Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't thorium also pretty abundant? Judging by this, the US has around six times as much thorium as uranium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_thorium_r... I've also never really gotten the proliferation concern. I mean, sure, you don't want to sell a breeder reactor to Iran. But why can't you sell one to PG&E? Are we that concerned that…
> Isn't thorium also pretty abundant? Yes. Even more so! But that doesn't mean it's easy to get. Everything has to be processed at the end of the day. The reason I brought up uranium is that it is easier to fissile. So sure, there's more thorium but it requires more processing. Why use it when we aren't concerned about uranium access? Uranium is already "cheap". (We could get into an analogy with different types of o…
Nobody serious is actually saying that.
What people are actually saying that any nation would be completely fucking insane to attempt to start their nuclear program with this method. When there are proven method that already work, are far easier and with existing equipment.
Plus, using U233 also leads to the creation of elements that you really don't want and are unpractical for a long term nuclear defense policy. And they are equally as unpractical for hiding nuclear material.
No country so far has used this method for a reason, and no country will either. And that argument doesn't matter for most western nations anyway.
> We can dramatically reduce waste but we don't.
Lots of things aren't done until they are done. We should and with a cyclical thorium fuel cycle we could.
While nuclear waste isn't a real problem, we still have millions of people who think it is, and to have clear solution that anybody can just point out, is much better of an argument winner then 'just ignore the waste its fine'. Even if it is actually fine.
> There just isn't much of it and doing more fission is less economical.
Not sure what you mean. I don't think its actually true that fission isn't economical specially if you are thinking about it from a country perspective.
I did some calculation with pretty conservative assumptions for cost, using Germany at the start of the 'Grünewende' and the cost of all that. And I think nuclear would have been a far better deal for them, and its not even really close.
> That's the case with France, so they "recycle" their waste and in the process this dramatically reduces it.
They are using a very complex process. Part of the reason why in the 60s some of the smartest minds looked into molten salt is because that's in many ways easier to work with then complex solid fuels.
> So that points us back to the opening: yes, thorium is abundant, but why go through all that effort when we got plenty of uranium which is cheap and efficient?
In general you are right but a few points, uranium isn't actually that cheap. We restrict what our reactors can do because only low enriched is commercially available, limiting some of the cool things we could be doing. Enriched uranium was artificially cheap because of Russian policy. And now to supply enough, the West will need to increase its own enrichment again.
Second, its only not a big factor of the cost because PWR plants have pretty high operating cost. If you can get the labor cost down, the capital cost down, and the maintenance cost down, and the fuel cost down, you have something potentially interesting.
This of course matters far more when you are doing this as a country strategically. For an individual plant or company its not worth doing.
The things that actually makes thorium special, and an actual improvement over uranium is that you can do a thermal breeder.