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why Thorium not used for nuclear energy production ?
becoz mining companies can't make money from such a cheap plentiful commodity ........
also countries are not interested becoz it can't be used to make nuclear weapons unlike uranium..........
Thorium produced only minute quantities of radioactive waste and is almost impossible to adapt to make weapons and it is found in river sands, soil and granite rock the world over.
One ton of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tons of uranium and identified thorium deposits could power the world for at least 10,000 years. Unlike uranium, it’s easy and cheap to refine, and it’s far less toxic. It produces energy without any carbon dioxide: so it would have virtually no carbon footprint.
A thorium reactor would be incapable of having a meltdown, and would generate only 0.6 per cent of the radioactive waste of a conventional nuclear plant. It could even ‘burn’ existing, stockpiled uranium waste in its core, thus enormously reducing its radioactive half-life and toxicity.
Nothing would happen spontaneously in a thorium reactor at all. Thorium atoms only start to undergo fissile nuclear reactions and thus to release their energy when they’re bombarded with neutrons, and these would have to be supplied by an external source – ultimately, an accelerator.
‘This means it is far greater than a conventional plant,’ says Cywinski. ‘If the accelerator fails, the reaction will subside. To stop the reactor, you just switch off the accelerator.’
And if hit by an earthquake as powerful as the one that wrecked Fukushima, a thorium plant would be ‘intrinsically safer’.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/mos...ions-Technology-save-world.html#ixzz1PDR39afQ
becoz mining companies can't make money from such a cheap plentiful commodity ........
also countries are not interested becoz it can't be used to make nuclear weapons unlike uranium..........
Thorium produced only minute quantities of radioactive waste and is almost impossible to adapt to make weapons and it is found in river sands, soil and granite rock the world over.
One ton of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tons of uranium and identified thorium deposits could power the world for at least 10,000 years. Unlike uranium, it’s easy and cheap to refine, and it’s far less toxic. It produces energy without any carbon dioxide: so it would have virtually no carbon footprint.
A thorium reactor would be incapable of having a meltdown, and would generate only 0.6 per cent of the radioactive waste of a conventional nuclear plant. It could even ‘burn’ existing, stockpiled uranium waste in its core, thus enormously reducing its radioactive half-life and toxicity.
Nothing would happen spontaneously in a thorium reactor at all. Thorium atoms only start to undergo fissile nuclear reactions and thus to release their energy when they’re bombarded with neutrons, and these would have to be supplied by an external source – ultimately, an accelerator.
‘This means it is far greater than a conventional plant,’ says Cywinski. ‘If the accelerator fails, the reaction will subside. To stop the reactor, you just switch off the accelerator.’
And if hit by an earthquake as powerful as the one that wrecked Fukushima, a thorium plant would be ‘intrinsically safer’.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/mos...ions-Technology-save-world.html#ixzz1PDR39afQ
