Robert Steinhaus has a good overview of Nuclear Energy and recently he commented about the advantages of the Thorium LFTR on Secretary of Energy Steven Chu’s Facebook Wall and lays out the advantages and nicely summarizes.

“All breeder reactors are not created equal (in terms of safety and cost). It is both safer and cheaper to design breeder reactors using a mild thermal neutron spectrum with Thorium nuclear fuel. Conventional breeder reactors are designed to operate with Uranium/Plutonium fuel and require very carefully designed fast neutron reactors to work. Thorium breeds more slowly than does a fast neutron reactor, but it does so with greater stability and safety. Some of the advantages of thermal spectrum breeder reactors burning Thorium is that you get fuel resource utilization closely approaching 100%, you have to dig only about one two hundredth the amount of ore from the ground, and after producing abundant amounts of clean power you have only one hundredth the amount of waste to get rid of and that waste is only radiotoxic (radioactivity above natural background) for about 400 years.”

Some background. The breeder reactor comes in a couple of varieties. The Fast Breeder and the Thermal Breeder. LFTR is Thermal. It runs without water and has no need for expensive containment since it does not become pressurized. It is the most flexible of reactor concepts and will one day be used for a great variety of purposes beyond just power for electricity.

1 ton of Thorium = 200 tons of Uranium

Current reactors leave behind 95% of the original fuel

A Thorium MSR (Molten Salt Reactor) or LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) will leave behind 1% of the original fuel

(Wikipedia)

“…Liquid-fluoride reactors have many attractive features, such as deep inherent safety (due to their strong negative temperature coefficient of reactivity and their ability to drain their liquid fuel into a passively-cooled and non-critical configuration) and ease of operation. They are particularly attractive as thermal breeders because they can isolate protactinium-233 (the intermediate breeding product of thorium) from neutron flux and allow it to decay to uranium-233, which can then be returned to the reactor. Typical solid-fueled reactors are not capable of accomplishing this step and thus U-234 is formed upon further neutron irradiation…”