What might save us all is thorium, which literally runs the earth at its core, keeping the world protected from being stripped of its gases by maintaining the electromagnetic field around us. Thorium is a radioactive element found in the periodic tablet. It can also be found spread widely across the earth close to the surface.
Thorium is considered a hazardous waste product when mined along with rare earths, and must be isolated and stored. Therefore, we have considerable thorium available should we ever decide to use it in nuclear reactors.
As an alternative to uranium, there are sufficient quantities to last either 1000 years, 20,000 years, or essentially indefinitely; I have seen all three numbers. That is plenty of time to develop nuclear fusion to power the world, if we are still here.
In the 1960s, it was a tossup between using uranium or thorium for peaceful atomic energy purposes. Uranium won the battle because it could be used more easily in breeder reactors to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Only now can a few clear thinkers see what a terrible error ignoring thorium was. Thorium is safer than uranium by a light-year. If we consider using only the Liquid Floride Thorium Reactor (LFTR), it does not need a source of water nearby for cooling because, if something goes wrong, the liquid fluoride will expand, slowing and stopping the chain reaction, causing the fluoride salt to solidify.
The fissile material that thorium reactors produce is the uranium isotope U-233, which is the source of neutrons for maintaining the chain reaction. The heat produced is so great (up to 800 degrees C) that it can boil sea water, distilling it for drinking and agriculture. As well, the heat is high enough to help manufacture fuels that can then be used in cars and trucks. Another useful function for LFTR reactors is that they eat waste from uranium-based reactors, waste that otherwise needs to be stored for hundreds of thousands of years.
Thorium is such a dense source of power that a hardball-sized chunk contains enough energy for all the needs of one person’s lifetime. That baseball constitutes an amazing 13,000 times more energy than any other fuel source such as its closest rivals, oil or coal, thus lightening the footprint of energy production. It puts wind and solar to shame in terms of cost for an equivalent unit of energy and, if implemented as our main source of electricity, will return the pristine beauty of our rolling hills and offshore areas after we figure out how to dismantle and dispose of our solar panels and wind turbines.
Also important, thorium reactors can be scaled up or down depending upon their proposed uses. They can be built big enough to power cities or small enough for submarines. Many medium-sized power plants rather than just a few big ones can give us the advantage of redundancy, making any single breakdown less devasting. Production of these power plants can be done on an assembly line and then trucked to their final sites; no need for extensive containment buildings because there is no pressurized hot water to make nuclear mishaps potentially catastrophic. (Check out Copenhagen Atomics.) Shorter timelines to build out functioning LFTR plants make the thorium solution practical today.
So, what’s going on here? Why hasn’t the nuclear industry taken up this process? As is the case with the military-industrial complex, the health industry, the university system, public schools, like, and governments both small and large, there are vested interests within the nuclear industry. Thorium is a game-changer and upends many vested interests.
In the case of our current government, the failure to bring the thorium revolution into America seems to be a Woke-tainted policy. Cheap reliable energy would reduce the hold government has over the people. With enough electrical power, ordinary folks could then engage in creating small profitable businesses and would not need to grow government to receive their daily rations.
It should be clear to everyone that our government’s refusal to support the thorium revolution puts poor people at a disadvantage. Those who are in poverty will remain there.
The government’s current policy aligns with the idea that there are too many people in the world. Depopulation is best carried out using hunger rather than war. Hunger is cheaper to implement, but an engineered pandemic is even quicker and less obvious.
However, any form of mass extinction will do in a pinch. Thus, we have John Kerry’s recent foray into Indonesian economic matters, where he somehow cajoled the government into foregoing the development of natural gas for its population, to be replaced by wind and solar.
The problem is that wind and solar can never meet even the de minimus energy requirements of the Indonesian population. A reading of the interchange between Kerry and the Indonesian government found that the United States will now be funding that nation’s futile effort to develop renewable energy sources. It is a perfect mechanism for hiding how the funds will be distributed, and it is possible, without knowing anything else about the intricacies of the deal to speculate, that much of the US funding will wind up in the personal accounts of the Indonesian rulers. The people will remain just as they were—poor. We will watch with bated breath over the next few years as to how the Indonesian people are faring with the influx of American funds.
There are other indications that it is the policy of our Woke government to actively thwart the development of cheap nuclear energy. Kirk Sorensen is a nuclear engineer and a vocal advocate for thorium reactors. He has many YouTube videos outlining his deep understanding of this technology.
We know or should know that the Internet is forever, so when we watch his videos, we should be both surprised and also not surprised that some of them are twelve to fifteen years old. Sorensen’s more recent thorium advocacy videos show how he has aged during his long push for this technology.
Sorensen and others are only now saying that regulations are the big barrier to progress in both demonstrating thorium’s benefits and commercial thorium build-outs. We need to know that regulations not only reflect government policy but also the deep prejudices of the ruling class. In their minds, thorium technology does not support their goal of depopulation, while “renewables” haven’t a chance of ever supplying what the world needs to be comfortable. So, renewables win!
Most people need further enlightenment in the matter of thorium reactors. My education comes from YouTube. “Rock Logic“ does a fine job of summarizing the current state of affairs. Its host notes that we started research on thorium-cycle reactors in the 1960s, but I believe it was first conceptualized by Alvin Weinberg in the 1940s and formally described and demonstrated in the 1950s.
So, either we knew about this technology sixty years ago or eighty years ago. Here, Sorensen discusses thorium theory in two and half hours of engineering talk that is within the understanding of a high school graduate who took chemistry. It is so entertaining that one may watch it in an evening, in place of some Netflix production.
Sorensen posted the video 12 years ago. Twelve years and nothing has happened in the US. Meanwhile, China is way ahead of us. That is not a bug, but a feature of government policy. “They” don’t want it. The world of thorium will fall through America’s fingers because “they” don’t want it. But “they” are without conscience and vision! I am going to guess that only when most of the human race has died off through official neglect will thorium finally take its proper place as the world’s energy savior.
Source: American Thinker.
