| SUPERFUEL Thorium, the Green Energy Source for the Future Richard Martin New York: Palgrave Macmillan, May 2012 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-230-11647-4 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-230-11647-7 | 262pp. | HC/GSI | $27.00 | |
| Page 11: | "The United States has about 440,000 tons of thorium reserves, according to the Nuclear Energy Agency;1 Australia has the world's largest resources, at about 539,000 tons." |
| Compare page 30.2 |
| Page 30: | "...the energy giant Areva has an active thorium R&D program and is investigating the possibility of building liquid fluoride thorium reactors by 2032. The Laboratoire de Physique Subatomique et de Cosmologie in Grenoble is the only facility in the world that has the resources and backing needed to actually develop a commercial LFTR by 2022." |
| It's not clear whether these are two different programs, or whether they aim for the same date which the author mis-transcribed in one instance. |
| Page 30: | "The world's most ambitious thorium power program, though, is in India, which has the world's largest thorium reserves." |
| Compare page 11.1 |
| Page 34: | "Along with Robert Boyle and Antoine Lavoisier (the French chemist who devised the first periodic table and whose law..." |
| The sources I consulted say Dmitri Mendeleev originated the periodic table of elements. |
| Page 35: | "It was [...] 66 years before the accidental discovery of radiation by the german physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen." |
| Is this radiation, or radioactivity? (The two terms are interchangeable in popular parlance.) And, if the latter, who discovered it first: Röntgen, Becquerel, or Curie? Compare pages 37 and 41. |
| Page 37: | "From Henri Becquerel's accidental discovery of radioactivity in 1986 to..." |
| Compare pages 35 and 41. |
| Pages 37-8: | "Because the quest culminated in the utter destruction of two ancient cities—not military targets—by the most fearsome weapons conceived up to that point, it is a story of absolute betrayal, of the subversion of humanity's highest ideals and its most brilliant minds by a technology..." |
| Only absolute hyperbole, subverting the most valiant quest for journalistic accuracy, is more fearsome! (I think it's arguable that they were military targets, and not in the sense of Dresden. And are biological weapons less fearsome?) |
| Page 41: | "In 1898, the year of Marie Curie's discovery of radiation..." |
| Compare pages 35 and 37. |
| Page 45: | "If more than one blue ball is ejected from every nucleus-struck ball, the reaction will continue almost ad infinitum." |
| Word order: S/B "ball-struck nucleus". |
| Page 62: | "When Bush left office eight years later, the NRC had more than a dozen applications for construction and operating licenses for more than 30 plants." |
| Perhaps I'm reading it wrong, but those numbers don't add up. |
| Page 63: | "In early 2011 Hess's team recommended two possible pathways: the pebble-bed reactor and a thorium-fueled fast reactor that would convert thorium to plutonium fuel." |
| I thought the idea was to convert thorium to uranium-233. |
| Page 74: | "For example, in liquids—particularly in molten salts—fission products tend to be stable, making it easier to isolate and remove them." |
| Stable in what sense? |
| Page 74: | "The fission reactions quickly cease and [...] the fluid cools rapidly." |
| This fluid will still have hot fission products within it. "Because LFTRs consume virtually all their nuclear fuel, the majority of the waste products are not long-lived fissile material but rather fission products, about 83 percent of which are safe within a decade." (page 77) |
| Page 76: | Step 1 of diagram: "The uranium is seperated..."Legend for block 1: "Uranium Seperator..." |
| Spelling: S/B "separated" and "Separator". (I have trouble with this word too. I'm "desparately" trying to get better.) Richard Martin, of course, did not create this diagram; it is due to Brad Nielsen. |
| Page 85: | "'I have always admired Rick's courage,' Weinberger wrote of Rickover..." |
| I can't picture anyone calling the admiral "Rick." Also, it S/B "Weinberg." |
| Page 87: | "The two hit if off quickly..." |
| Typo: S/B "hit it off". |
| Page 87: | "...lent urgency to the nuclear weapons research that was already underway at several institutes and universities..." |
| Missing space: S/B "under way". |
| Page 90: | "Hyman Rickover had a useful and distinguished war, if not a glorious one in battle." |
| Missing word: S/B "a useful and distinguished war record". |
| Page 106: | "...scientists at the famed Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge built a reactor with a core of 112 liters of heavy water mixed with powdered uranium-308." |
| There are 28 isotopes of uranium (excluding metastable states); the heaviest is uranium-242. If I had to guess what the author means here, I would say uranium-238. |
| Page 109: | "Never mind that the shift in tactics to nuclear submarines was already well underway or..." |
| Missing space: S/B "under way". |
| Page 110: | "The sea floor is actually an ideal place to store a decommissioned nuclear reactor." |
| Captain Cousteau would disagree. |
| Page 117: | "The process reduced the radioactivity of the fuel a billionfold, allowing the reprocessed uranium to be stored in unshielded steel containers." |
| How? |
| Page 119: | "Designs for a large MSR demonstration plant were already underway." |
| Missing space: S/B "under way". |
| Page 132: | "The 1960s were Weinberger's heyday..." |
| Misnomer: S/B "Weinberg's". This is the second of two such mistakes. Caspar Weinberger is mentioned later; could this be the source of the confusion? |
| Page 136: | "WASH-1022 was a whitewash that provided flimsy justification..." |
| Typo: S/B "WASH-1222". (Is there a pun intended here?) |
| Page 148: | "In stage 2, already underway, the plutonium is used in fast breeder reactors..." |
| Missing space: S/B "under way". |
| Page 174: | "It's as if nearly all the computers in use today were Altair 8800s, developed by Xerox in the early 1970s..." |
| The Altair 8800 was a computer designed in the early 1970s and first sold in 1975 — but not by Xerox. MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) was the company responsible, and the computer was something only a geek would love: you had to set a row of eight toggle switches to enter each byte of instruction. |
| Page 176: | "...based on liquid metal fast breeders such as the ill-fated Clinch River project or the French SuperPhénix." |
| This is the first mention of SuperPhénix. It should have been much earlier. Also, it is not indexed; and neither is Carlos the Jackal, who is suspected of attacking it in January 1982. |
| Page 177: | "No gas-cooled reactors have been operated on a commercial scale, though, and there is a historical irony..." |
| This is incorrect. An HTGR at Fort St. Vrain in Colorado operated from 1977 to 1992. Rated at 330MWe, it used mixed thorium and uranium fuel and was cooled by helium. See my review of The Demise of Nuclear Energy?. Also, Britain had seven HTGRs operating when that book was published in 1989; some still run today. |
| Page 185: | "...a stage that requires huge amounts of thrust, rather than efficiency, and no throttle capability..." |
| Mis-states the situation. The shuttle used solid rockets purely because their development cost was low, compared to liquids. It was a decision that cost us dearly. |
| Page 185: | "Coal plants leave behind coal ash (which is more radioactive, ounce for ounce, than nuclear plant waste)..." |
| Another misstatement. Coal ash contains more radioactivity in the aggregate, simply because its volume is vastly greater. |
| Page 194: | "The blanket salt and the fuel salt would be continuously recycled to breed new fuel and to burn off poisonous waste products." |
| I would rephrase this. As it stands, it suggests the unpalatable: burning dioxin or other noxious substances in an incinerator. |
| Page 195: | Note 2 (page 253): "The actual number of military reactors includes nuclear-powered naval vessels, which at any given time are in drydock for maintenance, being decommissioned, or otherwise inactive.. This number includes eight research reactors operated by the U.S. Army." |
| What does this mean, and why does it seem to exclude operational vessels? |
| Page 195: | "After the Fukushima-Daiichi accident, there was a brief run on supplies of iodine-131. An isotope of iodine produced in specialized reactors, iodine 131 is used to prevent thyroid cancer from radiation exposure." |
| No. What happened was a run on supplies of normal iodine tablets. By saturating the thyroids of people who might be exposed, this would block their uptake of iodine-131 escaping from the damaged plant. |
| Page 227: | "...the power sector is much more heterogeneous, with multiple big vendors (one of which, Westinghouse, is Korean owned)..." |
| No; Westinghouse is owned by Toshiba. See page 210. |
| Page 236: | "As for thorium, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that total thorium reserves in the United States are about 440,000 tons, mostly in Montana and Idaho." |
| So that's where the estimate of America's thorium reserves came from... |
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