"It is possible to use U-233 in a nuclear weapon, and in 1955 the USA detonated a device with a plutonium-U-233 composite pit, in Operation Teapot. The explosive yield was less than anticipated, at 22 kilotons" [STILL, THIS THORIUM BOMB WAS MORE THAN THE HIROSHIMA BLAST!].

see http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/thorium.aspx

The future of solar and wind electricity generation is limited.
The cost of attempting to get 100% by 100% reliability is so high we
will never reach it. It will be realised by even the dumbest politician
that it can never be affordable.
Nuclear and coal and gas will sit there offering the only affordable
electricity and as coal & gas Energy Return on Energy Invested declines
there will only be one choice left.

Doesn't matter who hates the idea of nuclear to have no electricity will
not be acceptable. No choice means no choice.

It is "technically" possible to make a nuclear bomb from U233!

Yes, it is possible and indeed it is possible to make a fusion bomb with an unstoppable chain reaction that just goes on and on, from other nuclear material.

All nuclear reactions have downsides in the wrong hands!

One recalls stories of a navy rating pinned to the solid concrete ceiling by a fuel rod from an early conventional reactor, that just let go under extreme pressure. (300 atmospheres?)

Pressure that is avoided in an MSR! MSR operates at less pressure than the tires on your car!

MSR can be used to burn up weapons grade plutonium. Or the nuclear waste other folk pay us to store for annual billions, even though in MSR technology, the remaining unspent 98% energy quotient becomes newly available!

Pete is one of those radiophobia Luddites, mentioned in the extremely well argued article?

Terrorists could come and steal from the reactor while operational?

Ha ha. First the gamma rays would blind them/fry their brain/turn their testicles to mush and the heat would cook the crap out of them for what. A few grams of white-hot molten U233? And then only after they gotten past security!

And while we know how to shield such a reactor to make it less radioactive than a banana. Not so newly minted U233!

Why do you think we do not as yet have a thorium bomb?

The only way to safely handle it is to burn it down until there's nothing left to react! Over 25-30 years.

Even so even this final product, emminally suitable for the long life space batteries our flegling space industry will need.

We can make it here for almost nothing or import a now increasingly rare product, for billions!?

I get that some of our latter-day luddites have vested interests in solar voltaic installing, Pete!? Hence their ill-informed contarian commentary?

Ill-informed commentary, that if followed will, condemn us to another depression and decades of being a servile dog, banana republic!

Good outcome for Pete and his ( I'm alright Jack) anti-recovery Buddies?
Alan B.

Explosion? Smolosion!

Here's a bang just one-Seventh the size of the 1950s THORIUM BOMB
http://youtu.be/5yFZsGAJukU?t=42s