India Unveils Thorium Reactor

Indian scientists today unveiled a revolutionary design for a thorium breeder reactor (ATBR) that can produce 600 megawatts of electricity for two years with no refueling and practically no control maneuvers:

ATBR is claimed to be far more economical and safer than any power reactor in the world.

Most significantly for India, ATBR does not require natural or enriched uranium which the country is finding difficult to import. It uses thorium -- which India has in plenty -- and only requires plutonium as "seed" to ignite the reactor core initially.

... The uniqueness of the ATBR design is that there is almost a perfect "balance" between fissile depletion and production that allows in-bred U-233 to take part in energy generation thereby extending the core life to two years.

This does not happen in the present-day power reactors because the fissile depletion takes place much faster than production of new fissile ones.

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