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Comment by jofer | Hacker News Reader

> Would mining a thorium rich deposit have higher environmentally related costs?

Yes, absolutely!

> Isn't the thorium itself valuable as well?

Not at present. It's basically a waste byproduct at the moment. If it becomes widely used as a nuclear fuel in molten salt reactors, that might change. It is used in a few alloys, etc, but there aren't a large number of industrial uses for it.

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That's one of the major problems with thorium. It is much more abundant than uranium, but uranium is mined from uranium-dense deposits. There are no equivalent thorium-rich deposits. Instead, thorium is sprinkled across the Earth's surface. So one has to sift through more earth to mine thorium than it takes to mine an equivalent amount of uranium, which is an often overlooked environmental disadvantage of the thorium cycle.

Sounds like a classic scenario in which one should massively stockpile thorium, or find a way to buy ownership in such. We seem to find valuable uses for nearly everything over time (and history is littered with examples of 'tossed to the side' materials that are later worth a fortune).

Like gasoline.

Thorium prices are really not going to rise all that much.

People have a hard time understanding what the six-seven orders of magnitude difference in energy density between nuclear and chemical fuels means in practice. Basically, even if the entire world switches to being powered only by thorium, thorium will still mostly be a waste product.

For the amount of digging you need to power a single coal plant you could power the entire earth and still have most of your production idle.

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