

India Plans to Export Uranium and Thorium Fueled Nuclear Reactors  - cwan
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP_Thorium_exports_coming_from_India_1709091.html

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sketerpot
India has a _lot_ of thorium; this is a natural step for them. The reactor
itself looks decent technically; they've got experience building and operating
similar reactors, and it'll produce a lot less waste than the light water
reactors that most of the world is using. The 300 MWe size should be easier to
finance than the usual gigawatt behemoths. The passive safety features are
nice. I'm afraid I can't get too excited about it, but it's a pretty good-
looking reactor.

The maddening thing, though, is that they haven't been too forthcoming yet on
how they're going to keep the costs down. How much will one of these things
cost? How long will it take to build? I guess we'll just have to wait and see
how it turns out.

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known
At present Plutonium is used instead of Uranium to seed Thorium. Annually
consuming 880 kg of plutonium for energy production from 'seed' rods, converts
1,100 kg of thorium into fissionable uranium-233.

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cdibona
One of the proponents of Thorium nuclear came to google to give a tech talk.
The video describing the technology can be found here,
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8>

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cnvogel
Very good coverage of the thorium fuel cycle and associated reactor technology
is to be found at <http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/> . Thorium is abundant
and, moreover, can be used more efficiently than uranium.

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sketerpot
While thorium is _easier_ to use efficiently than uranium (the LFTR on the
page you linked is brilliant), I'd like to point out that we can use uranium
orders of magnitude more efficiently than we're using it now, by building
breeder reactors like the Integral Fast Reactor or similar things.

The big reason we're not is because we have plenty of uranium-235 right now;
there's no compelling economic case for efficiency yet. The key thing to
remember is that "nuclear waste" is just another way of saying "slightly used
nuclear fuel", and by stockpiling it in dry cask storage, we're building up a
huge fuel reserve for future generations.

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known
I believe instead of exporting Advanced Heavy Water Reactors, India should
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOOT> them to prevent nuclear proliferation.

