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Thorium: The Wonder Fuel That Wasn't
Lasrick (2629253) writes "Bob Alvarez has a terrific article on the history and realities of thorium as an energy fuel: For 50 years the US has tried to develop thorium as an energy source for nuclear reactors, and that effort has mostly failed. Besides the extraordinary costs involved, In the process of pursuing thorium-based reactors a fair amount of uranium 233 has been created, and 96 kilograms of the stuff (enough to fuel 12 nuclear weapons) is now missing from the US national inventory. On top of that, the federal government is attempting to force Nevada into accepting a bunch of the uranium 233, as is, for disposal in a landfill (the Nevada Nuclear Security Site). 'Because such disposal would violate the agency's formal safeguards and radioactive waste disposal requirements, the Energy Department changed those rules, which it can do without public notification or comment. Never before has the agency or its predecessors taken steps to deliberately dump a large amount of highly concentrated fissile material in a landfill, an action that violates international standards and norms.'"
" Never before has the agency or its predecessors taken steps to deliberately dump a large amount of highly concentrated fissile material in a landfill, an action that violates international standards and norms."
Clearly this person knows nothing about what happened during the cold war at Rocky Flats, Hanford, and the Savannah River sites.
Well, I am a physicist, and I think that the article was badly written and intended to produce more heat than light. If the author has heard such complaints and believes they have been addressed, he sure didn't do a good job doing so.
Thorium 232 + a neutron -> Uranium 233.
No entirely accurate.
Th232 + n -> Th233 -> U233 + e
You forgot to bombard the Th 233 with a positron going backward in time.