Well if the US government ran a LFTR / MSR they'd have both power for the facility and something to process a lot of the isotopes and a means for extraction. T

Well if the US government ran a LFTR / MSR they'd have both power for the facility and something to process a lot of the isotopes and a means for extraction. The core contention of the article is that plutonium disposal is an issue. Not in an MSR! (at least from my reading). I can see how solid fuel rods are precisely designed in old crappy fuel rod designs, since you need to design the rods to avoid them melting down. MSRs are meltdown proof, owing to the fluid nature of the fuel. If the fuel is overheating/overfissioning, then a "plug" that is artificially cooled will melt, and the fluid pours into a shallow pool. Since the shallow pool distributes the fissile material in a way that stops the chain reaction (since effectively a volume is reduced to a sheet, so all the neutrons in the vast majority of directions don't run into another fissionable/fissile nucleus, the reaction stops) Aside from the plutonium, IIRC molten salt reactors can "burn" a lot of "waste" isotopes since if it isn't fissile, let it hang around in the salt and a couple absorbed neutrons will make it something that can. The fission products are in a liquid, so the fluid can be chemically processed more easily to extract products. Yeah, there's a LOT of handwaving there, but fundamentally if you have a breeder reactor you can "process" waste into a usable form. The best thing about MSRs is that they scale to smaller sizes: the ORNL research reactor was closet-sized. A general MSR for fission product processing would have a lot more stuff for processing the salt for waste, yeah. As for replacement parts and the associated dangers for weapons construction, that's not really a nuclear issue once the nuclear material is separated. The inherent chemical toxicity of all this is a problem, but fundamentally what you are doing is containing the salts and processing them. Toxic stuff will eventually get transmuted to something else, so you just need to keep the core thorium -> uranium cycle going and "work on" all the rest of it to get it to a usable or more stable element. Yeah it's expensive, but TFA mentions billions for disposal/processing. Well, we could have had a usable MSR design and tons of knowhow to go with a good disposal method.