What about the radioactive waste? All nuclear reactors produce waste (finally when disassembled after the reactors' end of life). I find it strange to search for more efficient reactor styles, while the waste problem is not solved.
Most of the waste from traditional reactors is actually unspent fuel. Solid fuel rods only allow for about 1-2% energy conversion before the amount of transuranics and other contaminants built up and prevent safe operation.
The idea of the liquid fueled reactors is that you can easily change the fuel composition, ideally constantly reprocessing the fuel of contaminates, while letting the unburned fuel stay in place. This would drastically reduce the amount of waste generated (by orders of magnitude), and the 'unburnable' waste left over actually has some uses of its own (molybdenum 99 and bismuth 213).
Most of the waste is actually not the fission product itself, but everything else that is required to maintain the reactor aswell as the reactor itself.
The waste problem has been solved. We store it somewhere safe until we decide something better to do with it.
What hasn't been solved is the effects of of all our coal, gas, and oil usage that could be replaced by nuclear power. It makes all the sense in the world to be finding ways we can widely and safely deploy nuclear power worldwide to replace coal and gas power plants. Generating clean electricity is a requisite for wide spread electric or hydrogen cars to stop burning gasoline.
If you believe that coal and gas burning is bad for the environment, then we need nuclear power urgently and widely, energy needs are only going to go up and the only alternative to nuclear is burning more fossil fuels. I find it absolutely absurd that people worry more about nuclear waste than atmosphere pollution currently happening. I think we could store a few hundred years of nuclear waste on Antarctica til technology figures out what to do with it, even if that's just shooting it into the sun. I choose safely storing nuclear waste for the future to deal with over continuing to burn billions of tons of coal and gas each year which is actively killing about a million people per year. (WHO 2008)
I appreciate the Futurama reference but it is true. Nuclear "waste" is extremely valuable for use in upcoming reactor designs like MSRs that burn up significantly more of the long-lived waste. Keeping it stored temporarily until these reactors go live is the most prudent and efficient option.
There is waste with thorium reactors as well, so they need to be well run by competent people just as a conventional reactors. That said, the waste is easier to handle for several reasons, particularly in the liquid fuel type.
The waste in conventional reactors are of two types, fission procucts and higher actinides. The fision products are the result of splitted uranium atoms. These are intensively radioactive, with halflives from milliseconds to about 30 years.
Then there are higher actinides, with halflives up to tens of thousands of years. These are less radioactive, but still radioactive enough that they have to be safely stored. This storage must be safe for hundred of thousands of years, something that it is hard to guarantee. Fision products only need to be stored for about 600-800 years before they are no more radioactive than uranium ore. Thorium rectors produce virtually no higher actinides, so it is easier to find storage that is safe for the period it must stay out of reach. It is also less volume of the waste (but more concentrated, as the amount of radioactivity is about the same), since the fission products are not mixed with U238 as in conventional reactors. This means that less storage is needed, which also makes it easier to handle.
I do not mean the fission products. I mean every thing else, starting from the clothes for the staff, to maintanance materials and finally the reactor itself. A reactor produces far more waste than just the fission products.
It is solved - store it somewhere, or use it as a fuel for other reactors.
And the currently used alternatives (coal) produces way more waste (whole mountains of slightly radioactive, and slightly toxic dust leftovers from coal extraction build up near coal mines).
Thorium molten salt reactors make waste reprocessing vastly easier and they produce significantly less "potent" waste products than Uranium solid fueled reactors do. This is important because MSRs could be used to vastly reduce the amount of waste built up so far, easing the storage problem enormously.
the article talks about waste, namely how thorium reactors burn longer lived radioactive elements into shorter lived elements so tens of thousands of years of waste turns into hundreds of years of waste
