Our thorium program is still ongoing , when was it stopped ? . As i understand it we are No 1 in thorium reactor research .
We have to import "phoren" reactors because thorium reactors wont be available in next few decades . By the time the tech matures it will become pointless . solar panels will be cheaper , safer and easier .
Yes, Modi restarted it from cold storage, albeit with a lot less funding. China has caught up since then, with none other than Jiang Zemin's son at the helm of that project, so funds are not a problem for them. There's not really a good way to tell how far they've gotten so we may not actually be #1.
Homi Bhabha laid out the plan in the 50's. If we didn't have such poor funding, and so many stops and starts, we would have a liquid salt thorium reactor by now. We have excellent materials scientists and engineers, don't underestimate them.
As for solar power, that is not the point of Thorium reactors. Thorium is transmuted into U-233, which is then refined into weapons grade. So via thorium, we can get our own fissile bomb cores. Solar is an intermittent source, even with batteries it is not enough to handle the energy demand curve. You can't just have solar everywhere for everything, you need baseline power generation. If solar was indeed the be all-end all of power generation, you wouldn't have fusion research programs like ITER. Have you noticed the sudden uptick in private fusion start-ups?
zeenews.india.com
Are you talking about this ?
