Thursday, August 25, 2005  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:   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. Technorati tags:   John Anderson
said...  Thorium: Energy Source of the Future and Replacement
for Uranium  ***Investment Th