China is not a fledgling nation. They just decided to play friends with us in the last couple of decades. They are doing a better job of it than the OPEC nations.
Another super cool aspect of a thorium or uranium liquid based breeder reactor is that they can use our spent nuclear fuel as part of their supply. They are much better at burning up what fuel they are fed than the reactors in use today. Where the solid fuel reactors use 0.5 to 3 percent of the fuel before it is spent, the liquid reactors use 99 percent of the fuel, leaving much left waste to dispose of. Moreover, the long-lived isotopes that have become such a huge problem today can be recycled back into the reactor and transformed into less problematic materials.
Considering the massive amounts of spent fuel rods sitting around with no place to go, the mere possibility of reducing these stockpiles seems a worthy enough cause to me. Having a smaller, safer reactor on-site would seem to be a no-brainer, sort of a nuclear waste composter. The liquid reactors operate at furnace-range temperatures, providing higher grade heat than traditional reactors do.
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