Technical details
Dave Tahija
location: Butte, Montana, en route from San Francisco to Juneau
listening to: Train - Save me, San Francisco
registered: 1999.12.27
posts: 261
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Here's a link to an article with more detail than you'll probably want to endure:http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.htmlSkip to the last section for the bottom line, which is that the thorium cycle is interesting because a)there is a lot of thorium around so shortages of it are unlikely and b) the thorium cycle doesn't produce bomb fuel nearly as readily as the uranium cycle.The bad news is that there are some really serious engineering problems with the cycle, which have prevented its utilization so far.Back in the early 1970s, thorium high-temperature-gas-cooled (HTGR) reactors were supposed to be the the Next Big Thing. 35 years later, HTGRs are still not on line.
D
Dave Tahija
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Here's a link to an article with more detail than you'll probably want to endure:http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.htmlSkip to the last section for the bottom line, which is that the thorium cycle is interesting because a)there is a lot of thorium around so shortages of it are unlikely and b) the thorium cycle doesn't produce bomb fuel nearly as readily as the uranium cycle.The bad news is that there are some really serious engineering problems with the cycle, which have prevented its utilization so far.Back in the early 1970s, thorium high-temperature-gas-cooled (HTGR) reactors were supposed to be the the Next Big Thing. 35 years later, HTGRs are still not on line.
