India and China are betting a lot on them, but they don't expect it to be commercial result soon. It is part of a process they ultimately hope will lead to commercial Thorium reactors. The current generation of reactors being built are money losing prototypes that they hope will lead to commercially viable reactors Until somebody comes up with a commercial prototype, it is something to be classified with the flying windmills. Since I support R&D for flying windmills I suppose to be consistent I should support R&D for Thorium. But flying windmills strike me as closer to commercial and require about 1/100th. For tens of millions we could fund flying windmill prototypes and either they would succeed and start an industry, or fail and we could say "oops we just wasted about what the U.S. DOE spends on stationary." But I think we are still rich enough we probably should fund more Thorium reactor research. Although, you know, since the Chinese are spending so much on the R&D maybe we could leave this one to them. Lack of intellectual property treaties between us and China go both ways.
In terms of safety. Superficially it looks like greater supplies and power density mean mining will kill a lot fewer people and do a lot less damage than mining uranium. The waste looks like it will last hundreds instead of millions of years and be safer while it exists. And it looks like much less proliferation danger. But I have not really looked at the literature on this, and remember when fission was going to provide energy "too cheap to meter" and anyway was "only a bridge to get us to fusion".
On the "not commercial yet" I'm very confident. On the health and safety -my knowledge is very superficial, very tentative. I would be not at all shocked if someone should point out where I'm wrong on the apparent improved safety. No time at present to follow up on old thread. -- Facebook: Gar Lipow Twitter: GarLipow Grist Blog: http://www.grist.org/member/1598 Static page: http://www.nohairshirts.com