The author proposes that we look at the use of THORIUM.
Thorium can be used in special type of nuclear reactor which has been shown to be proliferation resistant and safer than the High Pressure Water Reactors (HPWR) which are based upon uranium.
Back in the early 1960s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) built a Liquid Fluoride-Thorium salt reactor (LFTR). The reactor was designed by Dr. Alvin Weinberg, who was the director of ORNL. The reactor operated without incident for a number of years before it was shut down by Congress in favor of fast breeder reactors and HPWR because each of these types of reactors produce weapons grade fissile plutonium and uranium which was in great demand because of the Cold War arms race.
The demonstration of the LFTR reactor was a magnificent success. It proved that LFTR types of reactors were safer than uranium-based HPWR in a number of ways.
Read more at above link...
We should have been pursuing Thorium exploitation decades ago.
We still can, and we should.
Rare earths are found in thorium deposits and the thorium is radioactive waste from rare earth mining. Funny how plans come together, no?
Just a few years ago, “pebble bed” reactors using thorium pellets was touted as the coming thing for generating electricity. Supposedly they would have allowed development of smaller scale reactors, allowing decentralization of power production, thus less losses to long distance transmission, much safer/simpler waste disposal, etc. Any idea why this idea has seemed to fade away?
Karl Denninger wrote an article about Thorium as an energy source a couple of years ago - and that really opened my eyes. It is at: http://www.market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2491667
The simple fact is that we’ve known that thorium works in reactors very well since the 1960s, with “very well” meaning without the possibility of a melt-down or use of it for nukes by anyone (and that latter point is, as you mentioned, why it was ditched in favor of uranium-fueled power plants.
Oak Ridge built a reactor core which ran on U235 and U233, the U233 having been generated from prior Thorium breeding experiments conducted with other reactor designs. One proposal was to place a Thorium salt jacket around a MSR core to breed it’s own U233 fuel. Weinberg’s molten salt reactor never actually crossed path with Thorium during it’s operation.