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Germany did have a thorium based reactor, it had multiple incidents and was never profitable.

It was only online for two years and was eventually torn down. Well, the cooling tower was, they still have to wait for the reactor to lose it's radioactivity.

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300

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Long time ago there were utterly rosy predictions how simple and safe pebble bed reactors would be. Then they built that thing. I have this theory that the conventional wisdom is wrong. The people that designed the basic reactor design used to day were very very smart and had lots of resources. And that the best design they could come up with. Since then all the other proposed designs come from pollyanna B team types.

It was closed by the industry itself, because it was unreliable and not profitable.

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