Re:Left-wing party opposed to rare earth mining project wins...
by nicklecompte on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @11:14AM
(#26726094)
The issue in the article I linked isn’t that thorium is being produced but rather that Greenland Minerals doesn’t seem to have a plan for storing or processing it. So the fact that it could one day be used in a reactor isn’t very meaningful if the thorium in question is badly contaminated with other waste products and buried in a landfill somewhere.
From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
"Weinberg realized that you could use thorium in an entirely new kind of reactor, one that would have zero risk of meltdown. ... his team built a working reactor .... and he spent the rest of his 18-year tenure trying to make thorium the heart of the nation’s atomic power effort. He failed. Uranium reactors had already been established, and Hyman Rickover, de facto head of the US nuclear program, wanted the plutonium from uranium-powered nuclear plants to make bombs. Increasingly shunted aside, Weinberg was finally forced out in 1973."