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Is Safe, Green Thorium Power Finally Ready For Prime Time?
MrSeb writes "If you've not been tracking the thorium hype, you might be interested to learn that the benefits liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs) have over light water uranium reactors (LWRs) are compelling. Alvin Weinberg, who invented both, favored the LFTR for civilian power since its failures (when they happened) were considerably less dramatic — a catastrophic depressurization of radioactive steam, like occurred at Chernobyl in 1986, simply wouldn't be possible. Since the technical hurdles to building LFTRs and handling their byproducts are in theory no more challenging, one might ask — where are they? It turns out that a bunch of U.S. startups are investigating the modern-day viability of thorium power, and countries like India and China have serious, governmental efforts to use LFTRs. Is thorium power finally ready for prime time?"
Thorium reactors can be used to create nuclear weapons.
So, proliferation risk.
Waste products are still just being ignored-- there is no safe way to store the waste _already generated_ for the time periods required-- we don't need to add to this disaster waiting to happen.
A full 1% of commercial reactors have experienced catastrophic meltdowns. We don't know how to build this stuff to be either reliable nor safe. Imagine 1 out of 100 cars randomly blowing up on your freeway commute, or 1 out of 100 planes that have ever existed falling from the sky.
We have to subsidize current nuke plants and must indemnify them of any liability to allow these things to operate. If same thing for thorium, no thanks to socialized risk and privatized profits.
Money is better spent in efficiency, then renewables.