The Thorium molten salt reactor already is, what fusion power wants to be

You don't need Thorium to make a molten salt reactor, stop meming.

>we should use thorium to power fission reactors
>thorium isnt a fissionable element

Pick one

tell that india, they run a hybrid thorium reactor right now. if you salvage all the remaining data from the 50s, you can cut decades off research work. material science is so much more advanced these days than it was back then as well.

to be honest, we could have it 30 years ago if they would not have canceled this program when it was basically on its height in the mid 60s.

thorium needs a fissionable material to become fissionable, its not fissionable on its own . you need to add uranium-233 to turn thorium into uranium-233 in its fission process, thorium is a pseudo catalyst

you need to burn thorium in a reactor together with uranium233 or decay elements from atomic waste to make it a fissionable fuel. we could use our useless nuclear waste stockpiles to make thorium into fuel

>you dont need abundant fuel

you do not need it, but its more abundant than everything else you put into a reactor these days. its about combining a material like thorium, with the safety of a molten fluoride salt reactor

natural thorium contains only trace amounts of fissile material , which are insufficient to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. it is just fertile, not fissionable. if you breed thorium with a fissionable material, it turns into uranium which is used in the same fission process. thats what india is doing right now, since they do not have enough uranium to mine

>Making uranium-233 from Thorium-232 via slow neutron bombardment

Nazis did it first! Take that Jews!

so, they turn dirt into uranium, which in return they use to turn even more dirt into uranium. this is genius, even though they use a light water reactor, which has just the same isues all over again. relative short fuel life time, making them discard fuel rods which havent been completely spent yet, since you cant utilize the rods entire energy potential, creating just more nuclear waste. i dont know why i would have expected something more groundbreaking of a country which has people shit on the roadsides and beaches in public. so yeah, they utilize thorium. but they use their old dirty light water reactors

youtube.com/watch?v=7kBCMEUuSNw

Thank fuck India is doing the research on new LFTR reactors.

It isn't thorium but the military is working on reintroducing small nuclear reactors for bases.

And they look rather promising

nextbigfuture.com/2017/07/very-small-modular-nuclear-fission-reactors-for-military-and-space-applications.html

Yeah, the anti-nuclear movement, renewable subsidies, and cheap natural gas.

The catch is that it's just breeder reactors. Everything he's saying applies just as well to plutonium breeder reactors, where he's right and where he's wrong or misleading.

Like where he says:
>india and china are already working on establishing a thorium fuel cycle for their nations.
...he's talking about two countries that are so grossly inferior in organization and technology, and riddled with corruption. That they're doing something that the West has looked at decades ago and decided not to bother with is no endorsement of that thing.

Or:
>A material as abundant as rocks
...it's really as abundant as ppm levels in rocks. But "A material as abundant as praseodymium!" doesn't have the same ring, does it? Not that the abundance is really an issue.

>you could burn up stockpiles of nuclear waste in these molten salt reactors, making them decay to short-lived isotopes usable in scientific and medical applications.
Obviously, you're not talking about using thorium for fuel, if you're burning up existing waste. I reiterate that he's just talking about breeder reactors.

As for "short-lived isotopes" (aside from short-lived ones being the nastiest and most dangerous if there's a release event), even in the unlikely case you've got 100% transuranic burn-up, much of the fission fragment waste is still going to remain dangerous as high-grade nuclear waste effectively forever, for practical purposes.

Breeders sound very promising, but they are troublesome and costly to implement, and raise alarming weapon proliferation concerns. This is just warmed over "too cheap to meter!" 1950s nuclear naivety with the serial numbers filed off.

Please don't post infographics from a garbage propaganda blog like "Environmental Progress". They're the little boy who cried "wolf!": they lie far too often for it to be worth taking the time to debunk their claims individually.

>source of claims is literally given
>"propaganda!!!!"
You listen to the likes of Greenpeace don't you?

Thorium is a meme that has been relentlessly shilled. Uranium salt reactors make more sense.

Both fall under the same class of MSR, so shilling one shills the other.

The first catch is the benefits here aren't because of thorium, they're because of the molten salt reactor design. Thorium shills want you to conflate the two to buy their favorite element.

The second catch is that thorium reactors arent actually thorium reactors. The reactor acts as a breeder to turn thorium into uranium-233, in the process getting U-232 as byproduct. The long term waste from U-233/U-232 are worse than U-235.

The third catch is thorium breeder reactors have never been proven at commercial scale, and will require millions in investment before a reactor is actually up and running.

A: Retards who scream bloody murder at the mention of anything nuclear
B: I'm pretty sure Molten Salt reactors like to eat their parts much faster than a BWR or PWR

THORIUM IS LITERALLY PERFECT YOU'RE JUST A DUMB HIPPIE NUCLEARPHOBIC OIL COMPANY SHILL

>if it's sourced it automatically means it's true and valid in every way
I take it you didn't read the source.

Ive seen that thing claimed to be a time machine, anti gravity machine, weapon of mass destruction, spacecraft, and now thorium reactor. Which is it?

youtube.com/watch?v=s4mcghWWpP0

not India: they prefer solid thorium fuel cycles, with CANDU-like reactors.

China is the country that raided the Oak Ridge labs for all the research. They have a five-year-plan to develop LFTRs as a domestic clean energy source. We'll be buying reactors from them soon enough.

Yes, you must submit to satan

>Satan
>not Thor

For some reason getting Thorium is very difficult:

youtube.com/watch?v=2yZGcr0mpw0

Is there a clampdown on the element?
Are there technical difficulties?

Kek

fucking westinghouse is working with china on these lftr reactors, providing components while china pays for the research and development, owning all the IP , how fucked up is that?
sadly only china can make it happen, no bullshit regulations, and money out of their ass to fund that program, and i hope they proceed, reducing their own carbon footprint.
america kinda misses out, china will lock down the patents to a technology america failed to recognize as ground breaking, and the u.s. will have to license that technology, something they could have had themselves if they would not have been that short sighted

American politics ruins a lot of things, they cling to dying methods and do everything in their power to stomp out new ideas. Funny thing about capitalism is that the new ideas find their way to the surface eventually and the old ways of doing things become pointless. It's pretty hilarious that big energy companies refuse to learn that. Why are businesses so short sighted? Aren't CEOs supposed to be smart?

it is not difficult, you just cant get hold of it because nobody is refining it. its a regulated waste product, they are not even allowed to sell it, they just create landfills in disposal zones. you need a license to obtain certain quantities of fertile materials like thorium regulated by the nuclear regulatory commission, since its a source material, you can use to create uranium.

yeah, its not hard to refine, its just there is no use for thorium, so no one does it.

forgot to mention that thorium is a waste product in almost every mining operation. for rare metals, and rare earth materials.

Thorium reactor. Everything else is just sci-fi bullshit.

Here's an overview if you're interested:
sites.google.com/site/nazibelluncovered/

Obviously some of the facts are spurious, but insofar as it existed there is no other possible explanation for what it was.

It never existed. The source for it existing is one polish guy who, 40 years after the war ended, claimed that the nazis had this super science bell with magical properties. It's jerked off to by people who want to believe the Nazis still live in the hollow earth or other such garbage.

>hey Three Mile Island, whatcha doin'?
>nuclear power

>hey Chernobyl, whatcha doin'?
>nuclear power

>hey Fukushima, whatcha doin'?
>nuclear power

>MY SPECIFIC, PERFECT, ENTIRELY INFALLIBLE BRAND OF NUCLEAR POWER HAS NEVER BEEN TRIED

Why even talk about things of which you know nothing?

Yeah, why DO people circlejerk over the magic bell?

Why do people circle circlejerk over anything? That said, the propagation of fiction regarding the device doesn't detract from the truth of its being as a simple slow neutron producer to transmute Thorium-232 into Uranium-233 as part of their unsuccessful nuclear project.

>Three Mile Island
0 deaths

>Chernobyl
Fukushima
0 deaths

Don't forget:
>Three Mile Island
Safety systems save everybody's ass after gratuitous amounts of user error melts the reactor

>Chernobyl
>USSR
>Competent
jej

>Fukushima
This is why you don't rely on gentleman's agreements with anything important, and why Japanese culture is royally fucked up. Thanks, TEPCO.

People die in accidents at regular power plants all the time. Its like the planes vs cars scenario, people are more use to one so they think its safer. The hysteria around nuclear is whats stopping the west from solving energy and climate change concerns in one solution

God bless America!

Capitalism is what caused """climate change""" to begin with.
>Guys, consume more, then we can maybe solve a problem we created.

>There has to be some catch you're not telling us about
It's expensive and building reactors takes a long time