Comments by "Bob thebomb" (@bobthebomb1596) on "Good News: Small Nuclear Thorium Reactors are Coming to Europe" video.

  1. IF you have the means to siphon it from the reactor without being spotted and work on it without killing yourself.
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  2.  @brothermine2292  Hard to do it without being noticed either. First you need to own the reactor, hard to position your robots by a reactor you don't own without being noticed. Then you require somewhere to process the protactinium and separate out the uranium 233. Again, hard to do without being noticed. Then you require a facility to construct devices. If you own the reactor you have to prevent the IAEA noticing you are syphoning off protactinium, not easy in these days of easy, remote sensing. Finally, if a nation state wants to construct a bomb, they can just do it. All they require is money and the will to stick two fingers up to the international community.
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  3. Not thorium based and submarine reactors are designed to run on highly enriched fuel.
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  4. It's not just about generating cost. You have to factor in reliability of supply, operating capacity, grid stability, backup. All these come at a cost which is often left out of RE calculations.
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  5.  @TimothyWhiteheadzm  Agreed that the major negative affecting nuclear is politics (and technically illiterate protestors)
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  6. That's why modern reactors are moving to passive safety, requiring no human input in the initial phase.
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  7.  @brothermine2292  Based on what? During that decay the fertile material also contains U232, a hard gamma emitter, good luck hiding that and keeping your people alive without the backing of a state behind you.
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  8. Why would anyone hijack them? In most cases there will be no fuel in them during transportation. Where there are "swappable cores" the fuel will be low activity and useless without all the ancillary equipment to run the reactor. Terrorists might go for a "used" reactor carrying spent fuel, but where these leave the site at all they will be as highly guarded as current spent fuel movements.
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  9.  @jasonvene  There have been designs which feature a "swappable core" where the infrastructure for a number of SMR's would be put in place and sealed reactor modules would be delivered, used, stored temporarily then removed back to the manufacturer for reprocessing and disposal.
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  10. They don't, they will require some fissile to start the reactor (although they could use a neutron generator to start the breeding process).
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  11.  @Sciolist  That's why they are called breeder reactors, they turn fertile thorium into fissile uranium.
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  12. Not if you can produce the reactor vessels cheaply.
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