Not great, not terrible
Not great, not terrible
12 comments
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Thorium-232 has an extremely long half life (longer than the age of the universe) and it's reasonably abundant. That's the isotope useful for the thorium fuel cycle.
So it's not quite that bad for threading this needle. The fuel cycle is a little more complicated than uranium--it's not fertile as it is--and that could slow down R&D of a new nuclear program by getting stuck at some step.
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This doesnt remove a single step from the image
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It removes the "hope intelligent life evolves fast enough".
If it was only Uraniam, then you need U-235. That has a half life of about 700M years. Cut in half 2 more times, and there's almost none left. So if intelligent life took another 1.5B years to develop on Earth (which it easily could have), then that path is cut off.
With Thorium, the sun would probably expand to a red giant first.
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🤯
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As a geoscience, I like spicy rocks
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We'll be fine as long as this screwdriver says put.
12 comments
Well, one of those is "easy", the other is really hard.