Thorium: Earth's Forgotten Treasure

Thorium: Earth's Forgotten Treasure

As we face soaring energy prices, future shortages, and the alarming prospect of dramatic climate change brought about by fossil fuel waste, the one thing we desperately need stands out in stark relief: an abundant supply of clean energy - the Holy Grail of the modern world.

Oil and natural gas are running low. Wind power is limited to a few locations, biofuels require much more land than we have, and solar is still far from practical after decades of intensive research. Nuclear fusion has made even less progress. The supply of uranium for conventional nuclear power will run out within this century. Right now, almost every new power plant has to be fueled by dwinding supplies of natural gas or uranium, or by dirty coal, which spews out not only vast amounts of carbon dioxide but millions of tons of toxic soot, poisonous heavy metals, and radioactive isotopes.

Whenever the construction of a nuclear reactor is delayed because of a false hope in "renewable" energies that never materialize, a coal or natural gas plant has to be built instead, polluting the air we breathe and driving global warming faster and faster. But even conventional nuclear reactors produce waste, and because they use only a tiny fraction of the energy in uranium, that resource is also being depleted.

Enter Thorium. Half a century ago, a different kind of nuclear reactor was invented, one that burns Thorium - an inexhaustible supply of fuel, and much cheaper than the enriched-uranium fuel used by current reactors. It can even use the nuclear waste from other reactors as fuel! The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, or LFTR for short, operates at low pressures, so it could never explode like the reactor at Chernobyl, and its liquid-fuel design makes it physical impossible to overheat, like the reactor at Three Mile Island.

Unfortunately, it was the Cold War - energy was still cheap, global warming was just a theory, and the LFTR wasn't good for making weapons-grade plutonium, so it was abandoned. Now, a growing group of scientists and engineers are working to bring the LFTR back to life - to free us from filthy coal and turn stockpiles of nuclear waste into the clean, cheap energy we need.