Nuclear Power

[Kynes]

Dr.Grass said:

Kynes said:

Thorium (huge reserves) plants is the way to go as a stopgap while the fusion plants are developed. Renewables aren't efficient and dependable enough to cover all the production, and they need huge subsidies to cover their cost. Rare metal prices hike (neodymium for wind, other costly rare metals for improved coating in solar) make them costlier year by year.

Along with India we have most of the known Thorium reserves in South Africa. Unfortunately it takes about 40 years to 'breed' U235 from Thorium, but there are other developments in the use of Thorium:

http://www.physics.org/featuredetail.asp?id=60

ADSR reactors seem like an ideal stopgap untill we manage to optimize our fusion reactions.

On a side not, so many decrie nuclear power due to the radiation caused, especially the radiation of the by-products. What they don't know is that one of these Thorium mines is many, many times more radioactive than whatever contribution a nuclear plant might make. I don't think people realize that there's radiation going on all around them all the time...

You can use Thorium to produce U233, another fissile product. The "problem" with Thorium is that isn't as studied as U235, because you can't use it to create nukes, so this is why the governments decided to create nuclear plants with U235 as the fuel.