suddenly a wild am_Unition appears When you talk to people who govern or research nuclear reactions for a living, their argument against thorium is along the lines of "yeah, you can run your truck on biodiesel I guess. Right now we're running on nitromethane and it still barely works out. Kind of seems like a waste to put up with nuclear waste at all when thorium has much lower potential for energy generation." This isotope is more hazardous than the U-235 used in conventional reactors, he adds, because it produces U-232 as a side effect (half life: 160,000 years), on top of familiar fission by-products such as technetium-99 (half life: up to 300,000 years) and iodine-129 (half life: 15.7 million years).Add in actinides such as protactinium-231 (half life: 33,000 years) and it soon becomes apparent that thorium's superficial cleanliness will still depend on digging some pretty deep holes to bury the highly radioactive waste. It's like yeah - you can build a hydrogen fuel cell. But where does the hydrogen come from? burning fossil fuels. In some cases, cracking fossil fuels.Thorium cannot in itself power a reactor; unlike natural uranium, it does not contain enough fissile material to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. As a result it must first be bombarded with neutrons to produce the highly radioactive isotope uranium-233 – 'so these are really U-233 reactors,' says Karamoskos.