Challenges Facing Thorium Reactors

Re: my recent post on liquid fluoride thorium reactors, a reader notes:

It seems thorium is the best choice, as they become flexible enough to reduce atomic gen-sets down to 20 MW, put anywhere near clean water with 8-10 pre-made 40’ containers.  Successful plants are running in India…..Thorium fuel is cheap compared to gas/oil/coal, but the plant is very costly.   Wind is by far the cheapest generating method, followed by hydro.    Thorium is cheap once a realistic payback is completed, in about 10-12 years…..Thorium has several other advantages….higher breakdown temperature, all consuming to almost zero residue, no plutonium is generated, thus it is not used to make bombs.

Safety is higher as it can also be used safer in existing uranium plants.  New thorium burning plants are required to back-up the back-ups and reduce any threat to near zero.  

The biggest drawback: only the Chinese have it.   To make it requires a very expensive chemical plant, with supplies of mineral-bearing concentrate from Australia, USA, Mexico, South Africa and Russia.

Excellent points, as always.  Perhaps stupidly, I’m undeterred by the international politics here.  If this can be a safe and cost-effective way to generate energy without releasing CO2 (and worse) into our atmosphere, I’d like to believe there’s a way to make it happen globally.

Having said that, we’ve all seen the real challenge facing adoption of new energy technology: the money/politics of Big Oil.  They’ve proven themselves pretty darn effective at standing in the way of progress in this arena.