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I was talking more from the perspective of how easy the tech was to get working and what were the outputs. Thorium actually fell out of favour by 1960s because
by p_l 5y ago
I was talking more from the perspective of how easy the tech was to get working and what were the outputs. Thorium actually fell out of favour by 1960s because it was seen as adding more complexity for little gain. Was it good long term thinking? I think we both disagree.
However what I was responding to is more the perception that Uranium was used due to being usable for bombs, when the reality is that Pu-239 (from Uranium) cycle "won" over U-233 (from Thorium) mostly for reasons of it being easier to start the reaction. Normal Uranium reactor tends to produce too much Pu-240 which is undesirable in weapons, so special modified designs and operations had to be introduced all the way back in Manhattan Project.
- panick21_ 5y agoI totally agree, the Uranium-Plutonium was always gone be the first one you develop. So it made sense to make the first fission reactors like that. The big mistake of the nuclear age, in my opinion was the adoption of water cooled reactors for civilian nuclear power. They simply make no sense. It makes sense for the Navy, and the navy had the money to develop them. Once that was done the technology was just scaled to a crazy degree for commercial, scale was needed to make it commercial, but result in plants so big that the total number of plants was gone be really small. They could have developed a molten salt cooled reactor as an alternative. You wouldn't even need to go to a fully molten salt fueled reactor. Example: https://kairospower.com/technology/ https://kairospower.com/technology/