Yippee - LFTRs are on the Table for a House of Lords Select Committee Dicussion on the Future of the UK's Nuclear Research.

Don't expect much develop from this - But, you never know?

The link is:  http://www.parliament.uk/documents/lords-committees/science-technology/nuclear/nuclearresearchev.pdf  Page 153.

Email: lftrs@hotmail.co.uk Let me know how you would vote!

Novel method of assessing public opinion on meeting carbon targets.‏

To chris.huhne.mp@parliament.uk

From:	Colin Megson (lftrs@hotmail.co.uk)
Sent:	26 May 2011 22:49:50
To:	chris.huhne.mp@parliament.uk

Dear Mr. Huhne,

I read the article in The Engineer (Low-carbon policy won't drive out manufacturers, says Huhne. 24 May 2011 | By Stephen Harris) and posted a comment, generally as follows:

Nuclear: Cheap as chips.

See: Royal Academy of Engineering Study - http://www.raeng.org.uk/news/publications/list/reports/Cost_of_Generating_Electricity.pdf

Nuclear - 2.2 p/kWh
Onshore Wind - 5.3 p/kWh
Offshore Wind - 7.1 p/kWh

I've got a good idea Mr. Huhne:  Why don't you let manufacturers who support Nuclear pay nuclear prices and those who support Wind pay their preferred Onshore or Offshore prices?

Come to think of it, why don't you let the rest of us do it?

Although a flippant comment, this idea may have some merit, because it is so easy to test. It could well return the best possible quantitive data on the willingness of the electorate to pay for their preferred method of meeting carbon targets. Today, such is the issue of the cost of energy to every individual, that your decisions now may well make you or break you and the Government, by the time of the next election. This information could be of more value to you than a dozen select committee enquiries.

Set up a well publicised website, with the above cost information and a voting window, to allow parties to tick their supply of choice. The most foolproof method I can think of, to prevent voting fraud, will be to allow everyone on the electoral register to vote, with their National Insurance Number being the key to access.

What do you think?

Regards,

Colin Megson.

Dear Prime Minister

                                                                                                           21 May 2011.

10 Downing Street,
London,
SW1A 2AA,

For the attention of the Rt. Hon. David Cameron.

Dear Prime Minister

“I want us to be the greenest government ever”.

A year ago at the DECC, these were your very words and to do this, you are taking a predictable route of giving everybody in the mix a little bit, but inordinately pouring money into the populist option of renewables. This will divert much needed investment away from the NHS and other essential services.

May I propose ‘Plan B’, to take you into realms of ‘greenness’ about which you can only dream, meet our carbon targets ahead of time, take a huge chunk out of our £14 billion or so energy trade deficit and maximize energy independence.

You will not know of the capacity of this home-based resource, but you will be able to raise a green banner behind which every environmentalist can get. Not one extra square inch of our precious land need be sacrificed in accessing this fuel which can provide all of the UK’s electricity needs for the next 50 years and, it will be free of greenhouse gas emissions.

This resource is the lifeless, environmental abomination of fly-ash, with an average thorium content of 17 parts per million. Mining 60,000 tonnes of fly-ash yields 1 tonne of thorium, which can supply 1 GWyear of electricity; this is enough for all the electrical needs of a city of 1 million people for 1 year. Preposterous as it seems, 3,200,000 tonnes of coal have to be imported (£80 million) to supply the same amount of electricity, which means that the energy from fly-ash thorium yields 50 times more energy than the original coal burned.

You will need to spend a piddling £300 million on the first-of-a-kind 100 MWe Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR), which can be available in 5 years and factory produced units rolling off production lines in 10 years. Unlike PWRs (the UK’s new-build nuclear), LFTRs have extraordinary intrinsic, passive safety characteristics, making them capable of surviving a Fukushima level incident unscathed.

Extraordinary courage is needed to do something so revolutionary and such thoughts are likely to be kept away from you. However, I do hope your ‘knowledge filterers’ let you have a look at this data, for no other reason than it being an eye-opening ‘thought for the day’.

I must see what Archbishop Rowan has to say.

Yours sincerely,

That's it Folks!

04/05/2011

Dear Mr Megson,

Thank you for your submission to the Committee’s inquiry on nuclear research and development capabilities.

With regards

Rachel

House of Lords, SELECT COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, Call for Evidence: Nuclear Research and Development Capabilities.

Below is an email I received from Tim Yeo, followed by my last-minute, hurried and faulty response. There is no indication that comments from the Select Committee will be forthcoming, but I will post details, if I do hear anything:

Nuclear energy‏

From:	(BUCKLEYSA@parliament.uk)
Sent:	12 April 2011 13:10:39
To:	lftrs@hotmail.co.uk (lftrs@hotmail.co.uk)

 

DICTATED BY AND SENT ON BEHALF OF TIM YEO MP:

 

Dear Mr Megson

 

Thank you for your e-mail of 21 March which I read with interest.

 

At present my Committee is not looking specifically at the nuclear industry, but you may be interested to know that the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee has recently launched an inquiry into nuclear research and development capabilities. The press notice for this inquiry can be found here:

 

http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/lords-select/science-and-technology-committee/news/nuclear-inquiry-launched/

 

The deadline for submissions is 28 April. I hope you find this helpful.

 

I am grateful for your interest in our work.

 

Yours sincerely

 

Tim Yeo MP

Chairman, Energy and Climate Change Select Committee

 

 

 SELECT COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Call for Evidence

Nuclear Research and Development Capabilities

In the body of your document you appear to call for suggestions to cope with 7 different problems and, on the basis of the proposals you receive, you will then set about ensuring adequate R D & D capabilities to deliver your selected solutions by 2050.

If I am reading your intentions correctly, then I wish to propose a unique form of nuclear reactor which copes with all 7 problems, thus implying that much of the R D & D can be focused in a fashion which, one could reasonably suppose, would be the quickest and cheapest way of achieving your goals.

The reactor I propose is the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR), which provides the answers to the problems, in the order you laid them out, as follows:

1.  The choice of a LFTR, which is a Molten Salt Reactor, will deliver a Gen. IV reactor.

2.  Since LFTRs are fuelled by the thorium 232 isotope (Th 232) and natural thorium is 100% Th 232, the increasing demand for uranium, as the worldwide demand for PWRs escalates, is sidestepped. Bear in mind that natural thorium (containing 100% Th 232) is 3½ times more abundant than natural uranium (containing 0.7% fissile U 235 – hence the need for massively expensive enrichment plant). Also thorium is a throw-away by-product of rare-earth mining and, in some countries, safe disposal of thorium bearing rock has to be paid for. There is sufficient thorium available to supply the total energy requirements (including carbon-neutral fuels, from atmospheric CO₂, for all form of transport and ammonia feed-stock, from atmospheric nitrogen, for nitrate fertilizers).

3.  LFTRs are far more proliferation resistant the PWRs, since fertile Th 232 breeds to the fissile U 233 fuel, but the U 233 is always accompanied by a tiny proportion of the highly dangerous isotope U 232. This isotope emits hard gamma rays which endanger the lives of personnel and destroy electronics and other associated equipment.

4.  LFTRs are thermal spectrum reactors and burn up 100% of the thorium fuel – it is a closed fuel cycle and therefore obviates the need for recycling of fuel. Bearing in mind that PWRs operating on the U – Pu open fuel cycle only burn up a few percent of the fissile fuel, before removal of fuel assemblies is necessary, a LFTR power plant can deliver some 300 times more electricity (and/or process heat) per kg of fuel, than an equivalent PWR.

5.  LFTRs generally require a start-up ‘charge’ of U 233, but this can be replaced wholly or partly by Pu 239 and so, instead of producing Pu 239 (as happens in a PWR), a LFTR can burn-up Pu 239 and thus eliminate the problem of long term storage of plutonium. LFTRs do not produce any transuranics and the fission products contained in the spent fuel have worst-case half-lives of 30 years, requiring storage for 300 years, to decay to background radiation levels. Such waste can have a guarantee of safe storage, at a tiny fraction of the cost of storing PWR waste. 

6.  The ubiquity of thorium guarantees safe and secure fuel supply. Alvin M. Weinberg, one of the inventors and patent holders of the Light Water Reactor (LWR), championed LFTR research and operation in the 60s and 70s as Director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), talked about ‘mining the rocks’. The implication being that any cubic metre of the Earth’s crust could be cost-effectively mined, for the energy content of its thorium.

7.  The safe and secure disposal of spent fuel is covered in 5, above. Also of great significance, is the greatly reduced quantity of waste produced by a LFTR, in comparison to a PWR. To produce 1 GWyear of electricity, a PWR will consume 30 tonnes of LEU or MOX fuel and produce 30 tonnes of spent fuel, which may invoke the expense of reprocessing. By contrast, a LFTR produces the same 1 GWyear of electricity, using only 1 tonne of fuel and producing 1 tonne of cheaply stored waste.

There is so much more to be said about the benefits of LFTRs over and above those of PWRs, in terms of delivering high temperature process heat, to develop a widespread hydrogen economy and Combined Heating and Power (CHP) systems. In terms of safety, LFTRs are several orders of magnitude safer than PWRs, because they have no high-pressure ‘driver’ to expel radiotoxic substances into the environment. And, the fluoride salts are very stable and of low reactivity, unlike, for example, liquid sodium. In terms of cost, because LFTRs operate at atmospheric pressure, they do not require a thick-wall pressure vessel to contain the core and therefore, no outer containment building; you could run by a LFTR and know it’s not a fraction of the cost of an equivalent PWR.

I would like to suggest to the Committee that they invite Kirk Sorensen, the world’s leading authority on LFTRs, over from the USA, to give a presentation on LFTRs to your nuclear advisors.

Kirk blogs on:  http://energyfromthorium.com/

I blog on:  http://lftrsuk.blogspot.com/

Regards,

Colin Megson.

Sir John Beddington thinks: Forget it! There'll be no LFTRs in the UK....It's too risky!...It's too expensive!

The following is an extract from a DECC email reply, to an enquiry from a gentleman, pointing out LFTR interest in a Daily Telegraph Blog on Nuclear Power: 

The Government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir John Beddington, with input from the shadow Nuclear Centre of Excellence and others, recently coordinated an assessment of the prospects for research into advanced thorium reactors.......

The conclusion was that, whilst the science is reasonably sound, developing reactors based on a thorium fuel cycle would carry major technological and commercial risks. The resources required to develop these technologies to the point at which they might be deployed successfully at a commercial scale are also significant.

Daily Telegraph 23 January 2010:

Wind farm subsidies top £1 billion a year

Britain's energy policy faces new controversy as it can be revealed that electricity customers are paying more than £1 billion a year to subsidise windfarms and other forms of renewable energy.

By Rowena Mason 6:39AM GMT 11 Jan 2010

The cold weather has been accompanied by high pressure and a lack of wind, which meant that only 0.2pc of a possible 5pc of the UK's energy was generated by wind turbines over the last few days.

Yes, playing safe politics will keep us in power lads! Keep telling the people what Green Parties we are and keep the subsidies flowing into renewables (whisper, whisper - even though we know they're completely useless!). How many votes would we get sticking £300 million into the first-of-a-kind LFTR - not a lot - we'd have Greenpeace and the rest of those screaming anti-nukes at our throats!

Sir John says it'll be a bit tricky and a bit expensive - we can just tell the media that's the best advice and we've no need to stick our necks out!

Help! I need Somebody, Help!

<><><><>

The Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change Mr Tim Yeo MP (Chair)                                             Dan Byles MP Barry Gardiner MP Ian Lavery MP Dr Philip Lee MP Albert Owen MP Christopher Pincher MP                                          John Robertson MP Laura Sandys MP Sir Robert Smith MP Dr Alan Whitehead MP	(Con) (Con) (Lab) (Lab) (Con) (Lab) (Con) (Lab) (Con) (LD) (Lab)

We picked the side and Manager Chris Huhne and they hold the future of the UK's Nuclear Industry in their hands and control the spend of  £billions of hard-earned taxpayers' money. 

They could spend the piddling £300 million, to get the first-of-a-kind LFTR up and running in 5 years and subsidies UK manufacturing, to get the first-off production lines units available in 10 years. Then we substitute emission-free, load-following LFTRs for our coal burning and natural gas power stations - Voila! in 15 years we could be on a fast-track to meeting our carbon targets at a massively lower cost than any other method.

OR

They could literally pour OUR money down the drain in subsidies for CC&S and Wind and Solar Renewables. Surely, in everybody's heart-of-hearts, they must know that believing these technologies can provide 100% of our future energy needs, 100% of the time, is just wishful thinking. And, at what price ecological destruction and greenhouse gas emissions?

Taxpaying voters, I need you - email every one of these Select Committee Members  ( http://www.parliament.uk/mps-lords-and-offices/mps/ ) to demand they invite Kirk Sorensen over to present the LFTR case to them and their Nuclear Advisers. If you don't get a positive response, email your own MP and get them to lobby the Committee Members to positively move on a LFTRs study.