Current nuclear power plants were designed with the experience gained from the Cold War mass production of plutonium for weapons. A major objective was to turn that weapons-making experience toward the peaceful production of energy, “Atoms for Peace.” Later generations would have to decide how to manage the voluminous radiotoxic waste that resulted. The DBI Thorium Reactor program is now using the technology and experience from our current nuclear power reactors to minimize risks and waste first, then to configure such a system to produce energy economically.

The DBI Thorium Reactor program includes safety innovation on multiple levels:

• Environmental Safety
• Operational Safety
• Physical Safety

From mining to waste management, there is significantly less danger to human health and the environment using the DBI Thorium Reactor program.

Environmental Safety

Thorium is generally present in higher concentration in its ores (2-10% by weight) than uranium (0.1-1% by weight) in typical uranium ores, making thorium retrieval much less environmentally damaging than coal or uranium mining, per unit of energy extracted. Natural thorium is much less radioactive than natural uranium, reducing the radiation exposure of workers and the environment in the mining, milling, and clean-up processes. Because thorium is used to breed fissile material in the reactor core, no isotopic enrichment of thorium is necessary: this eliminates the roughly half-dozen highly toxic chemical steps needed to convert natural uranium metal to a gaseous form for enrichment and then back to a solid form for reactor fuel fabrication. Enrichment of uranium leaves behind a large inventory of unused depleted uranium chemical waste, another potential environmental hazard that is avoided in the thorium fuel cycle.

Higher burn-up rates in DBI Thorium Reactor designs result in a much smaller volume of radiotoxic waste produced per unit of energy. Computer models indicate that the final fuel waste volume will be at least 80-90% smaller—enough so that the waste can be transferred entirely from its reactor core of origin into the periphery of a second generation DBI Thorium Reactor core to be partially destroyed by decades of neutron bombardment.

Operational Safety

While nuclear reactors are designed to handle the effects of a fission chain reaction, fuel cycle facilities generally are not. There have been a number of criticality accidents in non-reactor facilities, as recently as 1999 in the Tokai reprocessing plant in Japan. Since the thorium fuel cycle proposed by DBI will achieve high fuel burn-up in a once-through type of cycle, reprocessing will not be necessary. Without the need to enrich nuclear fuel or reprocess nuclear waste, criticality accidents outside of the reactor core will be extremely unlikely.

• eliminate possibility of radiation release to the environment
• eliminate possibility of core meltdown
• eliminate possibility of catastrophic failure through operator error or tampering

Physical Safety

The DBI Thorium Reactor program also incorporates numerous physical safety innovations:

• reactor core is entirely below grade (underground) to make it highly resistant to an aircraft crash or truck-bomb type of attack
• computer-operated and completely automated to reduce likelihood of operator error
• satellite monitoring of all sensor readings to provide immediate expert oversight
• simple, gravity-powered, automatic, and redundant emergency shutdown systems
• greater security against weapons proliferation