This is a mostly pictorial essay, not because my readers are sub-par, but because this issue is easy to understand.
Here is a bowling ball. It has a diameter of 8.5 inches. If the ball were composed of metallic thorium it would weigh ~135 pounds.
This is a picture of an oil supertanker
A thorium bowling ball contains approximately the energy of an oil supertanker. (Read that again and again. This is the fundamental advantage of nuclear over chemical energy. Nuclear is millions of times more energy dense compared to burning oil/coal/gas/wood.)
This next photo is 3200 tons of thorium nitrate in containers being buried at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site by the DOE in 2006. ( I told you they were a failed institution. I just hope they left a map of where it was buried.)
If this thorium were used in molten salt reactors, it could generate all the electricity the US consumes for an entire decade!
It cost us, the taxpayers $17 million, in 2006 dollars to transport and bury. Money that could have been used to engineer and field molten salt reactors. (Talk about opportunity costs!)
Fifty-six years ago, the molten salt reactor experiment logged 6,000 hours at full power. Here is photo of Alvin Weinberg, director of Oak Ridge National Lab commemorating the event. (BTW, Weinberg invented the light water reactor of which there are about 400 in the world today.)
MSRE demonstrated the basic technologies of thorium molten salt reactors. Almost no additional work on thorium has been done since, which is appalling and exasperating.
10 years of carbon-free (and free for the cost of digging it up) electricity buried in the Nevada desert. What a waste! (PS. I want more carbon (dioxide) in the atmosphere. I love life. Carbon is life. Let’s have more of it.)
This is the lesson for today. We can continue to mope about climate change or we can use half a century old technology to power our civilization.
Any questions dear readers? What about you, Greta, any questions? You look puzzled/angry.