I'm a big fan of Thorium, but I'm also a big fan of nuclear in general. It just makes sense.<p>In fact, this is a lot like the issue of not building any oil refineries in the United States since the 1970s. While I'm sure there are good reasons for our lack of needed nuke plants, at the end of the day it looks like the system has let us all down.<p>I hate to sound like old cranky guy again, but frack, if you really wanted to get off oil you could do the math for how many nuke plants you'd need -- it'd be a lot! But it wouldn't be impossible, and we've known all of this for decades. It's just very frustrating. Things like the thorium ideas just make things worse because we can't even solve our problems using the old technology, much less the new stuff. It's almost like rubbing salt in the wound to see such potential and realize how improbable it will be to see the light of day (in a massive production sense). I find the state of our energy policy completely incredible, but the tech continues to look better with each passing year. Sigh.
This is a classic case of a solution to a problem that does not exist.<p>Firstly, Uranium is practically an insignificant cost of a nuclear power station. The price would have to go up by a factor of a 100 before it made a difference.<p>Secondly, the supplies of uranium are currently limited because the demand is limited. The moment the price shifts up by even a little, supply will grow because several other mining locations will become profitable.
The short answer is that there are many entrenched interests who are not keen on the idea: Uranium mines, nuclear industry, weapons manufacturers, not to mention the oil, gas and coal lobbies, even the alternative energy suppliers like solar. Thorium would rain on all their parades.
I thought all of the arguments against nuclear were overwhelmingly about NIMBY (not in my backyard). People just look at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and think "hell no."<p>Maybe after the BP spill, we'll think a little more about nuclear.
I've read somewhere that one problem with Thorium is it can easily be converted to a fissionable isotope (of Uranium?) which <i>can</i> be used to build bombs. So there's that.
Wouldn't getting over our fear of reprocessing Uranium make this a non-issue? That seems the simplest and most straightforward path... Just have to figure out a way to lock down the resulting plutonium.