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Ok-disaster2022 t1_j0b2drc wrote

China has a thorium reactor coming online soon, if not already. India has also been working on one.

The issue with thorium is its definitely harder to start. The actual nuclide releasing the fission energy after neutron capture is U233, so the Th232 has to capture 2 neutrons to fission, as opposed to the one need in the case of U235 or Pu239. Basically most reactors you could build with Th232 you could make with U238 ( which is most of the uranium anyway.

I'm in favor of thorium, just if there's limited resources going to nuclear development anyway, and fuel prices arent an issue with uranium, why dilute your resources? Long term between uranium and thorium, there enough fuel reserves to power the global population power needs as if they were all Americans for some thing like 3000 years. The extremely long lived, but super condensed waste products can be stored deep in the continental crust using convention oil mining technologies where it can ride any that section of the crust gets subducted back into the mantle in like a billion years.

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