Thorium Reactors
Discussions center on thorium reactors, their advantages like safety, fuel abundance, and low waste, disadvantages, challenges in implementation, and comparisons to molten salt reactors and traditional uranium designs. Users debate why thorium technology isn't more widely adopted despite its potential.
Activity Over Time
Top Contributors
Keywords
Sample Comments
Because thorium reactors don't exist?
Thorium molten salt reactors are potentially a good option - nuclear that doesn't produce much in the way of dangerous byproducts, and can't melt down. China's investing quite heavily in them iirc.
Why aren't we using thorium then?
What are the disadvantages of thorium reactors, making them so rare in practice? Cost?
For some reason users who post links don't want to read them. From the first paragraph:"Despite its designation as a thorium reactor , it was essentially a normal on uranium fission ( 235 U) based reactor"Additionally, a lot of the recent hype on thorium reactors is that they are actually molten salt reactors (see the oak ridge national lab experiments - http://en.wikipedia.org
Thorium based reactors, anyone?
Let's say, thorium reactors.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Thorium reactors yet. My understanding is that the fuel is more abundant and that meltdown is impossible, however the technology is still in its infancy.
Thorium has issues in a solid fuel reactor. The LFTR is the way to go.
You're correct since you specified thorium reactors, but it's also possible to build very simple non-breeding molten salt reactors running on uranium. Terrestrial Energy, for example, is working on one that's designed to reach production as soon as possible.Advantages include passive safety, no potential for hydrogen explosions, no high pressure containment, excellent nonproliferation, and reasonably high burnup. It's nowhere near what breeders are shooting for, but it