Everything I have read in addition to the article CLAIM that this is not the type of reactor you would want to build if you were looking for weapons grade material. Certainly building one at any scale for weapons grade material would not make sense seeing as we already know how to produce enough stuff to blow up the world many times over.
More detailed articles did describe the initial problems of not having materials available at that time to handle the required higher temperatures. Technology has now supplied us with those materials.
Investigation of the various links especially http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com/ will yield an unfortunate political food fight, egos, corporate leverage, and of course the materials vs temperature issue.
Once we started down the LWR path this technology was left in the dust for the most part in the USA but other countries seem to have take great interest as shown in some posts above so it would seem the technology has some merit.
Note: China is on a thorium buying spree.
Thanks again for your contribution to the discussion.
I agree with you that many of the technical problems originally encountered with u-233 reactors are probably within reach of current technology.
I just couldn’t make heads or tails out of the technical discussion in the article.
My opinion is that reactors using u-235 or pu-239 are already well established technologically and produce power more cheaply than any other existing technology.
Why spend the money and resources trying to develop something that we won’t see for 10 to 20 years?
We could start building nuclear plants using existing technology after breakfast tomorrow morning.