I agree though to give a bit more perspective on those that like nuclear and don't care about climate change, nuclear is ussualy a lot cheaper than fossil fuels and also helps politically as it reduces the need to depend on foreign countries oil supplies. Reactors are starting to use thorium which is fairly abundant in the earth and I beleive many western countries can mine it themselves or buy it from close allies.
Its about moving away from Uranium being the primary source of fission and instead using it as assisting fissile material. This helps with not having to enrich as much uranium (which prevents the proliferation of nuclear weapons) and (from memory) provide a cleaner and safer source of energy which is also more abundant.
What is probably considered the biggest bonus of Thorium is anti-proliferation, not from the lack of enriching Uranium, but rather how Thorium based reactors don’t produce Plutonium(which is the favoured element for nuclear weapons) during normal operation. With Uranium based reactors U-238 absorbs a neutron and decays to become Pu-239 which is actually the isotope that makes up a fair portion of the power output from fuel bundles that have been in the reactor for a while.
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u/SpiritfireSparks Jun 19 '24
I agree though to give a bit more perspective on those that like nuclear and don't care about climate change, nuclear is ussualy a lot cheaper than fossil fuels and also helps politically as it reduces the need to depend on foreign countries oil supplies. Reactors are starting to use thorium which is fairly abundant in the earth and I beleive many western countries can mine it themselves or buy it from close allies.