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Comment by cocoablazing | Hacker News Reader

No, the naturally abundant isotope of Thorium has 6 fewer nucleons. Why would building a special reactor for a program that has so little funding be justifiable?

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Because along with a steady source of Pu238, you also get the benefit of a safer, smaller nuclear reactor using a fuel that is significantly more common and less weaponizable than uranium/plutonium.

Please provide evidence that a Thorium reactor is safer. We have the means to make all the 238Pu we want. NASA just needs to pay commercial reactor operators to irradiate 237Np targets. This is a big problem, because NASA has very little funding to accomplish this, and the target material comes in a purified form suitable for direct use in nuclear weapons.

Is it practical to irradiate the target in units of mass that are smaller than the critical mass?

(The thought being that you can then only allow one unit to be in transit from storage to a reactor at any given time, pretty much entirely mitigating the risk of someone gathering enough of it to make a bomb)

You can make a bomb out of a little of this, and a little of that. A bomb requires much more than a critical mass anyhow.

On the safety: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor...

Economic feasibility: http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com/downloads/plutonium-238...

I'm a nuclear safety analyst. I need more than a powerpoint to convince me that an untested technology is safer than a technology that has seen billions of dollars of investment in enhanced technology, engineering, modeling, etc; along with decades of lessons learned. I'm not saying it couldn't be, but I think there are better ways to spend money on nuclear energy technologies right now, in terms of carbon offset and prevention of radioactivity release.

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