No country has seriously invested in the thorium fuel cycle because it cannot be used to create weapons. Unfortunately, the technology also began to look most promising as an energy source around the same time the Three Mile Island nuclear accident effectively ended all interest in nuclear energy in the United States.
India has shown some of the most interest to date, due to their lack of domestic uranium reserves. But it's been slow going their fast breeder reactor plans were delayed by like two decades. But it is built and it was loaded with fuel last month [0]
The French interest in breeder reactors and nuclear reprocessing also originates from a similar concern about lack of domestic access to raw uranium. Though Super-phoenix [0] was a more traditional uranium -> plutonium approach and not thorium. They gave up because just using uranium is way, way cheaper than synthesizing your own fissile materials.
Theoretically, perhaps, but I don’t think anyone with a serious interest in weapons would pursue it. From a nonproliferation perspective, I’d guess the infrastructure necessary to remove contaminants from uranium bred through the thorium cycle would be costly and difficult to conceal.
Multiple countries have detonated nuclear bombs using U-233 derived from thorium reactors! [0] Practically I agree with you that thorium is proliferation resistant and if someone is bomb hungry they won't prioritize it, but if you want to set up the bomb and all you have is thorium... The infrastructure wouldn't necessarily be significantly larger or worse than conventional enrichment.
Technically true and practically false. Only once has anyone done that. The bomb was considered a dud and the research was ultimately destroyed. So while you could, it would require completely reinventing all the original research that went into making the original one. Lookup operation teapot for more details.
Depends on what you want out of your reactor. You want to make a synthetic fuel, Thorium not Uranium. You want a liquid fueled reactor (because its safer and proliferation resistant), Thorium not Uranium. You want 900C heat instead of 300C heat, Thorium not Uranium.
The fuel costs of a NPP are a tiny rounding error. If you want electricity and want to build it today, Uranium not Thorium. You are using arguments from 50 years ago when many incorrect assumptions about cost structure and fuel availability were used to make decisions.
The cope is strong here. The only liquid fueled reactors with any operational experience got shut down because of corrosion issues causing major leaks.
The pros you mention are theoretical - because the cons came out in force when actually tried, and they’ve been tried many times by many different countries.
There is no business case for basic research, but if you stop basic research long enough you will have no business. The United States and its allies seem to have completely forgotten this.
It makes sense for big monopolies like Bell, or the CCP. The investment can be justified if the ones investing are confident they will be able to capture the value and not some competitor.
Bell Labs also served to maintain positive perceptions of the monopoly. Unix was famously developed despite the knowledge that AT&T would not be able to offer it as an independent product.
I don't see how it follows. Anyway it's debatable if the current system with antitrust laws is true capitalism. One of those poorly-defined words that people argue over.
This isn't basic research. The US has had this tech for half a century. There's just no reason to do it. Uranium is plentiful and cheap and arguably safer.
The fuel cost of a NPP has almost no impact on the NPP's operational expenses and a LFTR (like all liquid fuel designs) is a far safer design. Nobody in the energy industry has talked about the fuel cost in nuclear in 50 years. It isn't even a consideration when comparing designs. Waste volume, safety, politics, and construction labor costs are the factors which are considered (also temp of the heat maybe).
This and your comment upthread read like a textbook example of the naturalistic fallacy. The environment that produced your apparent masculine ideal was not permanent, nor was all of what it produced ideally suited to it.
If you really believe in naturalism, you believe that bacteria and insects are (presently) ideal forms of life. However, I suspect you do not believe this, and are instead arguing from an untestable value based position, as nearly everyone in this discussion is.
Uncharitably - GP likely believes (as many do) that the current zeitgeist of reproductive norms is ideal, as the possibility of it excluding themselves has never occurred to them.
There are also many (some in the comments to this post) who have excluded themselves because of it.
Not that they should have the final word the subject of course. I'm just saying you can't assume they they didn't because they have a contrary opinion.
There is also the matter that the American political leadership managed to maintain some level of economic prosperity for the white working class in the intervening decades. Now that is collapsing, and the old narratives have returned.
The white working class and professional managerial class are in fact largely aligned in their zero sum assessments of the current situation. They differ principally on the nature of the solutions. No one on the left has the courage to acknowledge this, much less attack it.
The universities could have continued in their socially productive capacity if their leadership realized their obligations should take precedence over career advancement. Instead, they chose to embrace cost disease. The reactionary right remains committed to finishing off whatever remains.
ECE is a compromise track that limits how far one can progress on hard systems design problems. An ECE’s principal strength is that they tend to manage long term software projects better than EEs.
EEs lead in anything that is limited by physics because that is how the discipline is oriented. The bleeding edge of compute has been like this since the first microprocessors were created, at the very latest.
It’s more nuanced than that. Americans on the west coast can express dissent; the means, however, are indirect and easily missed by managers who lack cross cultural competence. There’s also less motivation for a worker at a large successful American firm to express dissent in the first place. Employees at smaller firms speak up earlier.
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