What type of power avoids the pitfalls of nuclear meltdowns, oil spills, ash floods, and water contamination, while providing 3.5 million times more energy per ton than coal? The answer is thorium:
If there is ever going to be a nuclear expansion sufficient to significantly reduce coal-fired (and greenhouse gas-producing) electrical generation, thorium may be the answer, say its supporters. It can solve a lot of the problems associated with the present generation of nuclear reactors and instill public confidence in atomic energy as the long-term alternative to fossil fuels.
China considers thorium technology environmentally safe, cost effective and politically palatable; it is pushing ahead with its development. So are India and Russia. The pro-nuclear French are not in the game yet because they have invested heavily in the present generation of reactors. The U.S. used thorium to breed nuclear fuel nearly 50 years ago but moved heavily into uranium in order to have the weapons-grade plutonium needed in the Cold War. Thorium provides no such byproduct.
Mr. Cox and other thorium enthusiasts say theirs is a superior fuel that addresses all of the problems associated with uranium. Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA engineer and a thorium expert, told the London Telegraph recently that thorium reactors are inherently less prone to problems — if they overheat, they shut down. "They operate at atmospheric pressure, so you don't have the sort of hydrogen explosions we've seen in Japan," Mr. Sorenson said. "One of these reactors would have come through the tsunami just fine. There would have been no radiation release."
Molten Salt Reactor (Source: Wikipedia)
As the U.S. clings to technology that will ensure more babies are deformed in the Middle East and Northern Africa, our top economic rival is leaving us in the dust:
China has officially announced it will launch a program to develop a thorium-fueled molten-salt nuclear reactor, taking a crucial step towards shifting to nuclear power as a primary energy source.
The project was unveiled at the annual Chinese Academy of Sciences conference in Shanghai last week, and reported in the Wen Hui Bao newspaper (Google English translation here).
If the reactor works as planned, China may fulfill a long-delayed dream of clean nuclear energy. The United States could conceivably become dependent on China for next-generation nuclear technology. At the least, the United States could fall dramatically behind in developing green energy.
In the meantime, the solution to our own energy needs may be hiding beneath us:
[T]here’s enough easily mined thorium in the ground to power the world for a thousand years. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the United States has an estimated 440,000 tonnes, Australia and India about 300,000 tonnes each, and Canada about 100,000 tonnes.
It’s supposedly safer and produces much less waste. The waste it does produce loses its radiotoxicity in about 300 years, as opposed to tens or hundreds of thousands for conventional uranium waste.
Plus, get this, it actually feeds on radioactive plutonium waste, one of the nastiest substances on earth, as part of its power-generating process. That’s important because the disposal of plutonium is probably the nuclear industry’s most vexing problem.