Replies

Fluoride salts are corrosive and beryllium is dangerous but we use uranium fluoride salts all the time to enrich uranium for uranium based reactors and there's a beryllium processing plant within 50 miles of where I now sit. So, it can be done and it has been done. One of the Thorcom team members, Dane Wilson has a PhD in metallurgy corrosion and surface science incidentally. Also, interestingly and pertinently, "he recently retired from Oak Ridge National Laboratory where he worked on materials and systems for use in molten fluoride salts, high temperature gaseous environments, and other pernicious working fluids of interest to energy and hydrogen production".

Why is India pursuing this and we aren't?" Because, like Indonesia, they have a pot-full of monazite sands.

I was actually reading about India's large thorium deposits when I typed that. I meant to say Indonesia, not India. I read China is pursuing thorium reactors because they have large stockpiles of Thorium from refining rare earth metals for the battery market. I'm pretty sure we're sitting on a LOT of thorium ourselves however.

I think the day is coming soon when more Americans will be asking their government, why the hell aren't we building thorium reactors?

"Fluoride salts are corrosive and beryllium is dangerous but we use uranium fluoride salts all the time to enrich uranium for uranium based reactors and there's a beryllium processing plant within 50 miles of where I now sit. So, it can be done and it has been done.

Self am chemist with academic nuke background. Also worked in the chemical industry for twenty-plus years for a producer of chlorine and chlorinated organic products, which come "close" to being systems as corrosive as fluorides, though not toxic per beryllium, so I understand that it can be done, and am glad to hear that Thorcom has a suitable appreciation for the difficulties.....many companies would not.

"I think the day is coming soon when more Americans will be asking their government, why the hell aren't we building thorium reactors?

Why?? Because the Soviet-funded anti-nuke propaganda machine has outlived its masters, and its zombie self lives on in the environmental movement, poisoning the water (and land and air) against fission power production.

Probably because of their continued failure to produce usable power, the fusion power boys have largely stayed out of the cross-hairs of the zombies. This activity is not harmless, as they suck down a lot of funding that could go to more practical things like thorium reactors.