Advantages of Thorium nuclear fuel is overstated

[txen]

I do have to agree that the Thorium lobby over does it. When I read their materials they make is sound like daises, butterflyies, and bunnies will spontaneously pop out of the thorium reactor waste.

Naturally the reality is somewhat different. The waste is bad as any fission products are, but they are not nearly as bad existing reactors. While Thorium reactors do produce fissile Uranium 233, contamination is unavoidable. This contamination makes the U233 difficult to work with as far a bomb production goes. Is the proliferation risk zero, not it is not. However, separating Plutonium 239 out of a traditional Uranium 235 based reactor is a lot easier.

The truth is that every sector of energy production does environmental damage. Lots of workers die pulling carbon based energy out of the ground.

I really doubt that any of this means anything today. In the post Fukashima world not many are looking to build reactors of any type.

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by txen

While Thorium reactors do produce fissile Uranium 233, contamination is unavoidable. This contamination makes the U233 difficult to work with as far a bomb production goes. Is the proliferation risk zero, not it is not. However, separating Plutonium 239 out of a traditional Uranium 235 based reactor is a lot easier.

not according to the article linked. This is the usual response from Thorium advocates - that it is supposedly hard to separate U233 from the "breeder Thorium". According to the article, there is a low risk (if one can say so when dealing with U233) way to get U233 without contamination. I dont know if you can access the article, but you may want to read it or I can copy a few quotes here. Basically what they do is they chemically separate an intermediate product that is created from Thorium on its way to U233 and that has different chemical properties than Uranium or Thorium and can thus be chemically separated. This intermediate then can be purified and it will then decay into pure U233. They say that this is possible with a relatively small scale reactor and a small laboratory and can produce about enough material for one atom bomb in a year without running risk of being detected easily. This is serious, it even sounds like it may be easier to do this than to run expensice centrifuges to enrich Uranium to bomb-grade...

P.S.: Here is a short summary of the article with free access: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...1205132246.htm