hey snowman , remember when i talked about suppresion of idea's and products . here is an interesting article , it's a little long but interesting . This is from the Telegraph
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.
Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. "It’s the Big One," said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering.
"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. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium.
I must say this does sound like an exciting fuel. I like the fact that it eats its own hazardous waste and can even eat that of Uranium and Plutonium. Could be used in Chernobyl?
More from the Telegraph
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.
There is the same old problem with the energy cartels who try to prevent the spread of alternative energies to the 'dirty fuels'.
It would seem the bigest growth will be in the emerging economies and mabye in the U.S.. But would the Obama administration have the stomach to take on the nuclear looby in the U.S. and argue for the replacement of Uranium with Thorium?
So Aker is looking for tie-ups with the US, Russia, or China. The Indians have their own projects - none yet built - dating from days when they switched to thorium because their weapons programme prompted a uranium ban.
Billions have been provided in loan gurantees to encourage the expansion on the use of Nuclear powere in the U.S. why not funnel some of that to building Thorium based sites?
www.telegraph.co.uk...
Surely if the U.S. could show the benefits of Thorium powered reactors they could export the technology to places like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel and anyone else developing a Nuclear programme to replace any Uranium powered sites?
This would take the risk of nuclear weapons being built out of the equation, as it is nigh on impossible to use Thorium in a weapon because of its high output of Gamma rays.
Any thoughts?
Links to Thorium related sites.
energyfromthorium.com...
periodic.lanl.gov...
www.world-nuclear.org...