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Can we please just have both?
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this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Thorium is abundant and a byproduct of rare earth mining. It's also what the moon is mostly made up of, so our energy requirements on the moon could use locally mined sources for power generation making moon bases much cheaper to operate.
A Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, or LFTR, not only can't melt down, it can be smaller and require less staff to manage, requires no external cooling so it can be built anywhere, and cannot be used to make bombs. It's also not radioactive by itself.
In the 1940s, both uranium and thorium were looked at as potential fuels for nuclear energy, but you can't make bombs with thorium, so the US went with uranium. LFTRs create no nuclear waste, can be used to burn existing nuclear waste created by other nuclear energy processes, extracting more energy from our giant stockpile of unusable nuclear waste, and if the plant loses power, which is only needed to keep a frozen plug frozen, excess fuel melts and the empties into a reserve tank. Most rare earth mining companies don't even know what to do with the thorium they mine, so they store/stockpile it in hopes of future uses.
It simply baffles my mind that this isn't even on the table for potential, near limitless energy generation in addition to, or in replacement of, wind and solar green energy. The nuclear fearmongering has tainted the idea of safe nuclear power generation to the point that I suspect many of you have never heard of it. We literally have the answer to energy needs for the entire world, using greener production, but since it's new and would require billions to fund and start, it hasn't been considered until recently.
If billionaires really wanted to help humanity, rather than simply saying so for PR and launching their cars into space or creating flamethrowers, this is an investment that, while not as quick to return gains, would be lucrative, forward thinking, and beneficial enough to help all of humanity and this planet. And they could have started in the 50s when the government played around with a test reactor for proof of concept and proved it worked. Imagine a timeline where capitalism and greed weren't a thing and climate change wasn't even an utterance outside of explaining why Venus is so fucking hot!
That is not true. Scientist even argue if LFTRs are a powerful way to create Uranium233.
Also not correct. Where did you get your facts from?
I cannot find information online about scientists saying anything of the sort, but I don't feel like logging into my work VPN to access the pay-walled articles that might have that info. The amount of time required to get enough material for any significant bomb, at least with the information I can find, makes it impractical for that purpose so I stand by my statement.
I thought about including little to no waste in there, but opted to put none, because yes, while it still creates some waste, it's significantly less waste, that becomes safe after a few hundred years compared to the several thousands of years that current nuclear waste takes to become safe.
My message is still correct, which I suspect is why you only selected two sections from the entire thing -- where I over-generalized a statement of fact -- as arguments to negate the entirety of my reply.
Current NPP are extremely, almost comically inefficient and wasteful. The material is harder to get, harder to handle, less fuel-dense, and the waste produced creates a hazard that spans hundreds of human lifetimes. We've known about thorium for power generation for decades, but greed and "national security" prevented us from acting on it. Coupled with the confusion and misrepresentation of nuclear power as "dangerous" in the eyes of the general public, and we're now on a collision course with a potential wasteland of a planet.
But hey, don't let a little mistype or over-generalization stop us from knowing options that have largely been withheld or lumped in with more dangerous forms of the same power generation.