The realities of those 4 points: 1)burning existing waste is really expensive and you have to run the reactor at a lower power level so it is not economically viable until uranium becomes prohibitively expensive(30-50 years from now) 2)while thorium is abundant the fuel behavior in a reactor is not as well known and more importantly its much less stable and more prone to clad failure(fuel leaking into the primary coolant) which usually forces an unplanned shutdown or reduction in output power until the next refueling. 3) blatant lie. 4) This is a claim that can only be made after years of experience because we(both the US and China) lack the capability to model fast reactors well.
Generation IV reactors like this one will probably be much more practical in 20 years time, but currently they make little sense unless you don't have access to uranium(ie India).
1) Nonsense. Fuel costs for nuclear generators are almost negligible. You would not burn the waste because it is cheaper to do so, you would burn them because you don't want to bury them. We don't reprocess currently because of political reasons not economic.
2) Nonsense, you don't even know what reactor you are writing about. LFTR is based upon the molten salt reactor experiment at Oak Ridge. There is no cladding, that is a solid fuel reactor. Salts are incredibly stable. The MSRE was so stable that when the operators want to shut it down, which they did on weekend, they simply turned it off. The hot fuel/salt mixture then melted a plug which allow the fuel/salt to flow into a drain tank leaving it in a subcritical configuration.
3) Nonsense, again you do not know what reactor you are writing about. LFTR would substantially reduce wastes on both ends of the fuel cycle. The front end wastes being the depleted uranium which would be completely eliminated and the backend wastes being the transuranic actinides created when U238 absorbs neutrons. Unlike LFTR which contains no U238, today's LWR fuel pellets are 97% U238 which provides the vast majority of the long lived radiotoxicity that must be contained for 10's of thousands of years. LFTR wastes are substantially less in mass, about 80% reduced in 10 years and down to background radiation levels in about 300 years.
4) Nonsense. What we are talking about is not a fast reactor. More importantly what the Chinese are doing is funding research into commercializing this reactor design, not building commercial reactors. Thanks to the low levels of science education in the U.S. and people like yourself spreading their ignorance and FUD, I doubt the U.S. will ever do the same.
