time travel (backwards) would break physics as we know it, what are you talking about lol

You absolutely can make a nuke out of thorium-derived material (first in Teapot MET, 1955, then possibly later by India). It's not widely used because plutonium is similar and in some important ways superior material

The tradeoff in using salt as fuel/coolant is that now almost all the fission products are in soluble form, instead of nice ceramic chemically inert pellets, which makes any spill much worse, and i wouldn't say it's safer for this reason - it's different, and it's a tradeoff few thought it is worth making. We have figured out how to make PWRs not explode so it's not that big of a problem. This goes both for uranium or thorium as a fuel

The reason Yucca Mountain is needed is that nuclear waste exists, if US reversed their policy on reprocessing maybe it wouldn't fill up so quickly. It's a matter of political will

At least now, the chemical engineering for reprocessing fuel when reactor is on is not there. Maybe it'll get developed in this project, but this didn't happen yet. It all has to be weighed against existing alternatives, and it's possible to breed 233U in normal water-based reactors, so maybe there's a little reason to make MSRs in the first place. India has some thorium energy projects as well, but they're slowed down by lack of fissile material to bootstrap it (you can't fuel reactor using thorium only, it needs some fissile material)

When state-level funding for SMRs is available, it just makes more sense to build normal, GWe-sized reactors instead. For everything else, look up https://awful.systems/comment/7019440

i think that lack of willingness to handle fresh fission products has a part in this, in normal reactor you can just do nothing and win (bulk of most dangerous isotopes decays completely within 5y, not possible to do this with MSR)

There were small reactors that ran on thorium. Scaling up all the necessary molten salt processing will be pretty hard thing to do, if this thing can even run continously that is

this is toy sized reactor, not even entire technology demonstrator, there are medical isotope/research reactors with power 20MWt and more

in this house we obey laws of physics

yes, these are not onions either

it's not if you pay up https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/

ed paid, and that's what he got. this all comes with caveat that this count doesn't include deepseek chinese customers, but that's barely relevant to sv bubble

all your favourite boutique ocean-boiling nonsense generators combined, compared to openai products, have something like fifth of their userbase on mobile app and something like 2/3 on website. without counting deepseek (data from february - it was very fresh back then), it's closer to eigth on app and third on website