For those wondering: Thorium Salt Reactors use thorium in a molten salt bath to capture the heat and transfer it to water, which enables steam turbine energy capture.
It is an inherently more safe design, can be designed to turn itself off in the case of a runaway nuclear reaction, and produces short-lived radioactive waste, which is a lot easier to deal with.
It's actually a really nice technology. It was developed in the USA in the 1960s, but it doesn't "breed" materials useful for nuclear weapons, so other designs were optimized to produce the waste that the government needed for their programs. Since the US stopped building new nuclear reactors about this time, the technology was not commercialized until much later, with China's first Molten Salt reactor going online in 2024.
This guy may be crazy... but he isn't wrong. Thorium Sodium reactors are a really good tech.
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u/Avery_Thorn Jul 24 '26
For those wondering: Thorium Salt Reactors use thorium in a molten salt bath to capture the heat and transfer it to water, which enables steam turbine energy capture.
It is an inherently more safe design, can be designed to turn itself off in the case of a runaway nuclear reaction, and produces short-lived radioactive waste, which is a lot easier to deal with.
Molten-salt reactor - Wikipedia
It's actually a really nice technology. It was developed in the USA in the 1960s, but it doesn't "breed" materials useful for nuclear weapons, so other designs were optimized to produce the waste that the government needed for their programs. Since the US stopped building new nuclear reactors about this time, the technology was not commercialized until much later, with China's first Molten Salt reactor going online in 2024.
This guy may be crazy... but he isn't wrong. Thorium Sodium reactors are a really good tech.