I have researched this and haven't been able to find a time when it was EVER true, but it certainly isn't true of either modern solar cells (even in small-scale deployments) or wind turbines. As a result, it comes up quite often in non-fact-centric talk shows and as a result is something that a lot of people just "know". It seems just "shocking" enough to be true, and happens to coincide with what many rich interests would like to be true. The "uses more carbon to produce than it saves in its lifetime" charge is a persistent myth. Any actinide can work in this method, but thorium is particularly well suited because it is so efficient at the high temperatures at which fission occurs in the soup.' So why are we not building these reactors?" The system makes the reactor self-regulating: When the soup gets too hot it expands and flows out of the tubes - slowing fission and eliminating the possibility of another Chernobyl. This fission soup is poured into tubes in the core of the reactor, where the nuclear chain reaction - the billiard balls colliding - happens. The design is based on the lab's finding that thorium dissolves in hot liquid fluoride salts. Even better, Weinberg realized that you could use thorium in an entirely new kind of reactor, one that would have zero risk of meltdown. The more neutrons per collision, the more energy generated, the less total fuel consumed, and the less radioactive nastiness left behind. As it decays in a reactor core, its byproducts produce more neutrons per collision than conventional fuel.
It is also extraordinarily efficient as a nuclear fuel. 'It's abundant - the US has at least 175,000 tons of the stuff - and doesn't require costly processing. But thorium is safer and easier to work with, and may cause a lot fewer headaches.
Mrshermanoaks writes "When the choices for developing nuclear energy were being made, we went with uranium because it had the byproduct of producing plutonium that could be weaponized.
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