Thorium - The End of the Salvation Declaration
I was being introduced by a friend to one of his acquaintances and work associates, “He’s one of the nuclear engineers at the site”. The site in and around Idaho Falls, Idaho, and the area is immediately recognized as the Idaho National Laboratory (INL). The Laboratory is an arm of the United States Department of Energy and, while it performs research in many areas, historically it is heavily involved in nuclear analysis, experimentation, materials, and construction.
“Do you work with thorium at all”, I ask.
“No, what’s that”, was the reply.
Rather shocked, I explained, that like uranium, it was a radioactive material and it was in abundance in Lemhi County, Idaho just to our north and west. I further explained, it had a lot of benefits, but likely the most treasured was that thorium doesn’t produce plutonium, and thus, unlike uranium, it cannot become an annihilative weapon.
Thorium is much more plentiful than uranium. At the current level of energy requirements in the United States, there are more than one thousand years worth of thorium in the nation. The grade or percentage of thorium ore to waste rock is greater than uranium which translates to cheaper mining and generates less nuclear waste.
While true climate science repudiates the damaging climactic effects of rising carbon dioxide, especially the minor amounts generated by humans, all of us would compromise by using nuclear power. Nuclear power emits no CO2 and does not necessitate any changes to the current grid or infrastructure. Unlike renewable energies, nuclear power is not intermittent or sporadic and does not require gargantuan tracts of land or massive battery storage facilities.
Relative to people’s negativity towards nuclear energy, as it relates to World War II, Kirk Sorenson, President, and Chief Technologist at Flibe Energy quips, “I say all these things with great regret because I’m convinced that had nuclear fission been discovered at some other time in human history, we would have a very different story. If your first introduction to something is very negative you tend to think about it negatively from then on.
Thorium reactors are being built elsewhere in the world, including China, and it’s time for the USA and Canada to grab onto a CO2 emissions-free product that has the most effective replacement capabilities. Wind and solar energies are fundamentally inefficient and ineffective, thus all-out concessionary action needs to be promoted.
I link two very informative and interpretive ‘Ted Talk’ videos on thorium one here featuring the above-mentioned Kirk Sorenson and the other here with Thomas Jam Pedersen, Engineer, and Co-founder of Copenhagen Atomics.
Once all the benefits of nuclear energy, especially using thorium as reactor fuel, are brought forward, one has to be very inquisitive as to why renewables, with their inability to produce sufficient energy, are even a consideration. The reason, naturally, is that nuclear energy ends the human-induced climate change conflict and thus the ability for progressive politicians to employ fear tactics and tout themselves as the saviors of the world. This further erodes their dreams of collectivism, socialism, and globalization.