Today we have a lot of improved reactor designs that are much further from dual use, much more resistant to catastrophic failure, much easier to scale to smaller size, and that produce much less waste, but never allowed ourselves to build them.
I agree on the resistance to failure and less waste production, but disagree on dual use. Thorium produces uranium-233 which can be used for nuclear reactions. Unlike uranium 235 based energy reactors, thorium produces more uranium-233 than it consumes in the course of producing energy. With thorium reactors, all energy reactors will be producing weapons grade nuclear material. This may be less efficient than traditional reactors dedicated to making nuclear weapons material, but converting a thorium energy plant from energy to weapons making is more trivial. And if as you say these new reactors design are more simple and small, the capital costs will be much lower, and since thorium is abundant the operational costs are much lower, so the plants will be more spread out geographically and new nations will get it. Overall the headache to global intelligence agencies is much higher.
I also think beyond these specific objections, the dual-use nature nuclear is “overdetermined”. There’s an amusing part of the interview where Thiel points out that the history of industrial advancement was moving from energy sources that take up more space to ones that take up less, from wood to coal to oil to nuclear. and now we’re moving back to natural gas which takes up more space and solar panels that take up a lot of land. Anyways, the atom fundamentally has a lot of energy in it, E=mc2. but massive amounts of energy in a small space is easy to turn into large explosions. The thing that makes nuclear attractive is the same thing that makes it dangerous. There’s been incredible technical progress in preventing nuclear accidents but preventing nuclear weapons requires geopolitical solutions.
I was thinking more about advanced uranium reactor designs rather than thorium. For example, a lot of SMR designs are sealed, making it harder to access fuel/waste during the lifetime or modify operation. Some are also fast neutron reactors, burners not breeders. That means they contain less total fissile material initially than they otherwise would, and consume a large proportion of what would otherwise be fissile or long lived waste.
Yes, you do have to be concerned about people opening them up and modifying them to breeder reactors—but honestly, I think that “Don’t allow sales to people who will do that, and also require monitoring to prevent modification” is enough to deter most of the problems, and for what’s left, the difference between being able to do that and being able to figure it out for yourself is not nearly as high a hurdle as it was 50-70 years ago.
I agree on the resistance to failure and less waste production, but disagree on dual use.
Thorium produces uranium-233 which can be used for nuclear reactions. Unlike uranium 235 based energy reactors, thorium produces more uranium-233 than it consumes in the course of producing energy. With thorium reactors, all energy reactors will be producing weapons grade nuclear material. This may be less efficient than traditional reactors dedicated to making nuclear weapons material, but converting a thorium energy plant from energy to weapons making is more trivial.
And if as you say these new reactors design are more simple and small, the capital costs will be much lower, and since thorium is abundant the operational costs are much lower, so the plants will be more spread out geographically and new nations will get it. Overall the headache to global intelligence agencies is much higher.
I also think beyond these specific objections, the dual-use nature nuclear is “overdetermined”. There’s an amusing part of the interview where Thiel points out that the history of industrial advancement was moving from energy sources that take up more space to ones that take up less, from wood to coal to oil to nuclear. and now we’re moving back to natural gas which takes up more space and solar panels that take up a lot of land. Anyways, the atom fundamentally has a lot of energy in it, E=mc2. but massive amounts of energy in a small space is easy to turn into large explosions. The thing that makes nuclear attractive is the same thing that makes it dangerous. There’s been incredible technical progress in preventing nuclear accidents but preventing nuclear weapons requires geopolitical solutions.
I was thinking more about advanced uranium reactor designs rather than thorium. For example, a lot of SMR designs are sealed, making it harder to access fuel/waste during the lifetime or modify operation. Some are also fast neutron reactors, burners not breeders. That means they contain less total fissile material initially than they otherwise would, and consume a large proportion of what would otherwise be fissile or long lived waste.
Yes, you do have to be concerned about people opening them up and modifying them to breeder reactors—but honestly, I think that “Don’t allow sales to people who will do that, and also require monitoring to prevent modification” is enough to deter most of the problems, and for what’s left, the difference between being able to do that and being able to figure it out for yourself is not nearly as high a hurdle as it was 50-70 years ago.