Posted on 06/11/2011 9:13:24 PM PDT by SouthernBoyupNorth
Imagine a safe, clean nuclear reactor that used a fuel that was hugely abundant, produced only minute quantities of radioactive waste and was almost impossible to adapt to make weapons. It sounds too good to be true, but this isn’t science fiction. This is what lies in store if we harness the power of a silvery metal found in river sands, soil and granite rock the world over: thorium.
One ton of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tons of uranium, or 3.5 million tons of coal, and the thorium deposits that have already been identified would meet the entire world’s energy needs for at least 10,000 years. Unlike uranium, it’s easy and cheap to refine, and it’s far less toxic. Happily, it produces energy without producing any carbon dioxide: so an economy that ran on thorium power would have virtually no carbon footprint.
Better still, a thorium reactor would be incapable of having a meltdown, and would generate only 0.6 per cent of the radioactive waste of a conventional nuclear plant. It could even be adapted to ‘burn’ existing, stockpiled uranium waste in its core, thus enormously reducing its radioactive half-life and toxicity.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-2001548/Electron-Model-Many-Applications-Technology-save-world.html#ixzz1P1ygL0Cg
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
To be fair to the US, you guys examined Thorium decades ago. The only reason the West went with Uranium rather than Thorium is because we absolutely needed to defend liberty by creating nuclear weapons.
Nowadays the attack on liberty centres on energy dependancy and on defeating the damn Greens: so Thorium is what we should be looking at.
She was my fantasy after Annette
Don’t worry, it won’t be us. I’m sure the enviro-freaks will find some reason to protest this technology.
Then there will be the NIMBY syndrome...
Then the government will regulate it to the point where you can’t possibly build one...
hey - thought you might find this interesting.
Yes I concur...
I have an old aviator friend that I lost touch with that left England because they started in on hand gun control and he couldn't afford to fly their in the early 60's. it was their nuevo-socialism that drove him out. He has over 30 patents and was rather silent about one that we may use every day that was his baby IMHO, but he would never come out and talk about it, but the hints were their. But the point was he could succeed with his inventiveness here, not their....
So what does that say about Britain post WWII and what Hayek warned us them about and they still haven't learned?
And our dear leader put us on the road to a health care system as screwed up as theirs....
Yes I concur...
I have an old aviator friend that I lost touch with that left England because they started in on hand gun control and he couldn't afford to fly their in the early 60's. it was their nuevo-socialism that drove him out. He has over 30 patents and was rather silent about one that we may use every day that was his baby IMHO, but he would never come out and talk about it, but the hints were their. But the point was he could succeed with his inventiveness here, not their....
So what does that say about Britain post WWII and what Hayek warned us them about and they still haven't learned?
And our dear leader put us on the road to a health care system as screwed up as theirs....
Thanks.
I’d like to see this take off and would like it more if done entirely in the private sector.
Well, maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but it would seem to me that this technology is made to order for the environmentalist crowd. It's darn near as green as solar or wind power.
Yowsa! Emma Peel was dethroned as my teenage fantasy only when Raquel Welch showed up in a fur bikini.
It reminds me of those fake petitions on college campuses to ban dihydrogen monoxide, without the students ever really knowing what it is.
You’re being overly optimistic. Anything with the word “nuclear” associated with it sends them into fits.
There have been some attempts to build a commercial thorium reactor, but it’s simply too complicated resulting in beeing way too expensive and risky. Thorium fission simply produces too much energy to handle it safe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_St._Vrain_Generating_Station
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