Posted on by ColinTwiggs

Thorium: the dream of green nuclear energy

While the idea of building small, thorium-based nuclear reactors – thought to be dramatically safer, cheaper, cleaner and terror-proof than our current catalog of reactors – can be shooed away as fringe by some, the germ of the idea began in the U.S. government’s major atomic lab, at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the 1960s, only to be left by the wayside as the American nuclear industry plowed ahead with its development of the light water reactors and the uranium fuel cycle.

4 Replies to “Thorium: the dream of green nuclear energy”

  1. The title should be: “Thorium: the greenwashing of nuclear energy”. Same problems, different name.

    1. Thorium seems a lot safer than current nuclear power and produces a small fraction of the waste.

      Chinese scientists claim that hazardous waste will be a thousand times less than with uranium. The system is inherently less prone to disaster.

      “The reactor has an amazing safety feature,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA engineer at Teledyne Brown and a thorium expert. “If it begins to overheat, a little plug melts and the salts drain into a pan. There is no need for computers, or the sort of electrical pumps that were crippled by the tsunami. The reactor saves itself,” he said. “They operate at atmospheric pressure so you don’t have the sort of hydrogen explosions we’ve seen in Japan. One of these reactors would have come through the tsunami just fine. There would have been no radiation release.” ~ Daily Telegraph

  2. Sadly, a lot of ‘information’ about nuclear is suspect and the result of years of experience at calming the hysterical public in the face of a pressing demand for fissile materials. You give a good example: “A little plug melts and the salts drain into a pan” – what could be safer than that! See, it’s only a little salt and it drains into the pan, just like cooking bacon and eggs…?!

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