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Thorium, nuclear industry savior?

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I had a bit of a back and forth with a few Andrew Yang supporters on the last DKos presidential cattle call poll thread. One of the items they brought up was Yang’s (and their) support for nuclear power using thorium as fuel.

Now I have a BA in Physics from a top 10 physics department, and granted, I wasn’t hard core, nor did I pursue a Physics career (I taught HS for a spell), but I do very well remember the lab on radioactivity. Let’s just say I’m pretty sure highly radioactive waste is bad news, so I’m about as down as you can get on a process that generates a whole lot of the stuff with no viable answer for dealing with it.

So I argued against “clean” nuclear power both on the radioactive part as well as the capital intensive part, capital that would be much better spent on actual clean renewable sources.

My Yang friend pointed me to a pro-nuclear website touting France’s stats on nuclear power. I noted back that they sunk a ton of money into all those plants in the 70’s, so sure, their nuclear generated electricity looks relatively inexpensive today, but try to build a few dozen new ones today… (and I provided links to just how inexpensive wind and solar is becoming).

Anyway, I found this link in my in-box this morning regarding the vagaries of thorium reactors, and it’s pretty revealing beyondnuclearinternational.org/…

Cliff notes — you need to mix in some plutonium or U235 to get a pile of thorium to do it’s chain reaction thing and when you’re done you produce a nice pile of nuclear bomb making U233 along with lots of other nasty radioactive waste, so is thorium nuclear industry’s savior a la our Yang supporting friends? No, no it’s not.

In case you have any questions on just how bad the nuclear industry is for people who have to deal with it on a daily basis, here you go —beyondnuclearinternational.org/…

As I researched other Navajo communities that had past uranium mining, I found they all had a similar story. They all had relatives that were former miners or lived nearby an abandoned uranium mine who died of cancer.

Have a great day.


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