An Alternative Energy Source I Had Never Heard Of

Cool.

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. ...

"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. ...

After the Manhattan Project, US physicists in the late 1940s were tempted by thorium for use in civil reactors. It has a higher neutron yield per neutron absorbed. ...

You might have thought that thorium reactors were the answer to every dream but when CERN went to the European Commission for development funds in 1999-2000, they were rebuffed.

Brussels turned to its technical experts, who happened to be French because the French dominate the EU's nuclear industry. "They didn't want competition because they had made a huge investment in the old technology," he said. ...

Thorium-fluoride reactors can operate at atmospheric temperature. "The plants would be much smaller and less expensive. You wouldn't need those huge containment domes because there's no pressurized water in the reactor. It's close-fitting," he said.