RE: Do most of the worlds problems have a common solution? You won't believe what the chinese are building.
Um...I don't want to be a killjoy or anything, but there are [quite a few myths] (https://whatisnuclear.com/articles/thorium_myths.html) surrounding the benefits of Thorium apparently. Now I'm not a nuclear scientist (INNS), but it seems to me that this is probably not the world saviour power source we're looking for. What we need is something safer, abundant and sustainable and which doesn't take much processing. Now where could we find a nice source of freely available abundant energy which we could use and store at will? >Peers up at the sky.
Another persuasive school of thought would suggest we need to think about using much, much less energy (and everything else), or rather using it more responsibly without as much waste. But that's another story, right?
Yes I'm aware of some details I missed, I contacted Gordon Mcdowell the creator of the documentaries. He said.
"- And 10 years of operation produces 1/1000th of a gram of waste
...that is not correct... it produces exactly the same amount of material that goes into it... only a tiny fraction is turned into energy most becomes fission products. The distinction between today's reactors is that an even SMALLER amount becomes energy, the rest is un-fissioned fuel (just like came out of ground, fission products (like LFTR creates too) and transuranics which create the 100,000y waste challenges (as opposed to 300y waste challenge of fission products).
Well it could, if the reactor was modified and operated illegally. You can make U-233 out of Thorium. You can make a bomb from that. It is just not the easiest path to take, and people tend to take easy paths to things. It should be very easy to safeguard against this... the waste produced by the reactor (the fisson products) are unsuitable for weapons, as no Plutonium leaves the reactor and no U-233 leaves the reactor. The waste stream is safe. But the reactor needs to be monitored still just like today's reactors are."
So technically I'm wrong but the gyst is right, its harder near impossible to make weapons from them and they produce a fraction of the waste which is what I got verbatim from one of the speakers on the documentary (this may not be accurate but still in general better)
I'm not sure where on the myths page there are myths that question the benefits of thorium, they all seem like historical or technical myths.