The world that might be - Thorium in the news

I have been a big fan of Thorium Fluoride reactors since I first read about them five years ago. They are a lot more efficient than Uranium water reactors and the waste products can be nuclearly "burned up" and the residue needs only a few hundred years sequestration. Uranium reactors are where they are today because of the Uranium industry that was invented to build the bombs. It was the most efficient use of materials to simply continue making uranium than to redesign a new technology. The problem is that we are now dealing with sixty years of development and there are some new designs out there that have operated successfully in small-scale reactors and show every sign of scaling up wonderfully. The UK Telegraph has a great article on Thorium and what might happen if someone grows a substantial pair and rams this through like he rammed ObamaCare:

Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium
If Barack Obama were to marshal America�s vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project, he might reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years.

We could then stop arguing about wind mills, deepwater drilling, IPCC hockey sticks, or strategic reliance on the Kremlin. History will move on fast.

Muddling on with the status quo is not a grown-up policy. The International Energy Agency says the world must invest $26 trillion (�16.7 trillion) over the next 20 years to avert an energy shock. The scramble for scarce fuel is already leading to friction between China, India, and the West.

There is no certain bet in nuclear physics but work by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors may be the magic bullet we have all been hoping for, though we have barely begun to crack the potential of solar power.

Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal � named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor�s day or Thursday - produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.

Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. "It�s the Big One," said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering.

"Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it�s essentially free. You don�t have to deal with uranium cartels," he said.

Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium.

More. Faster. Please...