That's more than right and we should be going after every energy source available to us on a wartime basis as we speak. Aside from the fact of still having 20 - 30 years of petroleum fueled vehicles in service starting from now, there's the question of how money sent to the opeckers gets used, i.e. to fly aircraft into our taller buildings, i.e. you have to figure that into the cost.
But thorium is a spectacular possibility. It's vastly more efficient for producing energy than uranium is and totally clean, burning down to nothing as it is used. It can't be used to make bombs (which is why nobody was interested in it in previous decades), and is much more plentiful than uranium.
“But thorium is a spectacular possibility. It’s vastly more efficient for producing energy than uranium is and totally clean, burning down to nothing as it is used. It can’t be used to make bombs (which is why nobody was interested in it in previous decades), and is much more plentiful than uranium. “
Can you justify any of these assertions?
Thorium isn’t much good for bombs, but a thorium reactor generates other fissionable isotopes that are good for bombs.
Thorium-fueled reactors don’t “burn down to nothing”. What do you think becomes of the fission products, many of which are radioactive? Or does “burn down to nothing” imply that we’ve waited a few billion years for it to happen?
Please do some research before you post:
“U-233 is produced from thorium-232 by neutron capture. It can be made highly pure because it can be chemically separated from Th-232 rather than by mass, which is far easier. Therefore, there is no weapons-grade concentration for U-233. Since it can relatively easily be made pure, it is regulated as a special nuclear material only by the total amount present rather than by concentration or concentration combined with the amount. Uranium-232 is a contaminant that is present only in small amounts, but whose highly radioactive decay products like thallium-208 make handling more difficult.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons-grade