They’re also pursuing an additional approach, with ANEEL fuel. India’s fleet includes heavy water reactors, like Canadian CANDU. So USA (at INL) and Canada and India are collaborating to see if Thorium + HALEU can be combined for fuel in heavy-water reactors.
It isn’t an especially efficient use of resources… basically the greatest thing about CANDU is you can power them with natural uranium, avoiding the proliferation concerns of uranium enrichment. (Is why western nations didn’t want Iran to enrich their own uranium, for example.) Fissioning natural uranium in heavy water reactors is one of the most efficient uses of natural uranium in any operating civilian power reactor. There’s ways to make things WAY more efficient, but in terms of what is operating today, CANDU is one of the most efficient-with-fuel options.
But operationally it might help reduce costs. ANEEL fuel would provide power 7x as long as natural uranium CANDU fuel bundles. They’d also have 1/7th the waste volume… assuming no one was going to recycle the used fuel. In a sense it is pre-recycled from a waste storage perspective.
The optimal reactor for harnessing Thorium for energy would be a molten salt reactor… India isn’t really pursuing MSR. USA and Canada will be building MSR (uranium fueled) before India. And apparently China has a (Thorium+Urnaium) fuelled MSR (“T-MSR”) which has completed construction. The Chinese T-MSR could be operating right now, no one outside of that program knows.
