Kibitzing outside of any expertise that I have, here, but thorium reactors are generally regarded as a significant nuclear weapons proliferation risk. This has been an inhibiting factor with regards to investment in research.
This design — cheap and transportable in a standard shipping container — significantly ups the ante on that risk, to put it mildly.
Deployed singly, small, low-power, short-lifespan reactors would increase the burden of maintaining regulatory control over those reactors — destined, by design, for catastrophic failure unless they are retired within a safety period — which in turn would the risk of a nuclear contamination incident. This could be mitigated by operating the reactors in banks at a containment/maintenance site.
I'm not sure what parts of the reactor could be usefully recycled. All the metals would be embrittled by neutron bombardment.
I'm just recalling from the Sorensen's LFTR's videos here, but I had the impression it was the exact opposite in terms of weapon-grade nuclear material.
Anything you take out of a Thorium-fueled reactor is going to contain Uranium-232 and its decay products, which emit easily-detectable and dangerous to nearby living things gamma radiation. U-232 is much harder to separate out from the useful U-233 (which is the fissile fuel that Thorium is converted into) than Uranium 235 is from Uranium 238, so it is very hard to extract clean safe fissile material from a Thorium reactor.
This means that a Thorium reactor is really hard to get material from for a nuclear explosion. Any material you do extract is going to be screaming "I'm over here" to any nearby gamma ray detector, and will be dangerous to handle.
But if you just wanted to make a dirty bomb by blowing up a small Thorium nuclear plant with conventional explosives, spreading highly radioactive material all over the place, that sounds much more feasible.
> Kibitzing outside of any expertise that I have, here, but thorium reactors are generally regarded as a significant nuclear weapons proliferation risk.
Also outside my expertise, but everything I read said the opposite. Wikipedia (which gets true/false questions wrong half the time) says (emphasis added):
Uranium-232 (232 U) is an isotope of uranium. It has a half-life of around 68.9 years and is a side product in the thorium cycle. It has been cited as an obstacle to nuclear proliferation using 233U as the fissile material, because the intense gamma radiation emitted by 208Tl (a daughter of 232U, produced relatively quickly) makes the 233U contaminated with it more difficult to handle.
This design — cheap and transportable in a standard shipping container — significantly ups the ante on that risk, to put it mildly.
Deployed singly, small, low-power, short-lifespan reactors would increase the burden of maintaining regulatory control over those reactors — destined, by design, for catastrophic failure unless they are retired within a safety period — which in turn would the risk of a nuclear contamination incident. This could be mitigated by operating the reactors in banks at a containment/maintenance site.
I'm not sure what parts of the reactor could be usefully recycled. All the metals would be embrittled by neutron bombardment.