The Mighty Thorium Is The Energy Way To Go

The mighty thorium

The nearly perfect energy source nobody has heard of

Sunday, March 7, 2010 2:56 AM
By Doug Caruso
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Craving reliable energy that doesn't come with a big side order of carbon, the United States is taking a new look at nuclear power.

But even as they hail President Barack Obama's announcement last month that the government would back $8 billion in loans for new nuclear power plants, some engineers also are urging a new look at an alternative to the uranium fuel those plants will inevitably use.

Thorium, they say, provides all the carbon-free energy of uranium - about 300 times more, actually - with almost none of the guilt.

Thorium plants cooled with molten fluoride salt would leave a fraction of the nuclear waste compared to the uranium-fueled, water-cooled plants in use today. In addition, thorium plants can't melt down and don't produce reliable fuel for bombs.

"What's not to love?" asked Kirk Sorensen, a NASA rocket scientist in Huntsville, Ala., who is earning his doctorate in nuclear engineering.

Sorensen has taken up the cause of thorium reactors, an idea conceived in the 1950s and last researched in the United States in the early 1970s at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

And compared to coal?

"The amount of thorium it would take to power my whole life is the size of a marble that would fit in my hand," Sorensen said. "The amount of coal that would power my life would bury my yard to 30 or 40 feet."

The scientists who designed the first molten salt reactors at Oak Ridge were so far ahead of their time, Sorensen said, that "It's like a little moment of the 21st century was plucked out and plunked into the '50s."

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