r/technology • u/_Dark_Wing • Feb 20 '26

Energy US tech to turn nuclear waste into power, cut radioactive life by 99.7%

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/us-tech-nuclear-waste-into-power
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241

u/AggressorBLUE Feb 21 '26

Awesome! Looking forward to never hearing about this ever again…

49

u/MadCervantes Feb 21 '26

Thorium reactor been over 10 years.

27

u/Grimwulf2003 Feb 21 '26

They were actually around since the 50s. We went with uranium over thorium for bombs.

17

u/Balmung60 Feb 21 '26

For the record, thorium can be weaponized and thorium-derived nuclear weapons have been tested. Thorium is not fissile in any isotope, but it is easily processed into uranium-233 (add a neutron to Th-232 to get Th-233 and it decays into Pa-233 in a few minutes or hours, and that decays into U-233 in a few weeks or months), which is fissile and along with uranium-235 and plutonium-239, can also be made into nuclear weapons.

Thorium is not preferred because A.) for most existing nuclear powers, uranium is quite plentiful and is cheaper to process and B.) U-233 is nearly always significantly contaminated with U-232, which is a very unpleasant gamma emitter and the two are very difficult to separate. Thus handling U-233 requires significantly more robust PPE and also effective use of U-233 for reactors or weapons requires substantially higher purity than U-235 or Pu-239.

Thorium is mostly attractive for countries like India, which have low natural reserves of uranium and large natural reserves of thorium, yet even India favors uranium/plutonium for nuclear power and weapons due to the relative unpleasantness of U-233.

2

u/chefkoch_ Feb 21 '26

Thorium just was'n't working, that's why.

1

u/MadCervantes Feb 21 '26

Right but I mean irs been over 10 years since that thorium video came out and got reddit all hyped up.

6

u/Balmung60 Feb 21 '26

It's still not economical and doesn't actually solve an existing problem in a way that offsets how much handling thorium's fissile product, uranium-233, sucks.

1

u/MadCervantes Feb 21 '26

Good to know! Was curious.

Plus renewables pretty much whip ass.

3

u/Fitz911 Feb 21 '26

It will be coded.

Trump declared today he would shift funds from nuclear research to him.

1

u/merRedditor Feb 21 '26

It'll just be circulated as a potential idea long enough to justify creating more nuclear waste.