Seven years ago, CleanTechnica published its policy position to not cover thorium nuclear reactors. Today, the United States has a Democratic Presidential candidate in the top 10 who loves thorium, yet CleanTechnica still ignores it. Why is that?
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Nuclear reactors running on thorium are widely held to be inherently safer than the awful pressurized-water reactors we have today. So why don’t we have thorium reactors?
NIMBY — Not In My Back Yard — is a nice crisp acronym and gets bandied about a lot when discussing opposition to wind energy and other renewables. But it is inadequate as a categorization of the various people fighting against broader penetration of renewables in energy grids worldwide. More … [continued]
The other day, I published a post on “Why Thorium Nuclear Isn’t Featured on CleanTechnica.” The key portion of the post was a paper on thorium nuclear power put out by Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. A reader dropped in two good rebuttals to that paper in the comments below my post, and they seem worthy of reposting here […]
Update: I have published a new post on this matter (thorium) that includes two rebuttals to the below reposted paper. I had a reader email me recently asking why we don’t feature thorium nuclear technology on CleanTechnica. To many good-intentioned folks, thorium is an energy panacea that seems perfect. … [continued]
Replacing uranium with thorium could see currently installed nuclear reactors recycling their nuclear waste indefinitely. Since the development of nuclear power, many different strategies for the minimisation and disposal of nuclear waste have been considered. There are two types of nuclear waste: fission product waste and actinide waste. Fission … [continued]
A little insight into the potential advantages and drawbacks of thorium fueled nuclear reactors.
Perhaps the uranium industry’s fear of peak uranium is unfounded. Intellectual Ventures is preparing to spin off a company called TerraPower to develop nuclear reactors that run primarily on depleted uranium. While most nuclear reactors use enriched uranium, the depleted variety has many advantages— most importantly, a smaller amount of … [continued]
