Ohio just passed the worst energy bill of the 21st century - A corrupt bailout for dinosaur power plants that screws renewable energy in the process.

Your first clue this author was full of shit was when they started lamenting the radioactive dangers of byproducts with hundreds of thousands to billions of year half lives. This is the clearest indicator of people who don't understand nuclear anything - as these big numbers are generally indicators of how not dangerous a radioactive isotope is.

It makes a particularly big deal about technetium-99 for some reason, despite that being a decay product of the most common medical isotope in use today, and a thing we put into a great many people. If anything one of the biggest pros to a thorium fuel cycle reactor is the ability to to remove molybdenum-99 in process and manufacture it into tech-99metastable generators, as this is only possible in a uranium-235 reactor by constantly bringing it offline.

Then it talks about removing protactinium-233/uranium-233 as a waste, even though the whole point in a LFTR is that protactinium-233 decays to u-233 in mere days, which is the isotope that actually fuels a thorium reactor, and that since these are elementally differentiated from thorium they're quite "easy" to chemically separate.

It briefly mentions a 2 liquid design but skips on because it doesn't want to discuss how much that particular design solves almost every problem the whole article is complaining about. I didn't even get to wherever it talks about Hastelloy because I just couldn't keep reading it.

/r/technology Thread Parent Link - vox.com