There’s a growing movement to make nuclear power safer, more efficient and less weapons-prone by replacing today’s uranium fuel with another element, thorium.
And within the thorium push, there are different technological ideas for how to deploy. One camp says that the best way to optimize thorium’s many advantages is to put it into liquid form in a molten salt reactor (MSR), which is a radically different design compared to today’s solid fueled reactors.
Some thorium pragmatists, however, advocate another step that would get thorium onto the power scene sooner: Put it into existing reactors.
That’s the message coming from the University of Cambridge in England, where PhD candidate Ben Lindley has discovered another potential advantage: Reactor operators could burn a thorium fuel that is mixed with plutonium and thus would provide a useful way to eliminate troubling nuclear waste.
