Is thorium the future of nuclear power?

Originally posted by buddhasystem


Uranium requires enrichment to be used as fuel, Thorium does not. Uranium enrichment is a nasty process, as I'm sure you know, whereas Thorium can be just extracted from ore in mineral form, turned into oxide and put to use....

...in a breeder reactor. edit: solid fuels make fission product extraction near impossible, which is why thermal spectrum breeder reactors should employ liquid fuels, energyfromthorium.com...

when the technology becomes mature, it'll be a piece of cake, but today we have a hurdle to overcome, namely startup material. Th is fertile only.

don't get me wrong, i'm all for developing thorium breeders, they are, radioactive fission products aside, all that fusion power ever claimed to be, but you cannot rely on fuel cost to make the industry see the light, Uranium is available in such quantities that even enrichment requirements will not deter LWR operators anytime soon. besides, certain designs are capable of operating on natural uranium (CANDU, RBMK, but the latter is the unsafe Chernobyl type) with all the advantages this implies, even though they will never break even as breeder reactors.

That's why i claimed that Th232's nuclear properties are the key to its eventual adoption.

Thorium is found in old clocks, no one is using it efficiently for any fission.

DieBravely
This is all well and good, but what will we do with all the left over fuel rods made of uranium or plutonium or whatever?

Seems like we should have considered that BEFOREHAND.

Drill a hole 100 miles down into the earth's crust. Dump the radio active waste in the the hole.
Fill the hole with concrete,lead and tin. Wait for the uranium and plutonium to eat through the lithosphere into the mantle.