Nixon did not choose nuclear reactor fuel
"The U.S. under President Richard Nixon chose uranium over thorium in part because uranium reactors provided the weapons grade waste that was desirable during the Cold War."
That statement is ridiculous. We were building commercial nuclear power plants with uranium fuel long before Nixon became president. They were based on the design chosen by Admiral Hyman Rickover for nuclear-powered submarines. The submarines needed a very dense, highly-enriched core, so they could operate for decades without refueling. I don't think thorium would have worked for that purpose. In any case, we did not have the technology to make compact, highly-enriched submarine cores with thorium in the early 1960s. I don't think we can even do that today.
