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Comment by wil421 | Hacker News Reader

My point was I dont want to listen to a lawyer or politician. Give me the words of a scientist, preferably a nuclear one.

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He's a lawyer and politicians whose job for many years was to reconcile the views of scientists and politicians with respect to nuclear. And in this case the political impacts of Thorium are just as important as the science, and likely the reason they asked him questions:

Because it is far harder to use it to create nuclear weapons, there are far fewer political hindrances to mining and trade in Thorium, as well as political concerns over letting potential enemies establish Thorium reactors.

The supplies are also larger, and well distributed, which is also politically beneficial.

Nuclear power is not all about the science.

And because Thorium cannot easily be made into weapons, the military will not fund development of the use of it as a fuel - nor will it expend the political will to make the construction of a thorium-reactor possible. And so we keep using Uranium. The political hindrances of using Thorium turn out to be much greater than the political hindrances of using Uranium.

While I agree that up until now most of the developments on nuclear technologies have been funded by the military, it does not mean that a massive push by the public can't force governments to fund new thorium research.

The money needs to come from somewhere.

In the US, for example, the Department of Energy's budget[0] last FY was about 5.5% the size of the Department of Defense Senate proposed budget for FY2014[1] (35B v. 626B).

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_United_States_federal_budg... 1: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/44459

The military uses nuclear power outside of weapons, especially in the navy. Subs, aircraft carriers and the like are all nuclear powered, so they have an interest in safer nuclear power as well.

Yeah, people seem to forget that the largest operator of nuclear reactors is, if I recall correctly, the US Navy.

Nice summary.

I have wondered since I first heard of thorium reactor why they weren't already adopted. Since some of the country with the civil nuclear power are those with nuclear weapons, is it possible that the military are lobbying for uranium? (I can see two possible reasons: refining price going down with production scaling, or just to hide their own uranium import in the civil import. If Thorium is adopted worldwide and can't be used to build nuke, seeing who is upgrading its nuclear arsenal would way easier, which can be good or bad, depending on your point of view.)

>The technology development is decades in the future.

Well, that's true for every research domain which isn't funded enough.

One fairly major reason is the economics of the nuclear fuel producers (who also tend to be the people building the power plants). Simply put, enriched uranium fuel pellets require huge resources to produce, and are !&^" expensive. Moving to Thorium would remove a load of their revenue stream, as it is a much simpler fuel to produce (well, for the liquid fuel reactors anyway).

Wow, so we aren't moving to thorium because it would cost less than uranium?

Sometime, economy freaks me out even more than politic :'(

Not quite so simple. The nuclear industry wanted/needed federal dollars, so not being in the uranium game looked like a bad bet. Once you have all that infrastructure invested in uranium, investing additional resources into thorium looks less attractive.

The department primarily responsible for the research of nuclear technology including nuclear weapons development is the Department of Energy. Therefore the preferences of the DoD influence DoE decisions.

My guess is that he has a reasonably good overview, although not being a scientist: "He [...] later became the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. As such, Blix was the first Western representative to inspect the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union on site, and lead the agency response to them." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Blix

Personally, I'd go with the opinion of a nuclear engineer - I've worked on projects involving modelling nuclear power stations and the engineers who did the engineering simulations were some of the brightest and practical people I've ever met.

Could the good Doctor Strangelove be wrong?

Engineer would be even better.

Wernher von Braun once said that the most difficult step towards going to the moon was gathering the will to do it.

Nuclear engineer here.

The thorium fuel cycle has obvious advantages, but it takes so long to transition from uranium to a pure thorium cycle that I doubt I will see it happen in my lifetime.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about thorium. It isn't thorium that makes LFTR so great, it is type of reactor that makes all the difference. Molten salt reactors can run on any fissile material. The only advantage of using thorium over uranium in an MSR is in the fuel cycle.

(Full disclosure: I'm a founder of a startup (http://transatomicpower.com) that is designing a molten salt reactor to burn spent fuel.)

The fact that he admits is a big step up form most polticians.

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