Zapping Nuclear Waste in Minutes Is Nobel Winner’s Holy Grail Quest

Thorium reactors do indeed produce fewer transuranics, since Thorium-232 is 6 AMUs lower down the chain than Uranium-238. Used nuclear fuel is generally 95% U-238, 1% Pu and minor actinides, and 4% fission products. If you do chemical separation to partition the transuranics you can then try to burn them in a variety of reactors. In slow-neutron reactors using Thorium or Uranium fuel, they'll burn ok if they're well partitioned. In fast-neutron reactors, you can burn them with out as aggressive of partitioning. So it's probably easier and cheaper to reprocess UNF for fast reactors. They're far less sensitive to neutron-poisons and fertile species (e.g. fission products and U-238).

Any breeder reactor will make 2 orders of magnitude less TOTAL waste than a non-breeder. Thorium can breed with slow neutrons (which requires continuous removal of the neutron poisons via online chemistry, usually requiring fluid fuel). Uranium can breed with fast neutrons in solid fuel or in fluid fuel. Note I say total waste, not high level waste. High-level waste is proportional only to the burnup (fraction of the fuel you put in that gets fissioned) and doesn't include any process waste from before that (e.g. enrichment or reprocessing waste like U-238).

In a fast neutron uranium-fueled reactor, you can transmute the hell out of all actinides, leading to waste that decays to low levels in a few hundred years. See the link below.

Thorium's only true physical advantage is that it alone allows breeding with slow neutrons, which can be done with low fissile densities. Other than that, Uranium and Thorium have pretty similar characteristics and capabilities in advanced reactors.

[1] https://www.iaea.org/publications/7112/implications-of-parti...

The nuclear industry regularly uses this technique of "nothing to see here" to hide the fact that all nuclear plants leak and discharge radiation. All produce waste with an un-fixable lifecycle.

As far as your Wikipedia link, it was uploaded by an individual person. No references there.

Helen Caldicott is widely respected and far more of an authority on the subject that you or I or the journalist at the Guardian whom you cite.

Wrong. Here is an IPCC meta-analysis reference from a consensus of scientists showing that it's very low, 12 gCO2-eq/kWh, on par with wind. Solar is 40. Natural gas is 490 [1]. See Table A.III.2 | Emissions of selected electricity supply technologies.

Think about it. There is 2,000,000x more energy in a kg of uranium than in a kg of coal or gas or oil or lithium. A single train car of uranium can power a nuclear reactor for a year, vs. a mile-long traincar per day for a equivalent power coal plant. Energy density is where nuclear shines. And shines it does! That's why it's exciting and useful for a carbon-free future. It's the only large-scale low-carbon energy source we have that runs 24/7 and can be installed in very many geographical locations. It also has a tiny overall footprint. This is why James Hansen and Jim Lovelock and Bill Gates are so excited about it.

Same data in graphical form too, if you prefer [2].

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

[2] https://i.imgur.com/IpeULoF.png

First of all, nuclear weaponry waste from WW2 and the Cold War are wholly unrelated to activities of civilian nuclear power. While the material is similar in nature, you do not need to melt commercial waste down into radioactive vats of acid to extract pure weapons-grade plutonium in order to make low-carbon commercial nuclear energy. The civilian waste is solid ceramic and sits on parking lots at nuclear sites, where multiple decades of waste can fit nicely on a small area. Again, that's the glory of high energy density.

For Chernobyl and Fukushima, people absolutely count the effects. For example, UNSCEAR's entire mission is to do just that [1]. So far the counts are in, ~60 direct deaths from Chernobyl plus up to 4000 early cancer deaths on top of a few million that would have occurred naturally (small increase). Up to 1 death from Fukushima. As it turns out, more people die from coal plants operating normally every day than have died from nuclear accidents ever.

> As far as your Wikipedia link, it was uploaded by an individual person. No references there.

That'd be Figure 2 from the CBO in [2].

Helen Caldicott is the laughing stock of many respectable scientists. Don't make me dig up some of the ridiculous stuff she's said. She's a true clown.

[1] https://www.unscear.org/docs/reports/2008/09-86753_Report_20...

[2] https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/115th-congress-2017-2018/re...