ThorCon: Cheap, reliable, CO2-free electric power

I think making a molten salt reactor work would be amazing. Doing so in a 3rd world country would be even better but it happening is really hard to see.

I think more likely one of the companies working in Canada will get there first. Canada is the only international regulator of high standing who has a real strong program of trying to get such reactors actually certified.

The US has woken up out of their deep, deep slumber in the last 5 years but the DoE changing policy is basically like watching a glacier. They have done some good things and hopeful they continue to cooperate with Canada.

One of the biggest things holding back nuclear is that each country has a totally unique regulatory framework. And no market (except maybe the US) is large enough to justify the investment.

This is also a problem in other spaces but getting your electronics certified is a lot cheaper then spending potentially 100s of millions on a certification process.

To make nuclear commercial really happen international regulatory agency should exist or the nuclear regulator should cross license each other.

ThorCon gets around that by working with a company that almost doesn't (or didn't) have a regulatory agency or a regulatory framework and they are building them together. The government is building the regulator, the company the product.

I wish them the very, very best. If they are successful it could do more then almost any other project. Its far more important then getting a little bit more wind energy into Germany. Indonesia is one of the biggest countries in the world and coal is their only viable option right now.

Edit: This is great video to understand what ThorCon is actually doing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZx7kwZo4hQ

There are definitely waste concerns. There are a number of other problems, though most have to do with getting up and running.

Thorium is a by-product of rare-earth mineral mining. It is still radioactive, and it is also subject to all the regulatory red tape of handling any kind of radioactive material.

Rare-earth mineral mining is extraordinarily destructive to the environment. When you read about rare-earth mineral mining, you should think "strip mining" because that is generally how it's done. China does it because they don't care at all about the environment, they care about cornering the market.

Thorium reactors still include uranium to make them work. It may take eight years to exhaust the fuel, but you still have a pile of spent radioactive material that needs to go somewhere, and no one has solved that problem satisfactorily, which is bigger than the NIMBY issue of where the reactor goes in the first place.

Apparently the International Atomic Energy Agency spends ~10% of its budget on creating and sharing safety standards [0].

Unfortunately, its safety model flows through "and then allow nations to create their own standards."

Ceding standards / regulation to an international-level organization for advanced reactors that meet some criteria (e.g. proliferation-resistant, under a certain power, fail-safe, minimal worst-case scenario) would do wonders for low-carbon energy transitioning.

Imagine a micro-reactor that's deployable in any member country, because it's already been vetted and certified.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Energy_...

Next generation nuclear or fusion would be amazing, but looking how things stand today, I would bet on cheap and reliable grid-storage batteries coming first. Pairing renewables with cheap batteries solves energy for 80% of the world. Things like sodium-ion batteries look like they are getting close production, and don't contain hard-to-acquire materials.