The Daily Telegraph points to thorium as a way out of the energy crisis.
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.
The problem seems to be that the nuclear industry isn’t really interested in investing in new technology, they have invested too much in the current ones. Nuclear plants which are on the drawing board today will be around for up to another sixty years, so why try to master a new technology when you could refine the existing one?
There are advantages, however, to thorium plants:
- It has a higher neutron yield per neutron absorbed.
- It does not require isotope separation, a big cost saving.
- Thorium-fluoride reactors can operate at atmospheric temperature. (The plants would be much smaller and less expensive).
- Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, and it’s available all over the globe, so there’s no possibility of a cartel of thorium producers who could block its use.
- It is almost impossible make nuclear weapons out of thorium because it is too difficult to handle. (It emits too many high gamma rays)
