> Imagine a Thorium reactor that can be put into the bowels of a Hospital or an office building basement and supply electrical power.
Imagine the terrorism we'll see when highly radioactive material is within reach of any disgruntled office worker.
Imagine the terrorism we'll see when highly radioactive material is within reach of any disgruntled office worker.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
I don't think I've ever seen a place fully compliant with all regulations down to the last letter. Somebody inevitably takes a shortcut somewhere. All you can do is push those shortcuts into places they don't matter.
Certainly not the times and culture we live in, but the "test" they tried running at Chornobyl violated their own regulations too…
>>highly radioactive material is within reach of any disgruntled office worker.
Like, how would that disgruntled office worker even reach that highly radioactive material? Especially without killing themselves in the process. Hospitals already have extremely radioactive cobalt sources on premises, and they are 1) impossible to get to by a normal employee 2) would kill said employee if they ever did get to them somehow.
Also sources tend to come with shielding. Some portable, some less-portable. Oh and.. use machinery / robots / whatever, with operator outside the danger zone.
Your "impossible" does a lot of heavy lifting here.
No, it's the normal that does the heavy lifting. A radiation therapy machine does not allow for an easy removal of the source, not without hours of work with specialized machinery. Again, how does a disgruntled office worker do this without immediate attention of security?
>>There can be a good bit of time between receiving a lethal dose of radiation, and dying (or incapacitated) from that
Well, it's really unfortunate, but we have multiple reports from people who have accidentally walked into a room with an open Cesium source at various irradiation facilities - they all reported that they felt incredibly sick in less than a minute. And that's "just" an irradiation source, not an active nuclear reactor. Again, I'm struggling to imagine how a "disgruntled worker" gets anywhere near the actual radiactive material within it.
Thorium-based nuclear research was practically shut down during the Cold War precisely because they realized that you can't make nuclear weaponry out of it. It would have been a very different world otherwise.
1. General decline of nuclear power plant building after 1970s in U.S. Why financing research for Thorium-based reactor, when even PWRs and BWRs are not build anymore. The shutdown of sodium-based reactor research is another example.
2. Handling of highly radioactive corrosive molten salts in Molten-salt reactor designs is a big issue. Materials resistant to both intensive chemical corrosion and neutron irradiation were open research problem.
3. Online reprocessing of nuclear fuel necessary for some thorium fuel cycle designs (inside the nuclear power plant) could increase the risk of nuclear proliferation. U.S. government, as a general policy, doesn't like when non-weapon states do nuclear reprocessing.
4. Thorium-based reactor could be used to produce weapon usable Uranium-233. But this production was not necessary, as military Plutonium production reactors were already build.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor#Fuel_repro...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle
Many of specific issue around design nuclear weapons based on U-233 are classified. But:
"A declassified 1966 memo from the US nuclear program stated that uranium-233 has been shown to be highly satisfactory as a weapons material, though it was only superior to plutonium in rare circumstances. It was claimed that if the existing weapons were based on uranium-233 instead of plutonium-239, Livermore would not be interested in switching to plutonium.
The co-presence of uranium-232 can complicate the manufacture and use of uranium-233, though the Livermore memo indicates a likelihood that this complication can be worked around."
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233880587_Nuclear_e...