The first nuclear reactor uses new fuel

India is planning to build a nuclear power plant using new materials, thorium, which has a low radioactivity, safer than uranium.

Using thorium instead of uranium in traditional nuclear reactors could be a breakthrough in nuclear power.

Indian officials are currently choosing the area to build nuclear reactors using this fuel. This will be the first reactor to use thorium. As expected, the reactor will be operational by the end of this decade.

Thorium is very rich and has lower radioactivity than uranium (Photo: Guardian)

The development of completely feasible and large-scale thorium reactors for decades, is a dream for nuclear engineers. It contributes to environmental protection, replacing fossil fuels. Because thorium has so much and exploits it does not produce carbon dioxide.

Ratan Kumar Sinha, director of the Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) in Mumbai, India, told Guardian that 'the construction of this nuclear reactor could take 6 years to complete. The kiln is designed to have a capacity of 300 MW, equal to 1/4 of the electricity output of the new western nuclear power plant.

Producing a thorium reactor will be a major breakthrough in the energy industry. Previously thorium was a substance with average radioactivity that had been studied as an atomic energy source. But these promising early studies were carried out in the US during the 1950s and '60s of the twentieth century that were abandoned when uranium was used.

Unlike uranium, thorium reactor fuel does not produce plutonium to be a nuclear weapon. In addition, the wastes from thorium reactors are less dangerous, the case of leaks leaving radioactivity lasts shorter, at hundreds of years and not thousands of years like uranium.