Quote:
Originally Posted by oil pan 4
Commercial nuclear fusion could still be 50 years away.
Thorium was tested in the 1960s or 1970s and it doesn't produce the long lived radioactive byproducts that comes with uranium and plutonium fission. By long lived I mean 99.9% of the radioactivity has burned it's self out in 40 years, when the waste is separated from the fuel. Typically no more than 10% of the nuclear fuel is consumed before it's too unstable for continued use.
When you leave the waste and the fuel together, it it becomes more unstabile as it sits, lasts thousands of years and the raw waste will melt down if cooling water circulation is stopped.
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The ignorant, fear-mongering crowd has so poisoned the masses that moving forward with advanced fission reactors is prohibitively expensive and time consuming. It is going to happen, but more than likely in China or India as the West has lost its initiative due to our lack of political will.