I recall we once had a thorium plant, but it was dismantled since it did not produce bomb material as a byproduct.
Never heard anything about Brine issues.
I HAVE heard of more than one Thorium design, pebble bed reactors, etc.
This “New” design appears to nothing more than a refinement of the same old tech, nothing truly new or innovative.
The Chinese and probably even the English are on track to have Thorium plants before we do.
RIP American ingenuity leading the way!
Other than successfully aiding in creating nuclear bomb material, I think it was Livermore (National Laboratory) that studied reactor designs early on and couldn’t come up with decent safe reactor design. Typically 30% efficiently with most designs up to 50% efficient in the more exotic designs, all have draws backs when it comes to radioactive waste storage or worse a plant failure leading to radioactive fallout.
The boiling reactor is just about the dumbest design there has ever been with its control rods being inserted from the bottom.
The latest PWR has a claim to frame of being able to shut itself down and run for 3 days without human invention until the water supply (coolant) needs to be replenished. Besides the need for less building materials and whatever else the sales brochure says in it. Still any spent fuel or waste is stored on site.
A thorium plant is cooled with liquid salt, which is very very very corrosive as Livermore found out decades ago.
Of course with the head of GE (All these better idea nuke plants designs past, present or future are GE’s) now on the government payroll (Jeffrey Immelt, the head of Barack Obama’s Jobs Council) you won’t hear any bad mouthing of the nuclear industry including Japan’s Fuku nightmare. Also, O’bummer’s reelection can now tap into an unlimited source of funding from GE but with the republicans running opposition, he won’t need it.
Then from my point of view, there is the half life of concrete which is around 50 years but what do I know?