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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

I've been hearing for years now how fantastic Thorium is, but with every new article, I wonder: so where are all these new fantastic Thorium plants?

If they still don't exist, then surely that suggests it doesn't work, doesn't it?

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My current hypothesis is that nuclear became politically toxic in the 80s, and public will to support nuclear research evaporated, leading to everyone thinking "nuclear == light water reactor", and the entire field of research on fission-based nuclear stagnated as a result.

I'm not an expert though, just interested in the topic. I read up quite a bit on MSR and LFTR a decade ago and concluded that it was really interesting tech that can absolutely work but just never got enough interest for someone to "go big" with it. The wikipedia article[0] has a recent developments section that suggests the tech is quite viable.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reacto...

There's a lot of different countries in the world, and politics isn't the same everywhere. At the moment there are apparently 55 nuclear reactors under construction. No idea if any of them are Thorium MSRs.

Europe is shutting down nuclear power plants because apparently a lot of people (and many politicians) believe they will cause us to glow in the dark.

Insanity.

Here in New York, a perfectly functional nuclear power plant was shut down in order to replace it with 3 natgas plants. Right before the price of natgas spiked too, leading to everyone's electric bills doubling. Lobbying.

No, we know Dyson spheres work too... We just didn't get around to building one yet.

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