I got to know an old navy nuke guy, he had worked under rickover, and assisted in the installation of the nuclear plant thatpowered the building of the panama canal. He went on to start one of the first private firms that contracted maintenance at nuclear plants across the us.

So i asked him one day, why we arent building any new plants (i believe two have come on line since, but were in production for decades). He explained how they essentially regulated them to be so expensive, that other sources resulted in much cheaper costs, and thats what received funding.

You can pretty much blame it on three mile island, the movie “the China syndrome” and the environmentalist wackos of the day.

Thorium does not produce as much transuranics (neptunium, plutonium, americium, curium). Transuranics are alpha emitters with fairly long half-lifes (which makes them fairly piss-weak sources of radiation). Because of the regulatory model, those fairly weak sources are why you have to prove a waste repository will remain well sealed for 1 million years; where well sealed means something like no person, even if they drill a water well as their only source of drinking water right ontop the waste repository must ever be exposed to more than background radiation.

Another name for transuranics is unburned fuel. If you're not allowed to reprocess or build fast reactors you've defined the transuranics to be waste by government edict.

The thorium fuel chain produces roughly the same fission products in roughly the same amounts as U-235 and Pu-239 when it fissions. Most of those are short-lived isotopes; short half-lives means ridiculously radioactive, but gone in a short amount of time. The medium lived stuff, like cesium-137 is both radioactive enough to be scary and long lived enough that it can be around for a couple of human life-times. In some hundreds of years it will be less radioactive than uranium ore. The amounts we are talking about for the entire nuclear power production history of the united states is about a football field covered to a depth of 50 feet. The problem here isn't the volume of waste and it's not the actual toxicity or managability of the waste; it's letting the enemies of nuclear power make nuclear policy. Do you think thorium would make the enemies of nuclear power happy? Do they actually care that it is less radiotoxic than the uranium ore that came out of the ground in a couple of hundred years? Not really. They'll say that the uranium is natural, and the nuclear waste is scary dangerous unnatural waste and you can't just turn it into a glass log and put it back into the domain of rocks where little to nothing happens in time scales not measured in eons.

We already know how to safely dispose of waste. See the Oklo natural reactor. 2 billion years ago there was more U-235; enough so that light water could get particularly rich ore to go critical. It would slowly heat up the rock, boil the water and the reactor would shut down. It would keep going like this starting up and shutting down with a period of a few hundred thousand years. This is uranium ore that had water flowing through it. Where did these oh so dangerous transuranics go? Less than a smegging inch from the original ore body, in 2 billion years; it's still possible to see their decay products in the rock and how far they made it. This was not encapsulated and had water flowing through it.

The likes of Sierra club were originally in favour of nuclear power, because that gave them an opportunity to argue for the closing of hydroelectric dams and stopping expansion of hydroelectric. Then they were in favour of wind and solar, because that allows them to argue against any actually reliable and effective power source. The goal is not to supply clean energy; these people consider clean energy like giving an idiot child a machine gun (their words). They want energy to be expensive, fickle and limited. They want people to be fearful, few and poor.