Re: Whoops! The Atlantic Makes Trump Look EPIC In Cover Intended as a Smear

On 28/09/2024 01:50, Dimensional Traveler wrote:

On 9/27/2024 3:55 PM, Mike Van Pelt wrote:

In article <lln184F3mt6U1@mid.individual.net>,
Chris Buckley  <alan@sabir.com> wrote:

I didn't say that unlimited nuclear energy was possible; I only said
that the Uranium supply was not going to be the limiting factor to the use
of nuclear energy.  There is plenty of Uranium available at managable cost.

>
And besides uranium, there's thorium.  According to my CRC
handbook in the entry on thorium, it is "about as common as
lead", and "there is probably more available energy in the
Earth's crust from thorium as there is from uranium and all
fossil fuels put together."
>
I'd love to see more work done on thorium reactors.
>

That _sounds_ like an obvious answer to I have to ask what the catch is.
 

No great catch, except that thorium reactors have been massively over-hyped.
Proliferation free? Errr, no. Just, no.
Intrinsically safer than uranium reactors? Errr, no. Most of the supposed benefits here are for molten salt reactors, which run just fine or better on uranium. I'm also a bit sceptical about their supposed safety benefits, though having a passive post-SCRAM cooldown would be ... neat. Saves the Fukushima scenario.
Cheaper than uranium reactors? Err, not so you'd notice. Plus you have to pre-irradiate the thorium 232 t0 Th233, which ain't cheap.
Less radioactive waste? Long-term waste is pretty much the same. Claims for less short-term waste are ... disputable.
That's some of the over-hyped bits. Overall, thorium isn't any worse than uranium, or much different to uranium. There is more of it, but we have plenty of uranium.
A titbit, India is building lots of thorium reactors to get rid of excess thorium (co-mined with rare earth elements) which has to be stored as radioactive material.
Peter Fairbrother