Fissile Thorium Reactor

[kandrathe]

Fusion will be the preferred technique for our future energy demands. However it is not easy. Maybe it is even practically impossible to build a working fusion reactor.

But unlike what you are suggesting there is a lot of research done in this field, where a lack of well educated and smart people might be a bigger problem than just money.
Seeing how a good mathematician can make millions per year if he starts working as an investment banker, science funding can never be high enough to attract as many good people as we would like to.

Being an absolute supporter of much more science funding, I don´t believe that with more funding we would have working fusion reactors at this moment.

The idea of this Dr Rubbia seems a bit far fetched to me, but I sure hope researchers can get investors and politicians so far to fund the search for a working reactor. Nuclear power as it is used now is not a viable option I think. Reports pop up regularly that the waste disposal turns out to be more difficult and expensive than we thought, plus the fact the uranium is also hardly a endless energy source.

I was under the impression that outside the US there has been vast growth of light water reactors, especially in Asia. And, I was under the impression that the UK, Russia, France, and others are now reprocessing spent fuel reclaiming 90% of it's original energy, reducing and recycling the waste and are nearly break even on the expense and risks of additional mining and processing. I think only the US, is lagging through legal hurdles of doing anything with their waste other than building more containment pools.

Consider the turn around of my former adversaries like Patrick Moore.