/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.3067294]

daily thorium energy thread

[Nuka-cola my cool trip is elsewhere No.3067312]

that chart doesn't really assert the coolest aspects of a lftr (how the freeze plug works, online refueling and reprocessing, energy output scaling with demand)

[Anonymous No.3067327]

if this shit is so good why didn't it get built? fucking pie in the sky sugar covered bullshit

[Anonymous No.3067341]

>>3067327

Because you can't build bombs with it, faggot.

[Anonymous No.3067376]

>>3067312
Then make one that does. The other day you said you wanted to spread knowledge of the LFTR, this would be a good starting point, don't you think?

You certainly know enough to fill an infographic.

[Anonymous No.3067383]

>>3067327
>if this shit is so good why didn't it get built?
Upside: with thorium, it's really easy to build a breeder reactor.
Downside: we have no need of breeder reactors. While thorium is only fertile material (can be made into fissile fuel, but isn't itself), natural uranium already contains enough fissile material (U235) to be useful as fuel and is plentiful, and even if your reactor design requires an enriched fuel, enrichment (separating the fissionable/fertile U238 out of the mix, increasing the proportion of fissile U235) is not at all hard compared to operating a nuclear reactor. Also: we can make uranium breeder reactors too, in fact we have them, and because they involve fast neutron fluxes (useful for, for example, destroying certain types of nuclear waste) and produce plutonium, they are much more interesting to pursue than thorium breeders.

Upside: experimental thorium reactor design has all sorts of theoretical advantages.
Downside: experimental thorium reactor design is experimental, while far more extensive research on advanced uranium reactor designs with similar and greater advantages has been done.

Basically, there's not much reason to pursue thorium technology unless you can't get uranium (ex. India has plentiful thorium ore deposits within its borders, but not uranium, so thorium technology is important for their nuclear independence).

[Anonymous No.3067415]

>>3067341
Is that a joke? It's not hard to build bombs with thorium nuclear technology.

All you need to do is expose some thorium to a low-density neutron flux (ex. neutrons leaking from your LFTR, for instance), let it stew for a while, and then chemically separate the uranium out of it, which will mostly be U233 and isotopically pure enough to be "weapons grade" material.

You don't even need uranium hexafluoride centrifuges or other isotope enrichment techniques.

Now, once you have your weapons grade fissile material, it's still quite a fancy technical job to build an honest-to-god citykiller nuclear weapon, although you can make a hell of a mess by just letting a bare supercritical mass fizzle.

[Anonymous No.3067439]

OP,

Post this video when you make threads:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk

>>3067415
Thorium was ignored because it is less useful for weapons. That is a fact.

[Nuka-cola my cool trip is elsewhere No.3067456]

>>3067376
working on a comedic semi-animated video series in fact. they might take a bit

[Anonymous No.3067476]

>>3067415
And what's the efficiency of this process compared to the reactors we have today? My guess is that it's much less efficient.

[Anonymous No.3067479]

>>3067415
By the way, this is totally disregarding that you need to have working uranium reactors (or some fancy-pants nonsense like a fusion reactor or ridiculously prolific accelerator neutron source) to start your thorium reactor. And in any case, you've got to burn a lot of fuel to generate a lot of weapon's grade material (basically, your reactor has to release at least half of the amount of energy as you want to release in your big boom, and more realistically several times as much, and that sort of thing tends to be conspicuous even over a long timespan).

So don't worry, it's not an actual shortcut for terrorists or rogue states, but the point is: thorium reactors aren't any less of a proliferation threat than uranium reactors, and for that matter, neither are fusion reactors.

Any nuclear technology that lets you pump out moles and moles of neutrons without a huge power input is easily exploitable to produce weapons-grade fissile material. (and any aneutronic fusion technology, like helium-3 or proton-boron, is going to work even better with fuels that produce prolific neutrons -- they're just that much easier to fuse)

[Anonymous No.3067480]

>>3067439
As Nuka-Cola said in a similar thread yesterday, the hard gamma emmisions from the decay of the U232 impurities, almost certain to be found within your U233, makes successful bomb making a highly improbable task.

[Nuka-cola my cool trip is elsewhere No.3067481]

>>3067415
U233 is horrible for bombs due to U232 contamination from breeding. delicious gamma emissions fucking up electronics or killing anyone handling a solid core without remote operators.

>>3067383
LFTRs appeal is mostly in its safety and very small plant footprint. no pressure means no need for large containment. ultra high temperature core means Ac-unit sized brayton cycle turbines instead of warehouse sized steam ones. High negative coefficient of reactivity means it's easy to shut down, and in fact WANTS to shut down. continuous reprocessing means no fuel shutdowns, constant running.

it's a nuclear engineer's dream come true, takes out a lot of the "ugh" in plant management

also traveling wave or standing wave reactors are far better for waste burnup than fast breeders. but they're still experimental

[Anonymous No.3067531]

>>3067439
>Thorium was ignored because it is less useful for weapons. That is a fact.
Thorium was ignored by nuclear weapons developers because it's just all around worse and harder as long as you're not short on uranium or you're not some kind of monkey tribe who got handed a complete functional nuclear reactor by foreigners and want a way to get weapons grade fissile material that's easy enough a caveman could do it.

Earlier nuclear programs were weapons programs, so yes, it is technically true that thorium was ignored because it was less useful for weapons, in the context of having to bootstrap your whole nuclear infrastructure.

However, it has continued to be largely ignored because of the reasons I've stated and it presents a similar proliferation threat to uranium technology for the reasons I've stated.

[Nuka-cola my cool trip is elsewhere No.3067552]

>>3067531
why is it worse or harder...?
it does actually fuck up your classical fuel infrastructure (rods and waste disposal cycle), but that's kind of a good thing given how pricey it is.

i say phase out LWR in favor of more smaller LFTRs, and use traveling wave reactors to burn up the lwr waste

[Anonymous No.3067594]

>>3067480
>>3067481
Eh... before you play internet expert, you should at least learn what's in the wikipedia article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-233

>the hard gamma emmisions from the decay of the U232 impurities, almost certain to be found within your U233, makes successful bomb making a highly improbable task.
The "highly improbable" was achieved in 1955. And it was only done so late because they didn't think it was very important to bother with when they already had developed technologies with other materials.

Yeah, the gamma rays are bad for you. But for the kind of people who want to make nuclear weapons on the sly, killing a few technicians is just par for the course. It's not exactly good clean fun for the whole family.

>delicious gamma emissions fucking up electronics
Now that is just silly. It's not like a bomb needs an onboard computer, other core materials are gamma-free, or gamma-tolerant circuitry is rocket science.

Long story short, as the wiki says, there are some disadvantages compared to plutonium, but it's basically on the same level of difficulty.

[Anonymous No.3067624]

>2011
>someone on here isn't supporting thorium reactor research
>is instead debating the technicalities of ease of weapons proliferation

It's like I'm really on /b/

[Anonymous No.3067637]

>>3067552
>i say phase out LWR in favor of
Stop right there.

If you have to compare your favored technology to one that is several generations obsolete to make it look good, you've got to know your case is weak.

People who are enthusiastic about LFTRs are generally ignorant of the state of the art in nuclear technology. It's the nuclear equivalent of getting very excited about wankel engines: you hear one or two good things about a technology that has fallen by the wayside for good reasons, and assume from there that everyone involved in the field is stupid compared to you with your few little scraps of poorly understood information.

That's just not the way it is. I applaud your interest, but READ MOAR BOOKS.

[Anonymous No.3067669]

>>3067624
When one of the selling points people keep bringing up is, "...and it can't be used for weapons!" and they feed this directly into their conspiracy theory "...and the only reason it isn't already providing all of our power is that it wasn't useful for weapons!" then talking about its actual relation to nuclear proliferation is hardly off topic.

[Anonymous No.3067685]

>>3067637
>and assume from there that everyone involved in the field is stupid compared to you with your few little scraps of poorly understood information.

They don't have to be stupid, they just have to be uninformed or financially invested in what they're currently doing.

[Anonymous No.3067704]

>>3067669
However your own arguments agree that it's inferior to uranium-plutonium for weapons. Even if the difference is only marginal, the difference exists.

Also since when is every bit of history a conspiracy? A conspiracy would be if everyone involved was paid off to go for uranium-plutonium.

[Anonymous No.3067756]

14 billion year half life.


what are we going to do with waste that can live so fucking long.

[Anonymous No.3067763]

>>3067756
This bait is golden someone's gotta fall for it.

[Anonymous No.3067777]

>>3067637
>fallen by the wayside for good reasons
like....?
your argument seems to be "it's not as proliferation resistant as you think". which could be true, i'll concede that, but claiming that all the other benefits of LFTR over LWR are therefore irrelevant is just silly

>assume from there that everyone involved in the field is stupid compared to you
no, just uninformed. Most just don't know about it. The decision to abandon it was made during wartime, which is inherently troublesome. i'm confident it will gain more momentum in the nuclear engineering industry as it circulates

>with your few little scraps of poorly understood information.
i don't think the MSRE counts as scraps or poorly understood.

granted, it will need some problem solving in order to fix the various plumbing problems that MRSE uncovered, graphite moderation might need to be abandoned entirely, and we'll need to find a slightly better reactor lining, but this is all pretty surmountable stuff.

>>3067669
it's not really a conspiracy theory. This is pretty well documented stuff from the manhattan project and the projects following it. It was wartime, we needed bombs badly, this wouldn't really cut it

>>3067756
>>3067763
falling for it.
long half life = low radioactivity. very very very low.
also are you talking about thorium or the fission products?

[Anonymous No.3067784]

>>3067704
>However your own arguments agree that it's inferior to uranium-plutonium for weapons.
I've explained the class of cases where it's more easily achieved and why it therefore poses a special proliferation threat: U233 can be easily made and purified into weapons-grade material by anyone with access to a prolific thermal-neutron source (such as an LFTR, but any conventional nuclear reactor), whereas U235 requires a large-scale industrial enrichment operation, and plutonium requires processing of a large amount of very nasty nuclear waste.

Only the U233-from-thorium example is a relatively simple and small scale operation, given access to a working reactor.

[Anonymous No.3067786]

>>3067777
>>assume from there that everyone involved in the field is stupid compared to you
>no, just uninformed. Most just don't know about it.
...in the field of nuclear reactor engineering. You really believe this?

[Scientist !!ThFjnJh4EkH No.3067788]

>>3067786
>implying that nuclear engineers must be automatically smarter or more knowledgeable than other people

[Nuka-cola my cool trip is in europe No.3067789]

>>3067786
indeed.
these days it's probably spreading quickly, but back a few years ago it simply wasn't discussed much.

[Anonymous No.3067804]

>>3067777
>The decision to abandon it was made during wartime
Only if you count the entire cold war era as "wartime".

[Nuka-cola my trip is in the atlantic No.3067808]

>>3067784
but with no purification of the resulting U233 to remove the U232, you still have your gamma problem. and this isn't ho hum gamma, this is fucking 4.6 MEGA electron volt gamma emissions. It would kill anyone working on without tons of protection and remote operating equipment, relatively easy to track in modern times.

and even gamma-hardened control systems can be fucked up by gamma pulses this powerful.

so unless you have the capacity to enrich your U233 using normal enrichment techniques (kind of easy to spot) your bomb will either set itself off or set off every bomb detector in a tri state area when you assemble it.

this is excluding the fact that only .16% of the fuel salt is actually U233.

[Anonymous No.3067809]

>>3067788
>>implying that nuclear engineers [are] more knowledgeable [about nuclear reactor design] than [random 4chan kids]
Are you sure that's an implication you want to sneer at?

[Scientist !!ThFjnJh4EkH No.3067821]

>>3067809
I'm sure they're much more knowledgeable than me in terms of reactor design. However, considering that (self proclaimed) experts have said as much, I have little reason to doubt it, especially after looking over the evidence by myself.

It's not that farfetched, really.

[Nuka-cola my cool trip was eaten by ZALGO No.3067828]

>>3067809
i think he was implying that nuclear engineers are more specialized than anything. Cross pollination of research and ideas is kind of difficult since everyone is pursuing their own thing, and the professional work of NucEng is operating a LWR almost exclusively.

the funding necessary for real organized research just isn't there, and every day following fukushima it dwindles even more.
France had a decent look at it, though, they came up with some cool core schematics.
also china is pouring 2 billion annually into a chinese lftr as of january. i'd rather not buy one off them thank you.

[Anonymous No.3067837]

>>3067594

You're quoting Wikipedia as an 'expert source' ? I suggest you do some research of your own.

As chemical separation of U-232 isn't a possibility and the facility to remove Palladium, allowing pure U-233 to be obtained, isn't a design feature of MSR's, the correct isotopic mix for bomb-making is extremely unlikely to be obtained.

This isn't to say that models of reactor design which allow for proliferation of pure U-233 don't exist, but that the standard MSR isnt engineered to that end.

If you want weapons grade material, it's far easier to use a graphite pile to bake up some high quality Pu-239, where established designs and relative ease of handling make this a far better option.

[Anonymous No.3067836]

>>3067808
>with no purification of the resulting U233 to remove the U232
I don't think that anyone in the history of nuclear weapons design has seriously considered trying to remove the U232 from U233. If you're going to do that, then why not just extract the U235 from U238?

Note that this didn't stop them from making at least one U233 proof-of-concept bomb back in the 50s.

>and this isn't ho hum gamma, this is fucking 4.6 MEGA electron volt gamma emissions.
You're pretty much completely ignorant of how this stuff works, aren't you?

[Anonymous No.3067848]

>>3067836
>why not just extract the U235 from U238?
Oops. Of course I meant "separate the U235 from the U238 in natural uranium".

[Anonymous No.3067872]

>>3067837
>ignorant and stupid bullshit
Ugh... I guess some stuff just can't be intelligently discussed on 4chan. Too many fucking morons.

The U-232 contamination is merely inconvenient. It doesn't have to be removed to get weapons-grade material. It's just a factor you have to account for in your device and process design.

[Nuka-cola my trip is having trouble with that solid U233 core oh god what No.3067874]

>>3067836
>You're pretty much completely ignorant of how this stuff works, aren't you?
getting some hurr durr vibes here. 4.6 from a gamma decay emission is pretty fucking powerful.

and again, you seem to be faulting the design as a whole simply because of the ambiguity of its proliferation resistance.

[Scientist !!ThFjnJh4EkH No.3067887]

>>3067637
Educate me please. How much thorium is there available for easy access, and what would be its cost per unit of electricity generated if we went into full production, and how much uranium is there available for easy access, and what is the current cost per unit of electricity generated now with full production?

The one huge boon I've heard about thorium is that it's dirt cheap compared to uranium, several orders of magnitude cheaper. Citations please to prove or disprove this.

Also, the byproducts apparently are "less bad". They decay much more quickly. No 10,000 year half life shit to worry about.

[Nuka-cola my trip is a TERRIST No.3067889]

>>3067872
as someone else mentioned, it's probably easier to just make a Pu-239 core instead of;
-hijacking a LFTR plant
-extracting the fuel
-removing all the fluorine and carrier salt
-getting .16% U233 by mass
-doing this all with remote operation and heavy shielding
-assembling a weapon that is immune to the gamma emissions
-and then smuggling your bomb around with your bomb carrier being killed by the gamma emissions or being detected by bomb sniffers
-getting away with _ALL OF THIS_ without any international agency launching any kind of investigation (which would be able to pinpoint where this was all going on pretty quickly)

then yes, you have a nuclear bomb. good job

[Anonymous No.3067893]

FUCKING THORIUM MAN

MOLTEN SALT

KAKRAPAR

DOLLARS PER GIGAWATT HOUR

9001 HORSECOCKWATTS PER HOUR

FUCK

[Nuka-cola my cool trip having financial troubles No.3067906]

>>3067887
well, those are the neutron capture byproducts, which are generally considered the worst part of reactor waste (fission products have very long half lives and very low radioactivity, but still need to be stored). U235 plants have a better chance of producing the heavy transuranics due to solid fuel and higher probability of successive neutron captures.
fluid fuel is constantly removing anything bad such that the chance of successive captures is miniscule, not to mention U233 is 2 au lower than u235, so it has to "go further up the stairs", if you pardon the retarded analogy.

the end result is that the worst stuff from a lftr is back to background in 300 years, and produces some nice rare metals along the way

[Scientist !!ThFjnJh4EkH No.3067922]

>>3067906
I ask again, citations of operating and material cost, specifically the availability of thorium and the cost of obtaining it, taking into account the higher efficiency of the process, the expected percentage of usable thorium in stuff we dig up, and so on, please. And a comparison to current uranium too please.

This is all that really matters. With hard evidence of this, it would be retarded to not pursue it.

[Anonymous No.3067928]

>>3067874
>4.6 from a gamma decay emission is pretty fucking powerful.
No, it's pretty fucking energetic.

Your inability to distinguish between the two is the problem here.

The fact that it can produce gamma photons of a certain energy tells us precisely nothing about the difficulty of handling the material, without also knowing the rate at which it produces those photons.

There are equally high-energy gamma rays in the background radiation, produced by things like cosmic rays. That doesn't mean "OMGWTFBBQ WE'LL ALL GET CANCER ALL THE TIMES!".

(BTW, gamma rays with energies in the low MeVs aren't considered especially energetic -- 0.1 MeV is the minimum photon energy to even be considered a gamma ray)

[Anonymous No.3067936]

>>3067922
"Today, thorium is relatively expensive - about $5,000 per kilogram. However, this is only because of there is currently little demand for thorium, so as a specialty metal, it is expensive. But there is 4 times as much thorium in the earth’s crust as there is uranium, and uranium is only $40/kg. If thorium starts to be mined en masse, its cost could drop to as low as $10/kg. "

http://www.thorium.tv/en/thorium_costs/thorium_costs.php

"Energy Production--Because nearly all of the thorium is used up in an LFTR (versus only about 0.7% of uranium mined for an LWR), the reactor achieves high energy production per metric ton of fuel ore, on the order of 300 times the output of a typical uranium LWR."

http://www.thoriumenergy.org/lftradsrisks.html

[Anonymous No.3067956]

>>3067936
Based on this the savings is not in the material cost (speculation that the price will decrease is worthless because speculation) but rather the quantity of material needed.

The availability then only effects the lifespan in which we could rely on the fuel as a source of energy.

[Nuka-cola my trip is enjoying a tall cold glass of coca-cola. what an asshole No.3067968]

>>3067922
that's a little tricky. thorium at the moment is considered a "specialty metal", I.E nobody knows what to do with it, so it's sold with a big premium charge.
it's a byproduct of rare earth mineral mining though, and exists at 10ppm in most of the earth's crust. but it's not really centralized in veins, making extraction a little weirder. Best bet is the lemhi pass in idaho, where the concentrations are much higher.
as for good sources with good calculations? i'll go looking but it might no return much since it's super speculative

>>3067928
if you're denying it's a significant problem;
http://www-pub.iaea.org/mtcd/publications/pdf/te_1450_web.pdf
that's from the IAEA, a pretty in depth study. unfortunately it doesn't give any hard numbers on gamma emission rates, which is what you need. However from my calls to ORNL a few weeks ago, it sounds like their U233 supply needs to be under lots of shielding precisely because of this gamma

[Anonymous No.3067969]

So what are the cons? That infographic is entirely positive, I refuse to believe there are no downsides other that public ignorance and the need for research.

[Nuka-cola my trip will not be attending my funeral No.3067989]

>>3067969
>kills the shit out of the current nuclear fuel fabrication and waste disposal industry, which is well established and profitable. it would remove those jobs completely

>it's still in the design stages. MSRE proved the concept, but had problems. those problems will need to be solved through test reactors and R&D

>it's very very dissimilar to anything currently employed, so adoption will be difficult even after the problems are worked out

>it's proliferation resistance is somewhat ambiguous. I argue it's far too much trouble for a terrorist cell to use this instead of plutonium, but someone funded enough, sly enough, and determined enough could possibly get away with it.

>this is only one of many proposed new reactor designs

[Anonymous No.3067998]

>>3067889
>as someone else mentioned, it's probably easier to just make a Pu-239 core instead of;
>-hijacking a LFTR plant
>-extracting the fuel
>-removing all the fluorine and carrier salt
>-getting .16% U233 by mass
Uh, hello completely stupid person, that's not at all the method that was described.

All nuclear reactors leak neutrons. They require neutron shielding. An LFTR generates a considerable neutron surplus, as does pretty much any power-generating reactor.

Simply by putting thorium or a suitable thorium compound within the neutron shielding or as a neutron shield, atoms of thorium-232 will be transmuted to thorium-233 by neutrons and decay into protactinium-233 and then to uranium-233. When enough has accumulated, you take your thorium shielding block and chemically extract the uranium.

You don't have to muck about in the guts of the reactor, with its nasty fission products and so forth, at all, and chemically separating uranium from thorium is child's play.

And as for "hijack" this is about nuclear proliferation, not nuclear terrorism. It's about how a state or similarly powerful group can use any nuclear reactor they're operating to easily produce weapons-grade fissile material, regardless of the supposed "anti-proliferation" design features of that reactor or the state's technical inability to build their own nuclear reactors or do other challenging tasks such as enrich uranium, not about how a gang of cowboys can steal some from one.

[Anonymous No.3068003]

we had one of those in germany.

it did not just produce energy cheap, safe and clean, but it could also produce methanol out of cole, which could be used as a fuel for cars.

it was just perfect- but then chernobyl happened. and a week after chernobyl there was a really, very small incident in THTR-300 (that was its name), which was not dangerous at all, but the people paniced and it got shut down a few years later.

we should re-discover this technology, because it REALLY has potential.

[Anonymous No.3068005]

>>3067956
It's not speculation, it's simple economics. No one is mining thorium because current LWR do not use it as fuel. Because of this there is limited supply, despite its abundance over uranium.

[Nuka-cola my trip is something something No.3068012]

>>3067998
ah, now you have a better point
but you still have the trouble of doing all of this in total secrecy, with no international agencies catching wind of your operation at any step. and you STILL have that gamma problem all the way from fuel fabrication to finished weapon.

[Scientist !!ThFjnJh4EkH No.3068016]

>>3067968
That is in my estimation the best and really only good reason to be so excited about thorium, that we can operate reactors for a long time based on a huge supply, and that it's economical to do it.

It's possible to generate all of the electricity in the world with hand cranks, but not very economical. I want to know if there's any sort of serious attempt at laying out the evidence, such as:
1- Known deposits, with rough purity of the interesting bits.
2- A best guess for the cost to mine thorium.
3- How much electricity you get from X unit of thorium vs X unit of uranium.
4- Comparison in both available fuel in terms of electricity years and dollar cost between thorium and uranium.

[Nuka-cola my trip is... No.3068044]

>>3068016
oh, most of that stuff is outlined in the various tech talks here
>>3067439
but it rings suspiciously of napkin-calculations so i'm going to take it with a grain of salt.
really professional cost-benefit analysis like that will probably start rolling in if and when agencies start talking lftr seriously

[Scientist !!ThFjnJh4EkH No.3068049]

>>3068044
If the napkin calculations are interesting, then we should be interested. As I said, IMHO this is the best and really only good reason to be so excited about it - cheap, doable, near limitless electricity, without any particularly bad negative side effects like air pollution.

[Scientist !!ThFjnJh4EkH No.3068056]

>>3068044
Yeah, thanks. I've seen that before. Wondering if there was anything more rigorous.

[Anonymous No.3068062]

>>3068016
Kirk Sorensen's tech talk goes over those points fairly well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2vzotsvvkw#t=7m34s

I'd suggest doing more of your own research on energyfromthorium.com

[Scientist !!ThFjnJh4EkH No.3068067]

>>3068062
Thank you sir. Haven't seen that one before.

[Anonymous No.3068082]

>>3068005
It is speculation, because it's not certainty.

It's also irrelevant because there's a massive disparity in fuel quantities needed.

[Nuka-cola herp derp No.3068084]

>>3068062
meh, not a fan of that video honestly, it's kind of dry.
then again i like the nitty gritty of reactor design so the topical stuff bores me

[Anonymous No.3068102]

>>3068005
Thorium is used for lots of things. You could go to your local welding supplier and buy thoriated welding rods if you wanted to. You may already own a lantern with a mantle containing thorium.

The price wouldn't be as high as it is if people didn't want it for things.

Uranium is concentrated in easily-mined ores. Thorium is not.

That's the main reason for the difference in price. Even if there was no established uranium market, you'd still be able to cheaply hire someone to go pick up a truckload of pitchblende from where it's just lying around on the ground.

There's nowhere you can just grab a shovel and scoop up a wheelbarrow full of rich, easily refined thorium ore.

The belief that thorium will become cheap if the demand for it grows is based on the assumption that new technologies will be invented to extract it.

[Scientist !!ThFjnJh4EkH No.3068103]

>>3068067
>>3068062
I think I'm actually crying. I hope this isn't falsehoods.

[Nuka-cola my trip is done changing for compedic effect No.3068457]

>>3068102
this is actually a problem. Thorium does not congregate into veins, it's very very evenly distributed.

on the flip side, it's often found in normal rare earth mineral mining, and extracted as waste, so in essence, thorium mining could be "piggy-backed" onto traditional mining, even uranium mining