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What practical issues remain for the adoption of Thorium reactors?
I have been reading and watching a bit on thorium TH 90 and cannot understand why this is not being used more widely or even exclusively as our energy resource. there are two main points in the wikipedia article that i want to highlight.
The Thorium Energy Alliance (TEA), an educational advocacy organization, emphasizes that "there is enough thorium in the United States alone to power the country at its current energy level for over 10,000 years
more expensive than uranium fuels. But experts note that "the second thorium reactor may activate a third thorium reactor. This could continue in a chain of reactors for a millennium if we so choose." They add that because of thorium's abundance, it will not be exhausted in 1,000 years.
We can all agree that coal, oil and gas are in a steady rate of decline with all the for mentioned sources creating a negative effect on the environment. Not only that but in the case of the war in Iraq and what seems to be the brink of a war with Iran, it centers around our energy crisis and the creation of nuclear weapons ( in the case of Iran the nuclear development is supposedly a ruse to create a-bombs )
Thorium seems to solve all of these problems very quickly without the demonic waste that is created with current nuclear power plants and the fear of human destruction by nuclear meltdown as we almost saw in Japan. Even the mining of uranium is creating a heck of an environmental situation as seen at Olympic Dam in Oz.
There is also the pebble bed movement here in my own country and the most insane idea of the lot, fracking for oil. I think the fact that oil companies are fracking is a sign of the times of energy scarcity that we are living in.
Why is thorium so unknown? With clean nuclear energy we could create a system viable for most motors to be electrical, from boats to .. well everything. Yet I dont ( besides China ) see any country taking much interest in it. I am sure there is something that is preventing it because it does seem like a very rational move to make, i just have not, through my research found any, besides the fact that there is currently no infrastructure for it, which is minor really considering the seriousness of global warming, the energy crisis, energy based wars etc.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=+thorium&t=emd01
So to summarize, Why is it not being implemented to replace our current out of date and destructive energy system?
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