The Power of Thorium

It's the sound of the misqu Okay, on a scale of like one to Genghis Khan, how powerful I'm gonna go with Alexander the Great, So that's like a seven or an eight? It's eight nine? Yeah, how many kill A lots of power? Is that? Well, you'd have to melt him down first, but then you could put him through some nuclear reactions and thus gain power, and hey, nuclear power. You know, I was gonna talk about the future of sneakers, but now I think I want to

talk about the future of nuclear power. You know, when I look at your head sometimes I just think facile material? Do you Yeah? Not fast stile? I know. Okay, So you're talking about the material. What does fission? Right? Right, material that you know, it shoots off neutrons, things that cause heat and energy and power. Right, So we really

wanted to talk about the future of nuclear power. Obviously our listeners would like us to talk about that as well, and we're not talking specifically about uranium nuclear power, although we will address that in this episode as well. We wanted to talk about thorium. Thorium. This is a user requested topic, So we had a user ask us to do an episode on thorium. So you should take that

as a note of encouragement. If you want to hear us do a topic in the future right on end, tell us what it is and it may end up becoming a topic on the show. But what's the deal with thorium? Well, first let's talk about what's the deal with nuclear power in general? That should be a good place to start. Why nuclear power plants? So you know coal power plants, right, You know how we're getting power from that? We essentially we burn coal and we use

that heat to uh create steam. You know, we turn water into steam and steam turns turbine, which creates entirely excellent works of fiction about dirigibles. Yes, yes, it always, but more importantly turns turbines. Yes, it more importantly turns turbine. Steam powers many things, including the imagination. But but one of the problematic byproducts of this process I got a little alliterated of there is that coal creates greenhouse gasses,

lots of them. When you burn coal, you get a lot of greenhouse gases and other toxins, and that is bad for the environment. Yeah, it's significantly a contributor to global warming and climate change. And so a lot of people, of course have been looking into clean energy. But you are ready know this. You've heard this. So you've heard about solar, you've heard about wind power. But there is another energy that a lot of people think of as the sort of big elephant in the room when it

comes to clean energy, which is nuclear. Right. It was kind of the clean energy of the nineteen fifties, and and nuclear power is clean ish, right right, well cleaner, And so I want to make a distinction here. No power source is without any greenhouse gas emissions, because even nuclear you have to say, mine uranium and transport that uranium to the size so that it's never gonna have

like zero carbon emissions. But when you can look at it you can say basically, nuclear power is mostly carbon free and there are no direct carbon emissions from the reactor itself. Yeah, so you've got that. You also know that it's very it's I mean, it is quite powerful. You can power you can supply a whole power bread with it. A single a single nuclear reaction like a single atom splitting. You know, we hear about the splitting of the atom and how powerful it is in actuality.

If you're talking about one individual reaction, it's like two millivolts. It's really really small. But the thing is it happens an aggregate. You've got not just one atom represented here, you have billions of atoms represented. So when those when you have that many reactions happening, that adds up really quickly. So they are very powerful reactions. It's it's efficient, and it's reliable. Yeah, assuming everything is working properly in the facility,

everything is reliable. And thus we turn to the cons. Right, so the cons of nuclear power. Okay, so, um, you got a little bit of some leftovers, right, You've got nuclear waste. This is material that nobody should go putting their hands in or letting their kids play in. Yeah, you're not going to end up being like the teenage

mutant ninja turtles, You'll end up getting very sick. Right, It's stuff that you need to go something very safe with, put it away where nobody can get to it, ideally like bury it in assault mine under the earth, encased in a big thing of graphite, so that nobody gets anywhere near it. And you you might need to keep facilities like that secure because if you happen to get your hands on some of this material, it's possible that

you could use it for nefarious purposes. Sure. Yeah, this is dangerous, dangerous stuff, and so and it stays dangerous for a really long time, like well beyond your your lifespan. Yeah, and we'll talk about that a little bit more later on, um, but but more presently, this is assuming I mean, these are these are the normal operational cons to nuclear power.

What happens when stuff goes wrong. Well, we've got a couple of examples of that, right, I mean, there's some that we can point to that that range from range of severity from this was bad too. We still don't know how bad this is. Yeah, the things like Chernobyl and Fukushima, those those would be in the latter category when there is a meltdown, and it's not just that this is a local, timely disaster, but it's a disaster that lingers and can have significant effects for years afterwards.

And even a disaster like Three Mile Island, which wasn't a meltdown, it was more it was a leak of steam where there was a worry that it had released radioactive steam into the environment. Uh and I mean, in fact, that was what happened. It wasn't as severe as a full meltdown, but still was an incredibly yea, it at least caused a lot of worry. Yes, well, yeah, exactly.

So these are you know, there's some real concerns that go with it, which is what kind of brings us to thorium, because thorium, at least the proponents of thorium have a very different story they'd like to tell about using that as a nuclear fuel as opposed to what we usually use, which is uranium or sometimes a mixture of uranium and plutonium. Uh So, what's the story on thorium. It's an element on the periodic to able right, Yep, that's an actinied, Yes, it is an actinid. It's very dense.

It's one of those that if you look towards the bomb of the elemental table, that's where you're gonna find it. It was discovered by Yawn's Jacob Berzelius. Yawn's Jacob Berzelius, I love it, okay. Uh, he was a swell guy back in He discovered thorium, and he named it that after the great god of thor god of should have probably he probably is he? Actually, I'm sure, I'm sure after a long day of fighting giants he gets pretty thor Yeah you agreed before he moaned, alright, so at

any rate? Uh puns and and and slips of the tongue aside. Yes, he named it after the god thor So. Thorium is mildly radioactive. Yes, it is radioactive, but not so much that it would you know, it's it's not the kind of stuff that in the movies you come in contact with it and then and then moments later you're you're dead or you're dying. Right, I mean, you still don't want to use it to make a face moisturizer, but probably not. It's found most often in nature, is

part of a rare earth phosphate mineral called monosite. And we've been using thorium for a while, not in a nuclear power use, but in other uses as an alloying agent to strengthen magnesium at high temperatures and also to coat tungsten filaments in television sets and other electronics. So if you have an old TV, you may just have yourself a little miniature thorium nuclear power plant. But not really,

because that's not what's really going on. Okay, so you're gonna hear us throughout this podcast saying something with isotope notation. So that's going to be the name of an element followed by a number. The name of the element tells you how many protons it has, so it's something like uranium, and then the number after that is the mass number, which will tell you not just how many protons, but also how many neutrons, as so protons and neutrons added

together gives you that number. Different isotopes of the same element have different properties and can have vastly different properties in fact, especially for radioactive materials, so like uh for simple example, carbon twelve has six protons and six neutrons and carbon thirteen has six protons and seven neutrons. So really, what the larger numbers tell you is how many more neutrons it has than the base level of the elements, because if I had a different number of protons, would

be a different exactly. Yeah, if you change the number of protons, you've got a different element on your hands. And in fact, that's kind of what happens in a in a way with this this fission. You have elements that decay into other more stable elements when something happens. So, for example, in a regular nuclear reactor, you have uranium that will change into isotopes of plutonium. Yeah. Yeah, In fact, uranium will spontaneously undergo fission on its own, but you

can actually induce it to happen by bombarding it with neutrons. So, uh, there's a great uh visual zation. I read about this, and in fact, I want to say, this was in how stuff works and how nuclear power works. So imagine that you have a pool table and you've got a racked. You've got a rack of pool balls that are tightly packed together, and you hit it with a cue ball

and they scatter around. Okay, well, now imagine that instead of it being this two dimensional pool table, it's a three dimensional space where you have little packs of these racked cuball or pool balls, and you hit it with the cue ball that represents the neutron. You bombard this this atom with those different balls split apart, and then they hit other clusters of racked pool balls that are nearby,

and those split apart and they hit other clusters. That's what we talk about when we say a nuclear reaction. This it is in fact, yeah, And if you are able to have enough of the reactive material packed together, once you start this reaction, it'll just perpetuate itself as long as there's enough of that nuclear material in the

right the right configuration. Right. So, with a uranium based nuclear power plant, the way this works is they pack that uranium and it's uranium two thirty five I believe, and it has to be enriched to two or three percent uranium two thirty five. Uh. It's packed into little

little pellets and those pellets are arranged in rods. So you've got these rods of uranium two thirty five and you then submerge them into water and you allow this reaction to start and it begins to perpetuate itself and it gives off this little bit of energy per reaction, but there are millions of reactions happening which immediately starts to heat up the water and after that it's a

lot like the coal plant. Actually, yeah, you're really using that energy to heat water, to preferably water that's in a closed system that's not connected to the uh to the fusion core at all, so it's a separate water.

You have a heat exchange where you exchange the heat with this uh this this tube of water that's essentially going around that then turns it too steam turns turbines, right, because you're also using water to keep the system at an appropriate temperature so that you don't have meltdown exactly.

And a meltdown is when you get this uncontrolled nuclear reaction where the material just gets hotter and hotter, and since you're not able to cool it off, it literally melts into a pool of extremely dangerous stuff, which is what happened at Chernobyl and it's what happened at Fukushima.

And because they were unable to monitor and maintain that temperature because all of their systems failed and uh, that's that's one of the drawbacks to uranium based nuclear power plants, that that that opponents will bring up They say that if the factory was to lose all power, like everything, all backup systems, kind of like what happened at Fukushima, then you would no longer be able to circulate water and continue to cool down the core, and it would

just keep heating up until it had a meltdown. That you have to maintain power in order to keep it safe, and that one of the things that the people who who propose a specific implementation of thorium nuclear power say isn't a problem with their approach. Okay, so we've talked about how a standard uranium reactor works. How does a thorium based nuclear reactor work. A couple different ways You could do it. You could do it essentially the same

way as the uranium power plant. Yeah. Yeah, you can put thorium straight into a water cooled well, not straight into you would need to make a few changes. Yeah, but but but into into a water cool nuclear reactor.

But um. But the thing about thorium is that although it will not undergo this change all on its own the way that uranium will if you've bombarded with neutrons um it uh will or if you bombard thorium two thirty two, which is the operative type of thorium I believe in these discussions with neutrons, it turns into thorium two thirty three and then eventually decays into uranium, uranium

two thirty three to be specific. Right, that's the sweet spot. Now, what you're actually doing is you're using the uranium in a thorium reactor, the uranium that the thorium turns into when you bombard it with neutrons. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. So a lot of people say, look, when you're calling

these thorium nuclear power plants, they're really uranium nuclear power plants. Well, but you do need a you don't need a little starter bit of uranium and and that will kick off this this nuclear reaction and then uh and then every little bit of uranium that is created out of that forgers the nuclear reaction. Right. So there, But there there's another way you can do this which still has this this process of thorium decaying into uranium and then uranium

undergoing fission. It's still that same process, but it's a different implementation, which involves liquid fluoride. Right, liquid fluoride thorium reactors or lifter reactors. Yeah, and I'd say this is right now the most interesting thorium technology. It's certainly the one that's getting a most attention, I would say, based upon all the research I was doing, because it winds up being safer from meltdown certainly, and and and a couple other things. Okay, but so so how does how

does this whole salt thing work out? Well, you gotta dissolve the thorium into these this fluoride salts. You also dissolve the uranium into the fluoride salts. And so imagine that you've got a chamber. UH. This chamber does not have water in it, so you don't worry about using water to cool it down. It doesn't have any active cooling system. It's all. It's all UH incorporated directly into

the implementation here of this reactor core. You've got a graphite core that inside of it, you've got this this UH salt and uranium mixture. And on the outside of the graphite core, you've got it surrounded by thorium. All right. Now, when the uranium starts to undergo fission and starts to release these high energy neutrons, they will pass through this graphite core, encounter thorium on the other side, convert that into uranium, which through a mechanism that I have no

idea how it works. I'm just gonna be perfectly honest, because I couldn't find any explanation of how the mechanism worked. That uranium will then go into the core to keep perpetuating this, uh, this reaction. It generates the heat. You still use a heat exchanger to do this whole water to steam to turbine approach that we've been talking about this whole time, but instead of using water to cool down the system, the molten salts themselves actually act as

a coolant. They keep it under control because the boiling point of this these molten salts is higher than the operating temperature of the reactor itself, way higher, like almost a thousand degrees higher. Yeah, and because the salts are molten, it doesn't really make any sense for them to melt down. They already melted. It's already melted. So the ideas that you've already built a chamber that's able to withstand all this, now that's part of the the considerations we have to

talk about. The will will address those in a second, I thought the neatest thing about this is that it can have a passive UH safety system. So you know, I mentioned in the other one that in order to prevent a meltdown you have to continuously circulate water to keep the reactor cool. But this approach, you don't do that. Instead, they have essentially what's called a frozen salt plug. So you've got these liquid salts that have been frozen by having a specific tube where you are putting a special

blower on it to lower the temperature. Right, So you still need energy to to keep this this frozen plug frozen exactly. But if the power goes out, the frozen plug melts, and then all of that molten material will go funnel through into another chamber, a specific holding chamber, where it will rapidly, according to thorium proponents, cool and solidify and thus even possibly be ready to be used

at a future date. So even in a worst case scenario, again according to the people who are really behind thorium UH, then you just end up with a big solid lump of fuel that you can still use in the future. And hypothetically, this entire lifter process takes place at normal atmospheric pressure near to normal atmospheric pressure. One of the great dangers of of the water cooled nuclear systems is

that they are under extremely high pressure. Right when you increase pressure, you also increase the boiling point of any given material. So the more more pressure a material is under, the higher it's boiling points going to be. And that you're exactly right, Lauren, that those nuclear power plants have systems that are under extreme pressure, and that's one of the things that makes them so potentially dangerous. If there is a failure in the system to contain that pressure,

you can have explosive results. And we're talking about steam escaping, like steam that's been pressurized to great levels and and heated to incredible temperatures. Obviously, that would be very dangerous to anyone in the immediate vicinity. And if that steam in fact carries with it radioactive material, obviously that would

have greater concerns for an even larger area. Okay, So, so all of this so far sounds like it's a you know, pretty good benefits of thorium or at least of of lifter reactor systems over traditional water reactor systems. What are some of the I mean is is thorium itself? Does that have any particular benefits? Yeah? Well, uh so, one of the things is that thorium is much more abundant in nature than uranium. Uh And there are a lot of different figures because it's hard to know exactly

how much of a mineral we have on Earth. But uh what that What most people say is that thorium is about three to four times more plentiful on Earth

than uranium is. And according to the International Atomic Energy Association slash Nuclear Energy Agency Red Book, the planet Earth has an estimated four point four million tons of total known and estimated thorium, and if you want to go with a more optimistic figure, according to the World Nuclear Association, it might be something more like five point four million. Uh So, why does this matter? Are we about to

run out of uranium? Well not exactly, and it seems unlikely actually that will ever completely run out of uranium. But the thing is cost um As it becomes more difficult to locate and extract new reserves of uranium, that leads to an increase in price. So relative abundance and

ease of extraction actually does matter. Yeah, obviously, Like if you if you get to a point where you could say, well, technically we still have x amount of this fuel out there, but it's going to require you know, a hundred and fifty percent of the effort that we put forth in the past. You have to offset that some way. So there's like another return on investment question here, that is it is it worth to go and get that fuel? If getting the fuel itself, is that difficult to do?

And thorium it gives us an alternative. Yeah, Thorium, as I mentioned before, it's found in the natural rare earth mineral monocite, and there's like I read about there's some big vein of that up in Idaho or something. It's it's apparently not that hard to come by. Yeah, there

was one guy. I saw a YouTube video where a guy was talking about the person was a strong advocate for thorium power plants, and I I was about how a front of his had a rare Earth mind in the United States and he estimated that he would be able to get enough thorium out of his one mind, which he said was not particularly special, uh, to power the entire globe for a year. Well, whether that's true, we

don't know, but I don't. I wouldn't rule that out. Yeah, I mean, if that's if that is true, then obviously that would be a big boon. I mean, that would be one of the big pros of thorium. Sure. What about the waist it produces, Yeah, that's a big one. Uh. And so it's gonna be really difficult to nail down actual numbers about the comparative advantage thorium lifter technology offers over a regular nuclear power reactor in terms of the waste.

But pretty much everybody's in agreement that it's gonna be better some degree. Right. A lot of people are saying that it will produce a hugely smaller amount of waste just in terms of huge a much smaller amount of waste just in terms of volume. I saw a figure saying between a thousand to ten thousand times less nuclear waste. That's pretty incredible. Yeah. Another another figure I saw it was an advocate saying that it would be tents of a percent of the volume. That's um I mean, and

that could very well be true. The counter arguments I've heard on that, by the way, are mostly uh mostly this is all conjecture, obviously, but they're mostly centered around the idea that if these nuclear power plants end up being uh like, if we end up making lots more of them, that in aggregate they will end up producing at least maybe not the same amount, but enough nuclear

waste for it to still be a considerable problem. Though, just to put that in perspective, let's not pretend that the waste by products produced by something like coal or nothing to really worry it. Right, So if if you're gonna say something like that, oh, well, you know, if cleaner and more efficient nuclear took up a much larger percent of our energy consumption profile or our energy production profile, actually,

um that that would be just as bad. Well, you could compare that to actually the fact that coal lash as radioactivity effect, isn't it. So yeah, we can certainly look at that. There's another aspect to the waste question, which is how long the radioactive waste remains dangerous, right, and how dangerous it is. Another aspect to the question of the waste by product is not just how much

it produces, but how long it remains dangerous. So, of course, radioactive material has a half life, which means that you know, it takes this much time for half of it to decay into another mint um, And so that is a factor when you're looking at how long this byproduct is going to remain radio toxic enough to hurt somebody. Generally, people are saying that the byproducts of a thorium based reactor are going to remain dangerous for a lot less time.

But again, this is one of those things where I've seen a lot of different figures and I don't feel confident enough to cite any one of them. Right, Yeah, none of us here are nuclear physicists. We are going largely by what a lot of other people have said, and most of the people who are saying things about this have pretty high stakes in the issue one way or another. So, Um, I would say the length of time that it remains radio toxic, at least to my mind,

remains something that's debatable. Um, But I it could be that it's actually true that this stuff is good within five hundred years, whereas most you know, nuclear byproducts take a lot longer to become safe. Right, Okay, Um, but so we've talked about the waste, what about the actual energy yield before we get to the waste. That's also a big advantage, they say, which is they say that thorium has a much greater energy yield per unit of fuel.

One estimate is that the yield of thorium is two hundred times greater than the yield of uranium, So like one pound of thorium produces as much electricity as two hundred pounds of uranium. Right. And really, when you're talking about water cooled reactors and uranium fuel rods, you're only getting some three to five percent of the potential energy out of that once you've converted it to steam and turbines like that. Right, Yeah, the the efficiency number is abysmal.

You're generating lots of energy, but you're wasting a lot of potential energy in the process, or at least you're not able to useful work. Right. We've already mentioned this some of the safety advantages, right, Yeah, the fact that it has a passive system as opposed to an active system, so it's one that could work even when you lose all power to the facility. Uh, that would actually technically turn on the safety system because it would make the

blower stop blowing. Then that frozen plug of salts could melt, and you would end up having the reactor drain into a containment vessel. And of course, since it's already melted, like you said, Joe, you can't have a melt down, right, So there's that. Okay, so all of this sounds really good. Um. We also mentioned earlier in the podcast about um about one of the byproducts of uranium water cooled processes being plutonium,

which can be used in weapons. Yeah. Right, And this is a big thing also that proponents of thorium have latched onto, which is the idea that a thorium reactor could be a very strong impediment to nuclear proliferation, which means spreading of nuclear materials that people could use as a weapon. Right, Okay, So a thorium reactor still would produce material els that you could use to make a weapon.

It would produce uranium two thirty three, which is something that could potentially be used to create a nuclear bomb. And that's the material that's that's primary in the reactor. It's the facile material, that's it's the chemical workhourse of your thorium reactor. But when thorium is irradiated and it and it produces uranium two thirty three, it also produces this highly radioactive, highly dangerous isotope, which is uranium two

thirty two different. So if you want to retrieve the uranium two thirty three, you've got this horrible, horrible, nasty stuff mixed in and you need really sophisticated technology and facilities to harvest it without irradiating yourself. So, in other words, one of the reasons why one of the arguments are saying that thorium is good to prevent proliferation is just that it's too darn hard to get the stuff that would have been useful in a nuclear bomb without you know,

putting yourself. UH had a great risk of risk than the people that you'd want to bomb, So that is true. But I think this is also a good opportunity for us to transition to talking about some of the potential drawbacks to thorium, or at least some of the main questions that have been asked about the supposed benefits of it.

And one of them is a criticism of this UH statement that thorium reactors would not be liable to allow proliferation UM and it was a comment piece published in Nature in two thousand and twelve, and basically it explained how it might be possible to get around this problem of the uranium two thirty two preventing you from getting

bomb materials out of these reactors. Basically, what they mentioned is there's a totally separate process you could go around to create some uranium two thirty three from thorium, and that would be you separate from thorium the pro tactinium two thirty three, and then you allow that by product to decay into uranium two thirty three, which is good for bombs and that has little radio toxic byproduct. They said, Okay,

so all this doesn't mean that thorium is bad. I mean, we know that uranium can be used to produce nuclear weapons. So the authors of the common piece in Nature, they just simply wanted to point out that thorium is not completely free of proliferation risks. Right. Well, and another drawback is when it comes down to the fact that you know, you're talking about creating a brand new type of nuclear

power plant on a commercial scale. You're talking about a lot of investment, financial investment, right and we're not just talking about the investment it takes to say get the

fuel or build the facilities. We're talking about research. I mean, this is sort of back to the drawing board, because today's uranium based nuclear power plants owe a whole lot to money that was originally dedicated to mill terry and weapons research around the time of World War two and so, governments were putting money into bombs and we happen to

get some clean power as a result. But you might ask the question, well, can the peaceful pursuit of cleaner, safer energy provide the same incentive that war does well, especially since you know, the even the Cold War, you had the United States and the Soviet Union both pursuing nuclear power as also a means of generating nuclear material that could be used in nuclear weapons, right, So, I mean that was that was one of the ideas, was that not only do we get power out of this,

but we could in theory makes as a byproduct of this terrific clean power, we can blow people up. Yeah. Yeah, so I mean that was you know, that's that's something that was an ongoing consideration even after the end of World War two, and yeah, convincing people to spend billions of dollars for the research and development and then the construction and maintenance of a new type of power infrastructure

is that's a big deal. When you want to think about costs, think not just about the amount of money that goes into building it, not just in researching how to do it, but also in researching how to regulate it, which is a huge concern. Actually, you have to before you do this on a large scale, you have to create a regulatory framework like we already have for light water reactors. We don't have that for thorium based reactors. And we don't know how long that would take, how

much it would cost. And it's something that you actually do need. I mean, you can't just have like unregulated nuclear power plants. Sure, even estimating all of those costs is really pretty tricky. Yeah, pretty much is impossible to estimate, to give a meaningful estimation. And there's there's some factors

we just don't know yet. For example, Uh, these salts can be corrosive, and what happens if they are corrosive to the point where you have to consistently replace elements of your of your reactor so that you can, you know, operate it safely. And uh, you know, we don't really know the answer to that because we haven't had a case study that's lasted long enough on a commercial scale. Certainly, we haven't had one of those to really see what the effects are and how how concerning they should be.

So there's a lot of uncertainty which has fueled opponents of thorium to really say, look, this isn't we shouldn't be spending time or money on this approach because of

these arguments. Yeah, well, there there are several uh different types of arguments that a lot of these opponents take, and one of them is something I'm kind of sympathetic to, which is that, Okay, if we think about how much money it would take and how much time it would take to invest in all this um, what if we just put all that into the renewables we already have,

like solar and wind. I mean, if we could create offshore wind turbines and more efficient photovoltaics with all of that money, would we actually kind of like offset the benefit that would be gained from thorium in the first place. Well, I I don't know if that's true, but just the fact that it's possible is enough to make you think. There's a similar argument that says that by the time we would reach a point where thorium nuclear power plants

would be commercially viable. We may have already reached the height of the renewable energy approaches, and it would be a moot point anyway, So that even if you did spend the money on this and you directed it toward thorium research, by the time it was actually something we could take advantage of, it would be it would be meaningless,

would be obsolete. Yeah. Another sentiment I often encountered when I was reading about this was just that I think there are a lot of anti nuclear activists who sort of see this as it's just a distraction. You know, it's like an excuse to keep pressurized water reactors online while the powers that be, quote researching thorium is placating people. That sounds kind of like conspiracy thinking. To me, That's okay.

It's on the other side too, the conspiracy thinking that's saying that it's the nuclear lobby that's against thorium, not they're not investigating it in order to maintain the stas quo. They're actively opposing thorium because they've got too much of a steak in the uranium based power. That doesn't really matter. It turns out that that if you are if you

are of this particular mindset. You're convinced that the other side is working clandestine lee against you in some matter, uh, even if the two different ways that it's working against you are complete opposites. Although it is certainly true that many people have a huge monetary steak in keeping the status quo as it stands, I mean, you know, I'm I know that that's kind of the insidious base of

many conspiracy theories, but that doesn't make it untrue. Oh no, I mean people who have money actually do spend that money to further their interests. Yeah, and that's not a not ada. And if you thought that perhaps that that in some points of this conversation we were overly critical, It's not so much that I'm critical of the technology. I'm not at all. In fact, I'm very curious to see this technology go further into uh, to to be

tested and find out what the results are. I actually really hope that they turn out to be positive and are something that we can take advantage of in the future. The reason why we get a little kg and a little skeptical is because a lot of the reports that are out there are written by people who clearly have a vested interest in one side or the other of this argument, and thus it's very difficult to get unbiased information.

And until we have more lifter reactor testing or that's one of those a t M machine kind of things, apologies, Until we have more lifter testing in firmly in place, it's really hard to say what the outcome of a lot of these questions that we've brought up. It's to be yeah, well, especially at the commercial levels, making it

viable enough financially to be widespread. But if I can say one thing at the in sort of in favor of thorium, it's that I can't find any convincing arguments that thorium based nuclear power would be worse than current

uranium based reactors. The criticisms that I see either boil down to a blanket rejection of all nuclear energy, or an argument may be correct, maybe incorrect, that thorium isn't so much better that it's worth it, right, so, in other words, that the improvements we would see would be so small that it would take too long for us to see any kind of return on that investment in the technology in the first place, right, or even that I I think that one of the biggest benefits here

is the safety issue, and safety isn't monetize herble. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, it's that's a really dire outlooks. It's tough to it to say this, but a lot of these things really do end up depend heavily on how expensive is it going to be to implement, and if you end up you know, it's just the world we live in. Until we reach that magical Star Trek future where money is no longer a concern, then we have to take that into consideration. Well, let's get

practical for a second. What's actually going on today. Are there thorium based reactors currently online or online in the past, and how is this working in practice? I want to start with one interesting fact that you all might not know, but that there were actually lifter experiments at oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee half a century ago. You just bringing this up because you're from Tennessee. I am from Tennessee. Uh uh yeah. From the fifties through the seventies, scientists

at oak Ridge pursued lifter or research. They built a molten salt reactor that went online in the sixties. I think it was sixty four. Uh, and it didn't actually run on thorium, but they were sort of proving the concept viable by running it on uranium two thirty three, which the isotope that thorium produces in fission. Right when you bombard it with a neutron, that's what thorium, yeah, decays into. So they were sort of in effect running it,

but just without actually starting with thorium. And this went on until it was shut down by the Nicks administration in seventy three. So that's the end of that, right. And there are companies that are working on this, and some of them have have thorium reactors. They're not commercial reactors now, Uh, some of the researcher There's a thor Energy out of Norway. I like their name, Lightbridge Corps

of the United States. Uh, there's there's one as far as I know that is still an operation in India, the Kakra par One. It might be the world's only operational thorium reactor. In fact, it was built in and it's a pressurized water reactor. I mean it's it's a it's not one of these lifters, but it is redesigned to run on thorium. Um and and I think I think that that might be a really good potential immediate future, especially for for thorium. Yeah, we're not talking about creating

a brand new style of power facility. You're repurposing your kind of retrofitting, yeah, or or refitting rather um And you know, I've seen it suggested that even a blend of thorium and uranium in in a redesigned water reactor could reduce the the uranium fuel input and the waste

output and also decrease this potential for proliferation. Yeah. They're actually also thorium reactors undergoing research in China, So the Chinese Academy of Sciences is running a thorium based research project and they're actually partnering with oak Ridge yet again, this episode brought to you by the Great State of Tennessee. But yeah, no, this is that I actually do find

this technology really interesting. And I mean obviously anything that any sort of research that goes toward meeting our energy needs, which is obviously that's incredibly important to us. Uh, I find citing and I hope it works out. It's certainly got a long way to go in the testing phase. And also just you know, making enough people have to prove to enough folks with money that this is worth

the investment. That's the that's really the bottom line is what we're getting to and then they have to prove that it works. So step one is proving to the people who have the money, hey, this is something that deserves funding so that we can make working, commercially viable power plants. And then to actually make it happen, and to prove that it's it's a safe method of generating power.

It's um I mean, it's a long road ahead, but it's something that's got some promise to it, whether or not we ever see it come to fruition or some other technology ends up taking its place. I mean, maybe it'll be renewable sources. I'm a little skeptical of that too, just based upon the history of how inefficient those tend to be. I would love to see a world where we're running on solar power. I would love to see that. The big question there is can't it meet the need? Yeah? Exactly,

that's the big one. A lot of conservationists that suggest that what you should do is cut down your energy consumption in the first place, rather than to try and find new ways of generating energy, but to make sense that that doesn't seem to be the way human race has um progressed since it's started settling down and making farms. But maybe we can make that conscious decision. That would be interesting to see people on moss doing that. Or maybe we'll see, you know, fusion reactors become a thing

and make this whole discussion moot. Uh, that would be awesome. We'll talk about fusion reactors at some point again, I'm sure anyway, that wraps up this discussion about using thorium as a fuel source. If you have suggestions for topics we should tackle in future episodes of Forward Thinking, you should let us know about it, because shouting it into the air is not nearly as effective as you seem

to think it is. Send us an email our addresses FW thinking at discovery dot com, or drop us a line on the social networks we frequently, which include Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. You can find us with the handle f W thinking and we'll talk to you again really sing. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places