LFTR has been demonstrated in the 50's.
MSR's were studied in the 50s through 70s and the demonstration units used Uranium, not Thorium. If the reactor design was so superior, we would have been using LFUR reactors.
It is infinitely more scalable than uranium sourced reactors, much less costly to construct,
Neither of those have been demonstrated at all, the electricity is likely to be more expensive than from LWR's.
the fuel has a radioactive life that is much more manageable
It requires reprocessing and doesn't eliminate the need for geologic storage, making the fuel cycle much more difficult.
The one and only reason that uranium was chosen as a reactor fuel was that it provided the feeder fuel for nuclear weapons grade plutonium.
Nope, that's anti-science historical revisionism - part of the cult-like nature of LFTR advocacy.
One of the most to-the-point explanations was given by the maintainer of the
Nuclear Weapons Archive in response to a bullshit Wired article:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1495612&cid=30623708
Wired Article Errors and Omissions (Score:5, Informative)
by careysub (976506) on Saturday January 02 2010, @01:20PM (#30623708)
The Wired Magazine article presents a false picture of the development of nuclear power and leaves out some crucial facts about thorium reactors. A key fact about thorium reactors mentioned no where in the article: you can't build a reactor, load it with thorium alone, and have it work. It will sit there producing no power forever. This because thorium is only the breeding material and is not fissile. To get the reactor to produce power the thorium has to be mixed with plutonium or U-233 bred in some uranium fueled reactor somewhere, or with highly enriched U-235. In other words - the reactor has to be loaded with bomb-usable material and there has to be a lot of it, enough for hundreds of weapons.
This is part of why the whole quasi-conspiratorial story of "why we didn't go with thorium in the first place" is utter nonsense. It was not because "we wanted bombs instead" and were prejudiced against "superior thorium", it is because only if you have an established nuclear industry cranking out materials usable in bombs by the thousands can you build these reactors in the first place. Either you must have natural/low enriched uranium reactors to produce plutonium, or you need large amounts of highly enriched uranium (prime bomb material) to load into thorium breeders.
Also unacknowledged is that the particular type of reactor being promoted, the molten fluoride salt reactor, was and is a complex technology that requires substantial additional development. Only one single reactor of this kind was ever built, and it was an 8 megawatt (thermal) materials test reactor, not a power reactor. We are looking at many years of additional development before construction can start on a prototype full scale power reactor. I agree that this technology should be further pursued, and it may turn out more successful that plutonium breeders (no successful power plants have been built, just several failures) but it is by no means guaranteed.
Hyman Rickover, by the way, was interested in light water uranium fueled reactors because they are a good technology for powering submarines, not because they produce plutonium (they are lousy plutonium producers, the yield is low and the material produced has terrible properties for bombs).
Check out the 2005 IAEA survey document (
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/IAEA-TECDOC-1450.pdf ) for a good summary of the thorium technology options and prospects.
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