Curated from MIT Technology Review — Here’s what matters right now:
For just the second time in nearly two decades, the United States has granted an export license to an American company planning to sell nuclear technology to India, MIT Technology Review has learned. The decision to greenlight Clean Core Thorium Energy’s license is a major step toward closer cooperation between the two countries on atomic energy and marks a milestone in the development of thorium as an alternative to uranium for fueling nuclear reactors. Starting from the issuance last week, the thorium fuel produced by the Chicago-based company can be shipped to reactors in India, where it could be loaded into the cores of existing reactors. Once Clean Core receives final approval from Indian regulators, it will become one of the first American companies to sell nuclear technology to India, just as the world’s most populous nation has started relaxing strict rules that have long kept the US private sector from entering its atomic power industry. “This license marks a turning point, not just for Clean Core but for the US-India civil nuclear partnership,” says Mehul Shah, the company’s chief executive and founder. “It places thorium at the center of the global energy transformation.” Thorium has long been seen as a good alternative to uranium because it’s more abundant, produces both smaller amounts of long-lived radioactive waste and fewer byproducts with centuries-long half-lives, and reduces the risk that materials from the fuel cycle will be diverted into weapons manufacturing. But at least some uranium fuel is needed to make thorium atoms split, making it an imperfect replacement. It’s also less well suited for use in the light-water reactors that power the vast majority of commercial nuclear plants worldwide. And in any case, the complex, highly regulated nuclear industry is extremely resistant to change. For India, which has scant uranium reserves but abundant deposits of thorium, the latter metal has been part of a long-term strategy for reducing dependence on imported fuels. The nation started negotiating a nuclear export treaty with the US in the early 2000s, and a 123 Agreement—a special, Senate-approved treaty the US requires with another country before sending it any civilian nuclear products— was approved in 2008. A new approach While most thorium advocates have envisioned new reactors designed to run on this fuel, which would mean rebuilding the nuclear industry from the ground up, Shah and his team took a different approach. Clean Core created a new type of fuel that blends thorium with a more concentrated type of uranium called HALEU (high-assay low-enriched uranium). This blended fuel can be used in India’s pressurized heavy-water reactors, which make up the bulk of the country’s existing fleet and many of the new units under development now. Thorium isn’t a fissile material itself, meaning its atoms aren’t inherently unstable enough for an extra neutron to easily split the nuclei and release energy.
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Original reporting: MIT Technology Review