August 16, 2023

Thor Will Save Us! No, not the Norse god or Hollywood superhero. What might save us all is thorium, which literally runs the earth at its core, keeping the world protected from being stripped of its gases by maintaining the electromagnetic field around us. Thorium is a radioactive element found in the periodic tablet. It can also be found spread widely across the earth close to the surface.

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Thorium is considered a hazardous waste product when mined along with rare earths, and must be isolated and stored. Therefore, we have considerable thorium available should we ever decide to use it in nuclear reactors.

As an alternative to uranium, there are sufficient quantities to last either 1000 years, 20,000 years, or essentially indefinitely; I have seen all three numbers. That is plenty of time to develop nuclear fusion to power the world, if we are still here.

In the 1960s, it was a tossup between using uranium or thorium for peaceful atomic energy purposes. Uranium won the battle because it could be used more easily in breeder reactors to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.

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Only now can a few clear thinkers see what a terrible error ignoring thorium was. Thorium is safer than uranium by a light-year. If we consider using only the Liquid Floride Thorium Reactor (LFTR), it does not need a source of water nearby for cooling because, if something goes wrong, the liquid fluoride will expand, slowing and stopping the chain reaction, causing the fluoride salt to solidify.

The fissile material that thorium reactors produce is the uranium isotope U-233, which is the source of neutrons for maintaining the chain reaction. The heat produced is so great (up to 800 degrees C) that it can boil sea water, distilling it for drinking and agriculture. As well, the heat is high enough to help manufacture fuels that can then be used in cars and trucks. Another useful function for LFTR reactors is that they eat waste from uranium-based reactors, waste that otherwise needs to be stored for hundreds of thousands of years.

Image from a government report on Safety and Licensing Aspects of the Molten Salt Reactor.

Thorium is such a dense source of power that a hardball-sized chunk contains enough energy for all the needs of one person’s lifetime. That baseball constitutes an amazing 13,000 times more energy than any other fuel source such as its closest rivals, oil or coal, thus lightening the footprint of energy production. It puts wind and solar to shame in terms of cost for an equivalent unit of energy and, if implemented as our main source of electricity, will return the pristine beauty of our rolling hills and offshore areas after we figure out how to dismantle and dispose of our solar panels and wind turbines.

Also important, thorium reactors can be scaled up or down depending upon their proposed uses. They can be built big enough to power cities or small enough for submarines. Many medium-sized power plants rather than just a few big ones can give us the advantage of redundancy, making any single breakdown less devasting. Production of these power plants can be done on an assembly line and then trucked to their final sites; no need for extensive containment buildings because there is no pressurized hot water to make nuclear mishaps potentially catastrophic. (Check out Copenhagen Atomics.) Shorter timelines to build out functioning LFTR plants make the thorium solution practical today.

So, what’s going on here? Why hasn’t the nuclear industry taken up this process? As is the case with the military-industrial complex, the health industry, the university system, public schools, like, and governments both small and large, there are vested interests within the nuclear industry. Thorium is a game-changer and upends many vested interests.

In the case of our current government, the failure to bring the thorium revolution into America seems to be a Woke-tainted policy. Cheap reliable energy would reduce the hold government has over the people. With enough electrical power, ordinary folks could then engage in creating small profitable businesses and would not need to grow government to receive their daily rations.