More Research on Using Thorium for Nuclear Power Should be Undertaken

The environmental movement has been gaining steam around the world for the past few decades, recently much more so due to the prevalence of arguments concerning global warming and its solutions.  No matter whether you believe that global warming is an imminent danger that needs to be dealt with now or just a silly hoax that is being perpetrated by some political or environmental group, understanding and planning our energy futures should be important to everyone since we reap the benefits of having on-demand energy practically every minute of our lives.

We currently get our energy from many sources – we use petroleum-based gasoline in our cars and natural gas, oil, coal and nuclear power to heat and light our homes, offices and everything else.  Unfortunately, fossil fuel supplies are dwindling and are estimated to run out within a few generations.  Renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind and even geothermal, have been gaining popularity in recent years but are still not in widespread use due to skepticism and cost prohibitions, among other things.

Nuclear power has been used to create electricity in the United States since the late 1950’s.  While nuclear energy does not produce the air pollution and environmental devastation that fossil fuels do, it still has its drawbacks.  Nuclear waste storage is always an issue – nobody wants to live next to a waste disposal site, and trying to find places to safely put all of that nuclear waste is becoming a problem as the world becomes ever more populated.  Furthermore, the fission process used to create nuclear energy creates weapons-grade plutonium as a byproduct, which, when put in the wrong hands, creates the potential for nuclear war.

Enter Thorium.  Thorium, like other radioactive elements, is an actinide, yet is so lightly radioactive that you can hold it in your hand without harm.  Yet when used as fuel in a specially designed nuclear reactor, it produces more energy with smaller amounts of fuel and produces negligible amounts of waste when compared to typical nuclear fuels such as Uranium.

You may be asking why you have not heard about this wonder element until now.  You may be wondering why we aren’t building Thorium nuclear reactors all around to world to produce this efficient, fairly clean energy.  The reasons for this are varied, but there is one researcher who is on a crusade to change all of this, and his name is Kirk Sorenson.

Sorenson and his research into the future use of Thorium as a nuclear energy source was recently featured in the January 2010 issue of Wired Magazine.  While Thorium energy is not exactly a popular water cooler topic – yet – Sorenson’s research has been gaining ground in scientific and engineering, and even political, circles.

…Sorensen spearheads a cadre of outsiders dedicated to sparking a thorium revival. When he’s not at his day job as an aerospace engineer at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama — or wrapping up the master’s in nuclear engineering he is soon to earn from the University of Tennessee — he runs a popular blog called Energy From Thorium. A community of engineers, amateur nuclear power geeks, and researchers has gathered around the site’s forum, ardently discussing the future of thorium. The site even links to PDFs of the Oak Ridge archives, which Sorensen helped get scanned. Energy From Thorium has become a sort of open source project aimed at resurrecting long-lost energy technology using modern techniques.

And the online upstarts aren’t alone. Industry players are looking into thorium, and governments from Dubai to Beijing are funding research. India is betting heavily on the element.

The concept of nuclear power without waste or proliferation has obvious political appeal in the US, as well. The threat of climate change has created an urgent demand for carbon-free electricity, and the 52,000 tons of spent, toxic material that has piled up around the country makes traditional nuclear power less attractive. President Obama and his energy secretary, Steven Chu, have expressed general support for a nuclear renaissance. Utilities are investigating several next-gen alternatives, including scaled-down conventional plants and “pebble bed” reactors, in which the nuclear fuel is inserted into small graphite balls in a way that reduces the risk of meltdown.

Those technologies are still based on uranium, however, and will be beset by the same problems that have dogged the nuclear industry since the 1960s. It is only thorium, Sorensen and his band of revolutionaries argue, that can move the country toward a new era of safe, clean, affordable energy.

(Wired Magazine, January 2010 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/)

Could Thorium be the answer to our energy problems?  At first look, it would seem so.  But there are problems that must first be overcome.  There are currently no existing nuclear reactors that are constantly running on Thorium in the United States, in spite of the US having one of the largest natural sources of Thorium in the world.  There are only a few that are up and running in various countries.  This is unfortunately due to Thorium having been largely overlooked for over four decades.  Due to the concentration on using Uranium as the only fuel for nuclear reactions, funding for research into Thorium and its possibilities has been rare.  India is currently leading the way with its research into using Thorium to power its burgeoning country and population.

Thorium is actually an extremely common element, as it is found in most soil and rocks.  And it is three times more abundant than the fuel that we currently use in nuclear reactors, Uranium.  (http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.html)  Using Thorium has the possibility of powering our earth for thousands of years, again, with little waste and risk of meltdowns.

While building nuclear reactors is by no means an inexpensive proposition, it has been proven possible to convert current Uranium nuclear reactors to Thorium reactors.  This will never be accomplished though until the nuclear industry realizes that the Cold War is over and we need to move forward with our nuclear energy research.  The technology is buildable, the raw fuel is present in the ground beneath our feet and the nuclear physicists who understand the science behind Thorium reactors are all out there.  We just need to get the research funding and science monies to them.