Finally!!! Someone figured out that storage needs to be distributed. This is definitely a step in the right direction.

Backup Solar and Wind Power with Thorium Molten Salt Reactors

Renewable energy systems require a double energy infrastructure investment. It is first necessary to purchase the relatively expensive solar panels, solar thermal generators, or windmills. You must then backup these renewable energy plants with full capacity backups capable of providing power to the grid during the times the sun does not shine or the wind does not blow. You could use high carbon footprint technologies like coal, oil, or natural gas as backups to renewables if you want. It is also possible to consider less waste generating Thorium nuclear power plants to provide capacity backup to your renewables during the times of the day renewables are providing only small amounts of power into the power grid. Thorium Molten Salt Reactors produce less than 1 part in 100 the amount of total high level toxic waste of conventional nuclear LWR reactors and generate large amounts of energy economically with very high energy availability while producing no greenhouse gases. Thorium Molten Salt Reactors, unlike conventional nuclear reactors, can quickly and safely adjust their power output and can if necessary change their power output multiple times a day in response to changing load conditions and changing availability of energy from renewable sources.  It makes some sense to consider zero Green House Gas producing Thorium Molten Salt Reactors as a backup to renewable energy during the times renewable sources are unable to produce power.

Nuclear energy development for commercial power generation has evolved over the past two decades. Our best current nuclear power designs are capable of operating in a very safe fashion without generating large amounts of long term high activity waste and have greatly improved fuel efficiency. Most of what constitutes “nuclear waste” from our current Light Water Reactors is unburned fuel. Light Water Reactors currently used to make electricity in the USA only burn 2 to 3 percent of their Uranium/Plutonium fuel. The majority of the fuel in the spent fuel rod is just wasted and thrown away at great expense into the Yucca Mountain repository where it sits for 25,000 years as a worrisome contaminant. Thorium Molten Salt Reactors burn in excess of 98% of their fuel and produce more manageable fission products as waste. All of the fission products from Thorium Molten Salt Reactors decay to benign levels of radioactivity in less than 300 years. The majority (83%) of the fission products produced by TMSR reactors decay to the level of the natural radioactive background in 10 years.

Using Thorium Molten Salt Reactors as backup systems to your renewable energy systems will greatly improve the satisfaction of Americans with the completed energy system. People will not be happy with an energy system that has greater brownouts, blackouts, or intermittency than the fossil fuel based power system they are used to. Backing-up with Thorium Nuclear will keep the quality and customer satisfaction with the overall completed energy system high.

Thorium Molten Salt Reactors are not “crank” science.  Dr. Edward Teller, the founding director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, wrote his final paper a month before his death on the subject of the advantages of Thorium Molten Salt Reactors and the contribution this style of less polluting nuclear energy could provide in solving the problem of achieving energy independence while reducing the need to generate green house gases. This paper can be downloaded from the following URL:

http://www.geocities.com/rmoir2003/moir_teller.pdf

Respectfully,  Robert Steinhaus – Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Retired)

Note: For a cost of approximately one tenth the projected 2010 budget of NASA per year for five years the US could have Oak Ridge National Laboratory and an industrial partner prepare plans for a commercial 1000 MW Thorium Molten Salt Reactor that would, in the future, greatly reduce the amount of toxic high level waste that would have to be placed in the Yucca Mountain Repository. Approximately 1.8 billion dollars a year for five years could fund a complete NRC certifiable approved reactor design that could be quickly adopted and built by utilities wanting to provide improved nuclear power. Ongoing design efforts at the Laboratoire de Physique Subatomique et de Cosmologie in Grenoble, France and in Japan are underway to produce new, updated, Thorium Molten Salt Reactor designs. It might be possible to bootstrap design efforts by joining with the French and Japanese on a combined, updated, NRC reviewable commercial TMSR reactor design and share the costs of development.

I wonder what the size of a backyard storage system would be? I know portable solar generators can store a modest amount in batteries arranged in large coolers, but I wonder how large a residential system would have to be?