I know the United States had a working thorium-salt reactor, running inside a flying airplane, back in the 60’s. It was abandoned because uranium was already in steady supply from nuclear weapons development.
What’s the problem? It’s a perfectly viable technology and has been proven to work at least once. I have heard China has been experimenting with them in recent years but haven’t looked into it.
Thorium-salt breeder reactors have been effectively ignored by most major nuclear energy players for 60 years now, and they solve most of these problems…but nobody is building them. Likely the fossil fuel industry is behind that.
Counterpoint: every nuclear disaster in history, and all the waste nuclear power has ever produced, is absolutely miniscule compared to the damage burning fossil fuels has already done and will continue to do in the coming decades.
Every oil spill, every mountain ripped open to pull out coal, every jet airplane, every bunker-fueled container ship, every single ICE automobile, all combining to make the atmosphere worse and worse…the oceans are rising and getting more acidic. Wild species are going extinct by the thousands. Weather has gotten worse and more extreme. The damage may literally be incalculable. Millions of people have already died from the cancers and natural disasters fossil fuels have caused. The death toll of nuclear energy? Thousands at most.
Nuclear energy may not be perfect but it is a far better alternative.
Maybe you need to calm down.
Nuclear is not the same as fossil fuels but it is, per dollar spent and per megawatt made and by waste produced, the best solution we have right this instant. Nuclear reactors last 30+ years when built and nothing in current green energy technology has that kind of longevity as far as I know. Green energy has peaks and valleys over a given day and current electrical grids are not built for that kind of short-term storage. Nuclear solves that problem. Battery-powered devices like electric cars also depend on mining, you know. Don’t solar panels also have electrical circuits that require mined minerals?