Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke (Wired Magazine - Jan. 2010)

Is Thorium the “Green” answer? From this article in the January 2010 issue of Wired Magazine, we are certainly led to believe this is so. A Thorium reactor is more efficient than a uranium reactor, would produce literally no nuclear waste, leave no by-products for terrorists to construct nuclear weapons, and the supply of the element is so plentiful as to be nearly inexhaustible. We can quit emitting carbon dioxide from coal fired electric generating plants. With inexpensive, dependable nuclear energy, we can stop funding the terrorists who live on our petrodollars. After reading this article, I am wondering what we are waiting on? I was brought up on the saying that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is right now. Well we didn’t build these plants 20 years ago so shouldn’t we be starting today?
I hope that you enjoy the article.
s. rosenthal

Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke

The thick hardbound volume was sitting on a shelf in a colleague’s office when Kirk Sorensen spotted it. A rookie NASA engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Sorensen was researching nuclear-powered propulsion, and the book’s title — Fluid Fuel Reactors — jumped out at him. He picked it up and thumbed through it. Hours later, he was still reading, enchanted by the ideas but struggling with the arcane writing. “I took it home that night, but I didn’t understand all the nuclear terminology,” Sorensen says. He pored over it in the coming months, ultimately deciding that he held in his hands the key to the world’s energy future.

Published in 1958 under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission as part of its Atoms for Peace program, Fluid Fuel Reactors is a book only an engineer could love: a dense, 978-page account of research conducted at Oak Ridge National Lab, most of it under former director Alvin Weinberg. What caught Sorensen’s eye was the description of Weinberg’s experiments producing nuclear power with an element called thorium.

At the time, in 2000, Sorensen was just 25, engaged to be married and thrilled to be employed at his first serious job as a real aerospace engineer. A devout Mormon with a linebacker’s build and a marine’s crew cut, Sorensen made an unlikely iconoclast. But the book inspired him to pursue an intense study of nuclear energy over the next few years, during which he became convinced that thorium could solve the nuclear power industry’s most intractable problems. After it has been used as fuel for power plants, the element leaves behind minuscule amounts of waste. And that waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts. Because it’s so plentiful in nature, it’s virtually inexhaustible. It’s also one of only a few substances that acts as a thermal breeder, in theory creating enough new fuel as it breaks down to sustain a high-temperature chain reaction indefinitely. And it would be virtually impossible for the byproducts of a thorium reactor to be used by terrorists or anyone else to make nuclear weapons. (my emphasis)

For the entire article, go to the following url:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/all/1