I interviewed at Winston & Strawn in DC - but unfortunately they took the other final candidate (from Princeton). They are among the firms with a large NRC practice and I thought I had something unique to offer with a decade in nuclear power operations experience. We were discussing thorium reactor issues all the way back in '95. The industry standards are chaotically slow I fear we can never make a positive change.

The Thorium Cycle produces the same witches brew of nuclear daughter products as uranium. It only gets rid of the plutonium.

@racocn8 Not correct...

@racocn8 no, it actually produces waste with a significantly shorter half-life (300 yrs) that can be recycled back into the fuel cells. Plus you lose the gamma releases in lieu of alphas which are just 2He4 molecules and are so much easier to protect against. Using a molten salt coolant system vice water filled, water moderated also makes it immensely safer on land.

@Willow_Wisp yep. and some of those lifter designs are just awesome. they have some that you can pull behind a semi just like a trailer and drop them in a commercial neighborhood or the like for use. Kinda like naval shorepower.

@JeffMesser This was going to be my career after being a Nuke in the Navy, the three mile island and ignorance all but killed our only hope of providing useful clean power for ourselves.
I had to be retrained to become a programmer instead of a nuclear engineer.

@Willow_Wisp I was a nuke electrician on the Canopus, Ike, Ark, and SIMA Bremerton.

@JeffMesser I was a Nuke Electrician in the Navy, but it was ages ago, they taught us about SCRs but no one had a commercially available VFD that was cost effective, so they just ignored it.

@Willow_Wisp Per Wikipedia: "In a reactor, when a neutron hits a fissile atom (such as certain isotopes of uranium), it either splits the nucleus or is captured and transmutes the atom. In the case of 233U, the transmutations tend to produce useful nuclear fuels rather than transuranic waste. When 233U absorbs a neutron, it either fissions or becomes 234U. The chance of fissioning on absorption of a thermal neutron is about 92%; the capture-to-fission ratio of 233U, therefore, is about 1:12 – which is better than the corresponding capture vs. fission ratios of 235U (about 1:6), or 239Pu or 241Pu (both about 1:3). The result is less transuranic waste than in a reactor using the uranium-plutonium fuel cycle."

Thus, the Thorium Cycle benefits from producing recyclable fuel and no plutonium, but it only produces slightly less fissioned daughter-product waste. These daughter products have a broad range of half-lives, and no one has a means to transport nor dispose of it. It remains a showstopper. 300 years is still way too long. Even if the amount is less than what comes from a conventional nuclear reactor, nuclear waste remains too hazardous for todays politics. Also from Wikipedia:

"A 2011 MIT study concluded that although there is little in the way of barriers to a thorium fuel cycle, with current or near term light-water reactor designs there is also little incentive for any significant market penetration to occur. As such they conclude there is little chance of thorium cycles replacing conventional uranium cycles in the current nuclear power market, despite the potential benefits."

@racocn8 You really should try studying something other than Wikipedia. We have run OUT of U-233 which is excellent fuel for nuclear powered space probes but the half life is too short to find it in nature. The last time we launched such a probe we had to buy the U-233 from Russia.
The guy that wrote that Wiki page has an agenda. The literature is there, the resistance is all NRC politics and has NOTHING to do with the science, even if you use a bunch of engineering double speak.
The Thorium MSRs were proved by the ONE working unit ever built in the 60s.
Something that the NRC spends millions to suppress for unknown reasons.
Apparently India is going for it, which will give them a technical edge over the United States, which seems hell bent on throwing away a huge opportunity.
It reminds me of a Scientific American article from 1973 that predicted that no one would ever own a personal computer, such technology was always going to be strictly limited to science fiction. The article was written by an "expert" computer scientist at MIT.
American "experts" are profoundly stupid like that.

@Willow_Wisp Do we run anything besides spacecraft on U233? Heavy nuclei like U235 need 2.4 neutrons for each proton. When you split that, the ratio needs to be 1.3. To get there, the daughter nuclei must radiate betas and gammas, and that takes time and radioactivity. It isn't a set process and the mess you end up with is far worse than sorting trash. No one has a plan for disposing of their radioactive waste or shipping it. Yucca Mountain's plug got pulled 20 years ago, and the waste is just sitting in ponds, hither and yon. Even superfund site debris is treated and sent somewhere, however inadvisably. We'll have economical fusion before fission waste finds a home. If you or any fission proponents have a solution, by all means, feel free to help your cause. I'd be cheering too!

@Willow_Wisp I may well be uninformed. However, I suggest that you might misunderstand the notion of MSR reactors eating nuclear waste. As long as fission is occurring, the neutron flux is causing fuel nuclei to fission. MSR's do not avoid that. Again from reference below "Using thorium does not eliminate the problem of long-lived radioactive waste." If you have a reference that describes how the Thorium cycle avoids generating long-lived radioactive waste, please post it.

[wiseinternational.org]

@racocn8 do you understand what fission means? we already know what those by-products will be ... and it is different for different fuel cell assemblies. Thorium actually must be bumped to U-233 before fission. By itself it doesn't have enough "fissioning" material to sustain criticality ... it must actually be bombarded with neutrons to jump in energy to U-233 in order to fission (neutron capture). We actually load other fissionable material into the cladding and fuel cells to increase the neutron capture rate - which is what we mean by "eating up" other wastes. So it already creates less and what it does create we reuse ... and our resultant waste products become negligible.

You write that in the thorium cycle you "load other fissionable material", and that this absorbs neutrons, generating more fissionable material. However, that fission splits the fissionable nuclei into halves
We sort of know what those by-products will be... They will be one of several dozen elements as the heaviest and hottest isotope of that element. The daughter nuclei have so many excess neutrons that those nuclei are highly unstable. The nuclei must actually radiate something like ten times before the daughter nucleus becomes stable. In the picture attached, the resulting daughter product nuclei start as isotopes on the far right and emit beta particles and gammas rays until they reach stability. The path to stability goes through all the turquoise isotopes shown and half-lives can be milliseconds or centuries. The waste contains a mixture of atoms from all the rows shown, each with their own chemistry, and none having a commercial value that comes close to the cost of their extraction. Working with this stuff is far worse than any nerve gas or toxic sludge. Storing it above ground as shown in the video remains an unacceptable risk, given that they are supposed to remain intact for centuries. No one believes that will happen safely. The professor's example refers to the daughter products at 3:15 (0.80 tons).