Just happened to watch a fascinating video on Thorium reactors and I gotta say, that's some impressive stuff. The biggest takeaways from the video are that compared to Uranium, which is the primary resource used in most nuclear reactors nowadays, Thorium is nearly 3x as abundant, with India holding the largest estimated deposits in the world, followed by the US, Brazil, Australia and a few other countries:
Furthermore, Thorium is significantly easier and safer to mine and handle, as well as refine from ore to pure resource ready to use in a reactor. One of the key aspects that makes Thorium so attractive as a nuclear fuel is that it provides about 200 times the yield of energy for the same amount of substance as Uranium. The pound-for-pound power ratio of Thorium compared to coal is 1 : 3,500,000. This is, to put it lightly, very impressive.
What makes it even more impressive is the fact that Thorium reactors produce just 1% - 1.5% the amount of nuclear waste that Uranium reactors do, and that waste, even though it's "hotter" (i.e. more radioactive), decays significantly faster to safe levels. To put some numbers to that, Uranium reactor byproducts and waste are estimated to take more than 10,000 years to decay to safe levels, whereas Thorium byproducts and waste are estimated to take no more than a few hundred years, with some sources claiming it can happen as fast as a couple of decades only.
In nuclear energy, you want a "hotter" waste instead of a "colder" one. The problem we have with Uranium waste is not how radioactive it is, but how long it takes for it to not be dangerous to people. Because it's less radioactive ("colder") it takes much longer to fully decay to safe levels. The hotter your waste is, the faster it decays, the faster you don't have a waste problem on your hands and you can repurpose the waste into something useful.
Last, but not least, Thorium reactors have little, if any, potential to create byproducts that would be functionally useful in a nuclear weapon. We have plenty of those as is, so the less opportunity we allow for creating more, the better.
Still, with all of its promise, Thorium reactors have a long way to go before they can be realized on a meaningful scale. The technology still has to develop enough, and even when it does, it'll surely meet a lot of resistance from traditional fossil fuel proponents whose grotesquely inflated bank accounts will suffer a hit should a more cost-effective and efficient energy source take the throne of energy production.
As the video says, Thorium reactors should be considered a "bridge technology" - something that temporarily takes care of all of our energy needs while we work on a more sustainable, renewable source of energy that doesn't require the use of a finite (at least on our planet) resource. But even so, we're talking about centuries' worth of efficient, clean, and peaceful energy production that could change the world in a good way.
The video in question:
Science is awesome
