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Comment by jpdoctor | Hacker News Reader

> Thorium energy seems to be a very promising candidate for safe, clean

Only for some definitions of clean. Forget the radiation, Thorium's toxicity profile is not pretty. Hell, the damn thing is pyrophoric.

Hats off to the engineers if they can make a more sensible reactor out of it.

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But you need only small amounts of it. In a LFTR, one ton of thorium, about the size of a beach ball, is sufficient fuel for a one-gigawatt reactor to run for a year.

Compare that to the enormous quantities of coal ash we produce every day. It's hard to imagine chemical toxicity being a major problem. People used to make lamps out of the stuff.

In fact, given that thorium is a byproduct of rare earth mines, and currently considered a hazardous waste, it'd be nice to have something to do with it.

People in southern Utah used to go climb the buttes to get a better view of the fireballs from the Nevada nuclear bomb tests. Not sure I'd use what people used to do as a standard to measure against.

I'm just saying, if people can survive thorium lamps, we can probably manage to use modest amounts of thorium in much more controlled circumstances without undue difficulty.

Great Scott! That's almost enough to power a flux capacitor.

I was surprised about "about the size of a beach ball". Wikipedia says thorium is 11.7 g per cubic centimeter, so the one ton beach ball works out to a diameter of roughly 55 cm if my math is right, which is a reasonable beach ball. It turns out my intuitions aren't much use with metal beach balls.

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