25 Responses

1. While Thorium would be an amazing fuel source, and we should definitely be researching the technology. There’s a lot of problems with it. the Floride salts used in LIFTR are pretty damn scary stuff. They’ll eat through and corrode most metals, and when heated up to howeverhotthereactoris, they get even worse. Also, Thorium is cheap, but Thorium(IV) floride (say that ten times fast.), the salt the reactor uses, isn’t. Yet. IWouldPutAConclusionHere,But I’mRunningOutOfCharacters.SoYouDontGetOne.

2. We were actually aware of how much cheaper and safer Thorium was even before we started making nuclear power plants, and America went with Uranium because we could use the leftovers to make bombs…
   GG, America~! [/sarcasm]
   I mean, I get it. Russia was supposedly big and scary, and the cold war probably would have ended up differently. But still, why make Uranium the standard for POWER PLANTS when our bombs could have just used it directly?? I hate this country sometimes… >_>

3. Something needs to be corrected here: alpha particles are less harmful than gamma rays UNTIL an alpha emitter gets inside your body somehow. They don’t penetrate like gammas do, but a little alpha-hot dust will damage a lot of tissue for a long time.

4. Dang spelling error found just as posting, “here”, not “hear”. Face of embarressment

5. Stupid government, let power companies make these reactors now. Make sure it won’t blow up and all the good stuff there, but cheap, relatively clean energy sounds pretty good hear.

6. Salts are corrosive to certain materials, not all materials. Water is also corrosive in the right conditions, it is a matter of knowing your conditions and planning for it. Fluorine bound with an alkaline is generally very stable, like table salt, it is both sodium and chloride. Apart, they will kill you, but combined they are tasty and delicious! The original makers of the MSRE were concerned about corrosion as well, but they believed the solved that problem 50 years ago.

7. Then your problem is imaginary :D

   It is pretty well demonstrated that fuels from uranium and thorium are highly abundant. Now, if you are talking about U235, then perhaps I would agree, but u238 and Th232 are in enough quantity to power our way of living for a millenia, at least. Here in the use, we don’t even need to mine anything, we can use the waste from iron ore mining. Check out Burning the Rocks on “Energy from Thorium” dot com for a really good break down on that.

8. My only problem with nuclear power is that it’s just as nonrenewable as coal/fossil fuels. Even if we devise a solution to the harmful waste created, one day it too will become scarce.

9. That exact same feeling is what annoyed me after watching this video.
   There’s always a catch and Scishow didn’t bothered to mention it.

10. liquid salt is literally the most corrosive thing in existence and fluorine eats threw steel like a hot knife in butter. this is the number one concern.

11. That’s no reason not to start over. It’s like saying that we’ve been flying straight into the sun for decades and forgot how to turn out of the way.

12. expensive. Very expensive.

13. Cold fusion isn’t substantiated.

    There was a way to make fusion work and at an incredibly low cost, but it involved fission-initiated fusion microthermonuclear explosives, back in the day when the US was looking for commercial applications for the bomb. The project was called PACER, a hole in the ground basically. It also used FLiBe to breed both tritium and uranium-233 from thorium. It was crazy, but 95+% fusion fuel efficiences were definitely nothing to sneeze at.

14. There is no reason to change towards Thorium based power plants yesterday. But every power plant in the future should be constructed with LFTR in mind.

    Cold hydrogen fusion may also be a thing available in the near future, which may prove to be even cheaper than LFTR.

15. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH I REQUESTED THIS VIDEO! YES! YES! YESSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    *happy dance*

16. This is one of thousands of stupidly obvious, and easy improvements for everyone. Many get show down, and paid off by governments who are reviving ‘donations’ from big international company.

17. LFTR Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor/ Lifter
    LWR Light Water Reactor/ Lower

18. Technological lock-in is so prevalent in the nuclear industry that it’s insane.

    The DOE officially partnered with the Chinese CAS to help develop their LFTR. You’d think this meant the DOE finally wizened up and is seriously considering the LFTR, but you’d be wrong.

    The only thing the DOE wants is the molten-salt technology to make marginally better uranium-235 reactors. They still won’t consider thorium as a fuel, and they’ll continue using uranium as a solid fuel. Almost nothing will change.

19. Aluminium from what?

20. The second one is only mentioned in passing in several articles, so I can’t say for sure if it’s real or not.

    I know Australia’s Thorium Energy Generation Pty. Limited (TEG) company is trying to develop and build a 60 MW pilot plant in the Czech republic. So Australia is not totally out of the loop either.

21. so, does anyone know how to predict the final yield of aluminium? urgent chem help here :D thanks :D

22. and people wonder why china is taking over the world…

23. I don’t like the idea of the government buying it, but private companies should be trying to make some of these soon with all of the great affects it would have on power production.

24. Me as well. Thanks and Have a nice day.

25. Yes, I know. Isn’t it amazing?

    The Australian stock I mentioned was reference to a USGS estimate but apparently the RAR report is actually in dispute. Also, something I wasn’t aware of is India actually has as just as much.

    The vast majority of my knowledge on the matter comes from the Kirk Sorensen lecture at Protospace I watched months ago so excuse any inaccuracy or insufficiency on my part. Not sure where I got that China was building more. Maybe I heard something on their later plans…?