> full compliance with the directive

I don't think I've ever seen a place fully compliant with all regulations down to the last letter. Somebody inevitably takes a shortcut somewhere. All you can do is push those shortcuts into places they don't matter.

Certainly not the times and culture we live in, but the "test" they tried running at Chornobyl violated their own regulations too…

Thorium-based nuclear research was practically shut down because:

1. General decline of nuclear power plant building after 1970s in U.S. Why financing research for Thorium-based reactor, when even PWRs and BWRs are not build anymore. The shutdown of sodium-based reactor research is another example.

2. Handling of highly radioactive corrosive molten salts in Molten-salt reactor designs is a big issue. Materials resistant to both intensive chemical corrosion and neutron irradiation were open research problem.

3. Online reprocessing of nuclear fuel necessary for some thorium fuel cycle designs (inside the nuclear power plant) could increase the risk of nuclear proliferation. U.S. government, as a general policy, doesn't like when non-weapon states do nuclear reprocessing.

4. Thorium-based reactor could be used to produce weapon usable Uranium-233. But this production was not necessary, as military Plutonium production reactors were already build.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor#Fuel_repro...

no, weapons production is unrealated anyway - it's cheaper to do it in special facilities. Thorium was just too late to the party when most units were classic PWR's and BWR's without complicated handling

You don’t have to make a nuclear bomb for highly effective terrorism. Just blow up the reactor

"Unlike natural uranium, natural thorium contains only trace amounts of fissile material (such as Th-231), which are insufficient to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. Additional fissile material or another neutron source is necessary to initiate the fuel cycle. In a thorium-fuelled reactor, Th-232 absorbs neutrons to produce U-233. Depending on the design of the reactor and fuel cycle, the generated U-233 either fissions in situ or is chemically separated from the used nuclear fuel and formed into new nuclear fuel."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle

Many of specific issue around design nuclear weapons based on U-233 are classified. But:

"A declassified 1966 memo from the US nuclear program stated that uranium-233 has been shown to be highly satisfactory as a weapons material, though it was only superior to plutonium in rare circumstances. It was claimed that if the existing weapons were based on uranium-233 instead of plutonium-239, Livermore would not be interested in switching to plutonium.

The co-presence of uranium-232 can complicate the manufacture and use of uranium-233, though the Livermore memo indicates a likelihood that this complication can be worked around."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-233#Weapon_material

I think the larger concern is containment breach via sabotage and the resulting material release, definitely less than ideal if these things are put under random buildings where you have little perimeter control.

> You cannot make regular nuclear weapons out of thorium

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233880587_Nuclear_e...

And I already can imagine that prompt "Mythos, create a design for ..."