Think about it … candle light reading, horse buggies, flies swatting … manure. The good old days will be here again!

And do note that no-one addresses the consequences of atomic fission on the containment — especially at the boundary layer.

Wiki heads off into Lotus Eater land — with concerns about what the radio nuclides would look like in the out-centuries.

( These angels-on-a-pinhead discussions are wrapped into the justifications for the thorium cycle. What they really want is a life time of research funding. Doh!)

Th 232 ==>> U233

2) It’s STRICTLY a promotable fuel that becomes burnable AFTER it has absorbed a neutron — and decayed (upward) into U233.

3) U233 has better explosive metrics than either u235 or Pu239. It was skipped past because it was a slower route to the A bomb.

4) It’s been tested.

5) Since it MUST create U233 to get any power out of the ‘thorium’ cycle — the fission decay products are of the same chain probabilities as U235 and Pu239 — allowing for radio nuclide differences.

GB…

The fact that ALL He fusion reactions are massive high energy neutron emitters has been at the forefront of design headaches from the first.

http://www.polywellnuclearfusion.com/PolywellReactor/PolywellReactor.html

The Polywell fusion scheme is the only one that has any practical viability — and it has been starved of funding.

It’s notable that the Polywell design has moved towards viability at about twenty-times the speed of the other schemes — for one-thousandth of the cost.

It should be obvious to even the retarded, by this date, that absolutely no-one has a solution for ultra high energy neutron emissions. Being neutrons, they are entirely beyond the influence of electromagnatism.

And they start out with energies drastically higher than those in a fission reactor. Meaning that you’ll have to use containments — in layers — to exceed anything yet used in fission designs.

Never forget: it’s the neutrons that are making all of the components radio-active. What they don’t irradiate — they pulverize.

&&&&&

Polywell reactors figure to be viable for deep space propulsion. They simply don’t require massive shielding.

The only issues for them are the unknowns and the unknown unknowns.

&&&&

It is a fact that all prior government funded fusion research has proved to be dual use: for directed weapons.

It was from this very field that American engineers discovered that the Soviets were actively pursuing beam weapons — that when perfected — could’ve taken out American space assets in the blink of an eye.

This eventually morphed into Reagan’s SDI, after he was shown where the Soviets were tossing their priority monies.

Yes, the USSR was going after their own Star Wars at least ten-years before Reagan’s big speech.

When you’re at the edge of technical knowledge, progress can be quite slow. This goes double for small, tight, crews working on highly speculative, highly classified, weapons schemes.

&&&&&&

There really is no such thing as a “Thorium Reactor” — it’s a uranium 233 reactor — that gets its start by burning Pu239 to kick it off.

It’s also known as a THERMAL BREEDER REACTOR. For the grand design is to so conserve neutrons that most of the energy comes from converted (bred) thorium instead of the launch fuel — which is virtually always pitched as some plutonium 239.

For the last fifteen years, the “Thorium Reactor” has been only five years away from fruition.

It will stay that way for another fifty-years.

&&&&&

When the USSR and USA were throwing mega monies at the thorium cycle, they could NEVER get ANYTHING, and they tried everything in the periodic table, to survive the ‘hot’ fluorine atoms created by U233 fission.

ALL thorium reactor designs turn on a brew of fluorides — with a touch of oxides, — maybe.

So when the uranium splits, fluorine atoms are cut loose — with a portion of the fission reaction’s energy. These simply destroy every substance in the periodic table. Nothing in nature can stand up to them.

In all conventional designs this destruction of the container is solved by pellets that are sacrificed and removed — in the fuel rod assemblies.

Consequently, the rest of the reactor can survive — and power on for decades.

In all molten salt schemes, there can be no pelletizing — and the ‘hot’ fluorine is in direct contact with the reactor’s main containment.

THIS has proved to be THE crippling design flaw that no-one has ever been able to get around.

At the end of the day, the entire corpus has to be entombed.

For by then, the whole dang thing is ‘hot’ — and ruined.

Reprocessing such a huge block of nasty radio nuclides is not even dreamed of.

We’d need Yucca’s beyond measure if the scheme is adopted and scaled up.

This is the first that I have heard that, “fusion is drastically worse than fission”. On the other hand, I have seen dozens of articles that claim that fusion is an inherently clean process. I have to wonder how “The He fusion reactions – all of the variants/ combos are staggering neutron emitters.” could have somehow escaped researchers.

Nor is it my understanding that thorium reactors must inherently be fusion reactors.

I don’t know quite how that fusion >> fission argument ever got started — environmental impact wise — as fusion is drastically worse than fission.

Why?

The He fusion reactions — all of the variants/ combos are staggering neutron emitters. Each fusion reaction produces far more troublesome daughter radio nuclides than a uranium fission chain.

They are a pain because they activate EVERY other element in the periodic table into radio active decay isotopes.

And they do so with neutrons that have far, far, far more energy than those of a fission reaction.

So, after a fusion reactor has been running for any decent run — it’s as ‘hot’ / radio active as any fission reactor.

Worse: the primary throttle on weapons production is the scarcity of neutrons.

Once fusion reactors are in business, neutrons will be a glut on the market — able to promote thorium up to uranium (U233) at a profound tempo.

U233 is the ultimate nuclear explosive. It has all of the advantages of U235 and Pu239 combined.

Hence, the so-called thorium reactors [ a TOTAL mis-statement of what’s being burnt: uranium ] are the single WORST proliferation design to hit the drafting table.

[ U233 lends itself to back-pack nukes — uniquely so. Yiikes! ]

&&&&&&&&

Up until now the primary reactor design that has enabled nuclear proliferation has been the CANDU reactor — and its derivatives. (Heavy water moderator, un-enriched uranium fuel)

Thanks for everything, Canada.

[ BTW, Canada has entirely stopped exporting/ licensing their design for just the above reason. ]

Both the USSR and USA abandoned the thorium cycle for the dual reasons of technical impracticality and proliferation risk.

The defensive sphere that I envision would be to place twelve very large solar-powered, super-capacitor discharged, remote controlled, electromagnetic railguns* in geosynchronus orbits around the earth in a dodecahedron arrangement. This would allow a minimum of five railgun platforms to be targeted upon any near earth object on a collison course with earth, regardless of approach trajectory. Current technology and mathematical calculations would determine the railgun capability, which as technology advanced could be upgraded.

Besides the ‘evil that men do’ problem, the main technological barrier to near earth mastery is the enormous amount of energy it takes to get out of the earth’s ‘gravity well’. In time, that will yield to technological advancement.

In addition to protection from massive impacts upon the earth, there is literally an astronomical amount of mineral wealth awaiting us in the asteroid belt. The moon is covered with HE3 which could power nuclear fusion** reactors for tens of thousands of years.

We have profound reasons to master space travel and every day that we delay is literally playing Russian roulette with our fate.

* the US Navy just placed their first rail-gun aboard a naval vessel

**unlike our current nuclear fission, nuclear fusion is environmentally safe.