Posted on 05/25/2011 1:46:44 PM PDT by ckilmer
In the beginning, nuclear scientists identified two fuel sources for the atomic age: uranium and thorium. They went with uranium. Why? It wasn’t because uranium was the better fuel. Thorium is more abundant. It is simpler. It is safer. (Although slightly radioactive, it can’t sustain a chain reaction in a nuclear reactor and, hence, can’t “melt down.”)
But thorium had one strategic disadvantage: You couldn’t make plutonium from it. You could make plutonium from uranium. And plutonium was super-energetic, super-destructive. Man-made, the deadliest source of radioactive nuclear energy, plutonium is essentially forever.
In the Cold War, the science goal was synonymous with the military goal: nuclear weapons. Plutonium delivered the deadliest mushroom cloud. Tonnes of it still swirl around in the biosphere, a legacy of atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1960s. Thorium couldn’t compete. Regarding it as useless, the U.S. buried thousands of tonnes of it in the Nevada desert.
A Swedish chemist named Jons Jakob Berzelius discovered thorium in 1828 and named it after Thor, the god of thunder in Norse mythology – and incidentally, for our purposes (as suggested in Sir Kenneth Branagh’s 3-D film Thor), guardian of mankind.
(Excerpt) Read more at theglobeandmail.com ...
A shorter 16 minute "Reader's Digest" version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk
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Another good place that I have found to get updated info on Thorium is their Facebook Page:
http://www.facebook.com/EnergyFromThorium
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BO will stop that quickly. He can’t have America being energy independent. It undermines his anti-American agenda.
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