[rpaddock]

For 22 years I designed the electronics controls that ran Longwall Coal Mining Machines. I've been in many mines.

The problem with extracting things from tailings is that they are often contaminated with low levels of Thorium. Extracting the other things like Lithium, Sulfur etc, starts to build up the quantity of Thorium. Which sounds good if you want to build a molten salt Thorium reactor; I understand that China and India have prototype to come on line around 2027. Based on designs and experimental units that the US did in the ~1950s.

The tailing problem is that the company is how handling Nuclear Grade Material which causes the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to show up at the mine site. No mine wants to deal with this paper work, and health ramifications, headache so the tailings are not used.

If the profit ratio to headaches would improve things might change.

[mapt]

This seems backwards.

The tailings do not become nuclear waste when we decide to use them for something.

[dcrazy]

Perhaps the problem is that you are either refining away the thorium, or refining away as much non-thorium as you can. Either way you end up with mostly-thorium, and we know that radioactive stuff gets angry in large groups.

[DennisP]

Thorium does not get angry, because it's only slightly radioactive and it's not fissile. To start up a thorium reactor, you need enough plutonium or uranium spitting out neutrons to convert plenty of thorium to U233, which is what fissions and makes energy.

If you want an actual bomb, you need that U233 without any thorium, because the thorium mostly just turns to U233 when it absorbs a thermal neutron (i.e. slowed down by a moderator like graphite). In a bomb you're relying on fast neutrons.

Read enough books/articles on thorium reactors and you'll come across a photo of the US thorium stockpile, which is a great big stack of pure thorium bricks.

[westmeal]

Everythings ass backwards when bureaucrats or the military get involved.