Thorium MSRs don't make sense for the Americas, Europe or Australia. We have plenty of uranium.
Nuclear is receiving solid research backing in both America and China. (India is playing too. Austrlia is having an identity crisis.) Our different geologies mean there will probably be one solution for China, India and North Africa, on one hand, and the rest of the world, on the other hand.
That was tongue in cheek. It's being indecisive. I guess that's conserved across the Anglosphere.
Who said this?
> considering a liquid fueled reactor makes heat in the 900C range and a AP1400 makes heat in the 300C range, they aren't really substitutes for each other
Nobody said this either.
There are more reactor designs in the world than LFTR, PWR and BWR, particularly if we're talking at the demonstration scale like this reactor.
Came online ~10 years ago. One could quibble about design and construction timelines; the reactor is still half-experimental, and the Russians are conducting that breeder program very slowly. But it's not a 1980s design frozen in time.
Is the article about a production power plant?
That covers the input side of th equation. Thorium can help transform the outputs of our existing reactors into waste with orders of magnitude better in terms of dangerous lifespan
I'm glad people are finding more research and hopefully this will unlock other tech but this has limited impact on the current trajectory of commercial nuclear and the designs currently in the labs.
Though the commentary in here does remind me how much hype has infused the nuclear space - good thing on the whole as long as an eventual AI shakeout doesn't knee cap all the good work being done.