Yet, in practice, the two are the same. It's like Uber saying "Never mind, we're not profitable. We'll make flying taxis!"
The reasons that thorium reactors don't work aren't because people don't like nuclear. They don't work for technical reasons.
Besides, this story is about uranium power and that's where all our problems lie today. Even if we had thorium reactors tomorrow, we still have over 100 nuke plants in the US that would need to be de-commissioned along with all the waste they've already created -- and that's billions more in subsidies.
Sort of. If you'd read my links you'd see that Uranium cycle was originally developed and popularized because the US army wanted Plutonium for nuclear weapons. That has nothing to do with Thorium's intrinsic quality as a power source. [1]
The lack of investment into Thorium (and into nuclear power in general) had a lot to do with Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and of course much more recently Fukushima. [2] On my chart, that would be the giant slump in 1986 and 2012 (what could that have been?). It became far harder to secure funding for any kind of nuclear research because people lost their taste for it, and frankly, the remaining funding came from governments so they could have a steady supply of fissile material for weapons. This kind of research requires huge capital outlay. [5]
Thorium is far more efficient per unit weight (1T is equal to 200T of uranium and 3.5MT of coal), a lot more abundant, safer (from a stability perspective, and also from a non-proliferation perspective) and requires some of the waste products (such as Plutonium) from traditional reactors because it's fertile, not fissile. [4] As such, nuclear waste can be utilized by thorium reactors.
This is all very well documented ([1,2,4,5]).
Uber doesn't work because of its unit economics, but that's a totally unrelated conversation we can leave up to the judgement of the public markets to resolve. [3]
The reasons that thorium reactors don't work aren't because people don't like nuclear. They don't work for technical reasons.
Besides, this story is about uranium power and that's where all our problems lie today. Even if we had thorium reactors tomorrow, we still have over 100 nuke plants in the US that would need to be de-commissioned along with all the waste they've already created -- and that's billions more in subsidies.