Reliable sources of clean energy and human nature.

[IanMacdonald]

Thorium was tested in the 60's and worked very well indeed.  Problem isn't the technology but the financial backers preferring the mainstream product to anything remotely unusual. 

The situation with cold fusion (LENR) is rather perplexing, after all if the results are as good as claimed then why isn't it already in commercial production? I suspect because although positive results have been had, replicating them reliably has proved difficult. Other thing is that many labs won't work on it because it's too controversial.  It may well be the real game changer though once it's fully understood.

[Marco]

Thorium needs a breeder and bootstrapping with uranium+plutonium any way ... for what purpose? Just breed the uranium and forget about the extra complexity, with breeding we aren't going to run out soon.

[DougSpindler]

Thorium was tested in the 60's and worked very well indeed.  Problem isn't the technology but the financial backers preferring the mainstream product to anything remotely unusual. 

.

You are correct Thorium was tested.....  But worked well???   Don’t think so unles you call a partial melt down and the release of a radioactive gas into the atmosphere as working well.

May make sense to you......  But not to me?




 

[DougSpindler]

Thorium needs a breeder and bootstrapping with uranium+plutonium any way ... for what purpose? Just breed the uranium and forget about the extra complexity, with breeding we aren't going to run out soon.

And let’s not forget we already have a 750 year supply of enriched uranium we created.  Seems rather silly not to use the fuel we already have.  And since the Americans and Europeans aren’t willing to build the reactors China is.  So now not only are “we” giving the technology to the Chinese we will be giving them the fuel to power it.  So while the Ameraincans and Europeans screw around tying to figure out what to do while burning more coal the Chinese will be producing electricty with “our” fuel and “our” technology.

[f4eru]

Not really
In the next 20 Years, China plans to build :
1200 GW of Solar plants
20 GW of nuke plants.

Yeah. They keep nukes around to get plutonium, they don't care about nuke power.

[a59d1]

With Next Gen nuclear if there should be a Chernoby or Fukushima size accident  accident in just 20-30 ears all of the radio-active istopses would have decayed away.

That isn't how half-life works. There will *always* be some fraction of the original radioisotope remaining as long as you have more than a single atom left. If the half-life of whatever these fantasy reactors use is less than a year, meaning you'd have about a millionth of the original radioisotope remaining after 20 years, you're dealing with a very very unstable isotope.