How did this happen? What did Sylvania do with thorium?
Thorium is highly flammable if it is finely powdered, or in small turnings. Maybe that’s what happened.
Thorium was a fuel used in some early commercial reactors:
Sylvania was involved in developing commercial-scale thorium fuel.
Richard Nixon made the call to focus on development of Uranium 235 for Nuclear power because a byproduct of the reaction is Plutonium 239 which can be used to make bombs. The Uranium design uses boiling water under pressure for cooling. The Thorium design uses a molten salt.
I couldn’t get to the OP’s URL .
But the incident is this
Uranium, too, is highly pyrophoric.
That by itself could be a reason to prefer uranium. And of course you can create a liquid metal cooled reactor with uranium as well if you really want. It’s been done, even operationalized relatively early in the development of nuclear power:
The USSR also used liquid metal cooled reactors, perhaps most notably on the Alfas.
If something goes wrong and it gets too hot, the pressure of boiling water can increase to the point where it explodes. That is what happened at Fukushima. The molten salt is at atmospheric pressure.
That is not what caused the explosion at Fukushima.
The molten salt is at atmospheric pressure.
Molten salt also has a nasty habit of turning solid if you can’t keep the temperature up. Which is not optimal for a coolant. I’d also imagine it has its own unique problems when it comes to radioactivity.
Look, I will not pretend to be an expert on Boiling Water Reactors of the type they had at Fukushima or Liquid Metal Cooled Reactors. My experience is limited to a particular variety of Pressurized Water Reactors.
But just from what you are saying here, I think you might have some misconceptions about nuclear power in general.