Reply To: Global Warming

[HermannH]

Henning wrote: And thorium? Well a nice idea, I don’t know much about it. Maybe ten times better than uranium and ten times more abundant (whatever, I don’t really care at the moment). This makes it as much of a problem as uranium before: same amount of waste. But there’s no way of storing that waste safely (exception: the Swedes have a tectonic safe granite vault, but they won’t let anybody else dump their rubbish there).

So same problem with thorium as with uranium: heaps of uncontrollable waste.

Actually, the amount of waste produced by a Thorium reactor is going to be very small compared to the waste from a conventional Uranium reactor. And it is relatively short lived (half time of around 500 years if I remember correctly, compared to 20,000 years for plutonium). Given that many geological formations have lasted for millions of years it should be possible to find one that is ‘almost’ guaranteed to last some 10,000 years.

In general, breeder reactors (Thorium and Uranium as well) not only use their fuel much more efficiently, they also produce less waste.

Of course uranium breeders produce loads of Pu239, which is an excellent weapons material. Thorium breeders produce U233, which is also weapons capable. This is probably one of the reasons why breeder technology hasn’t been pursued much in recent decades.

There are also some other technical challenges associated with molten salt reactors as outlined in this Wikipedia article.

If Focus Fusion (or some other fusion technology) shouldn’t pan out Thorium reactors have a good chance of being our main energy source 40 to 50 years from now. That or solar.