Death comes to us all. Life's but a walking shadow | I heard an article on the radio last night on this issue. As for liquid metal coolant reactors conceived and design here back in the 1950's, they had one big drawback. they could produce nuclear weapon material so were discounted by the US military. Today the inability to produce weapon material is an inherent advantage to the world.
The other reason we stopped the nuclear energy programs is because this country never estabished a long term depository for nuclear waste. It was and is a purely political problem of "not in my backyard". Even though an decent storage design was supposedly developed the Congressmen in the affect area always blocked construction.
That's not to say that there aren't risks for nuclear, as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima have shown. What's interesting is that Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were caused by blatent operator error if not incompetence. Fukushima was caused by the simple avoidable design flaw of building the backup generators where they were vulerable to tsunami's. Like tsunami's never happen in Japan. |
Another country moves forward with Thorium
