uncle charlie wilson said:
Absolute nonsense. Substantiate what you just said please.
that's easy if Thorium was cheaper than Uranium fuels why are there currently no commercial thorium reactors. Electric companies would take a cheaper option if it was available to make more profit.
"Thorium can be used as a nuclear fuel. Although not fissile itself, Th-232 will absorb slow neutrons to produce uranium-233 (U-233)a, which is fissile (and long-lived). The irradiated fuel can then be unloaded from the reactor, the U-233 separated from the thorium, and fed back into another reactor as part of a closed fuel cycle. Alternatively, U-233 can be bred from thorium in a blanket, the U-233 separated, and then fed into the core.
Over the last 40 years there has been interest in utilising thorium as a nuclear fuel since it is more abundant in the Earth's crust than uranium. Also, all of the mined thorium is potentially useable in a reactor, compared with the 0.7% of natural uranium in today's reactorsb, so some 40 times the amount of energy per unit mass might theoretically be available (without recourse to fast neutron reactors). But this relative advantage vanishes if fast neutron reactors are used for uranium."
that sound like a more complex fuel cycle than uranium
Thorium is being developed as a fuel but it not there yet as a major fuel. India is at the forefront of thorium reactor development sole due to the fact that it doesn't have a lot of uranium as natural resources but it's got a lot of thorium.
"Developing a thorium-based fuel cycle
Despite the thorium fuel cycle having a number of attractive features, development has always run into difficulties.
The main attractive features are:
The possibility of utilising a very abundant resource which has hitherto been of so little interest that it has never been quantified properly.
The production of power with few long-lived transuranic elements in the waste.
Reduced radioactive wastes generally.
The problems include:
The high cost of fuel fabrication, due partly to the high radioactivity of U-233 chemically separated from the irradiated thorium fuel. Separated U-233 is always contaminated with traces of U-232 (69 year half-life but whose daughter products such as thallium-208 are strong gamma emitters with very short half-lives). Although this confers proliferation resistance to the fuel cycle by making U-233 hard to handle and easy to detect, it results in increased costs.
The similar problems in recycling thorium itself due to highly radioactive Th-228 (an alpha emitter with two-year half life) present.
Some concern over weapons proliferation risk of U-233 (if it could be separated on its own), although many designs such as the Radkowsky Thorium Reactor address this concern.
The technical problems (not yet satisfactorily solved) in reprocessing solid fuels. However, with some designs, in particular the molten salt reactor (MSR), these problems are likely to largely disappear.
Much development work is still required before the thorium fuel cycle can be commercialised, and the effort required seems unlikely while (or where) abundant uranium is available. In this respect, recent international moves to bring India into the ambit of international trade might result in the country ceasing to persist with the thorium cycle, as it now has ready access to traded uranium and conventional reactor designs.
Nevertheless, the thorium fuel cycle, with its potential for breeding fuel without the need for fast neutron reactors, holds considerable potential in the long-term. It is a significant factor in the long-term sustainability of nuclear energy."
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.html
that were the info came from
