Virtually no spent fuel problem, very little on site storage or transport. I have been following the events at Fukushima Nuclear Power plants disaster with great interest. How ironic that one of the greatest problems was with the spent fuel, not with the inability to shut down the working units. The spent fuel issue is the real Achilles’ heel of the Nuclear Power Industry. The cost of reprocessing and storing spent reactor fuel will burden us for centuries after the reactors themselves have been decommissioned when their useful life is ended. Molten Salt Thorium nuclear power works differently from conventional Uranium fueled Reactors as the fissile fuel gets generated in the breeding process itself and nearly all fuel gets consumed as it is generated. When the process shuts down, that is it. Only the radioactivity that is en route so to say will have to be accounted for, not everything generated thus far in the process. The difference is about ten thousand to one in the size of the problem. It is high time to rebuild and expand our Nuclear power generation by switching to Thorium..
The detractors of Thorium like to point out that the Thorium-U233 process generates some U 232 in the presence of free neutrons. U-232 decays with a 69-year half-life through 1.9-year half-life Th-228 to Tl-208, which emits a 2.6 MeV gamma ray upon decay. Gamma rays are easily shielded by clean water, so transportation and storage is not a problem. Rather than being a problem, this is a great asset. The 232U decay chain is the source of the high energy gamma rays that make 232U the preferred tracer isotope. Uranium-232 has a half-life of 69.8 years, and the decay chain terminates at 208Pb (National Nuclear Data Center).
Len Bilén's blog, a blog about faith, politics and the environment. 