| Germanium (110) |  |
| Thorium (25) | |
| Uranium (60) | |
#China and India race to fully harness thorium for nuclear power Thorium is an alternative to uranium as a way of doing nuclear fission.
Although the chemical element thorium sounds like the kind of material used as a plot device in a comic book blockbuster,
Thorium is being hailed as the key in the bid to find safer and more sustainable sources of nuclear energy to provide our electricity.
thorium has taken almost 200 years to be taken seriously as an energy contender. After a period in the 1950s and 1960s in which it flirted with thorium,
the US government shut down its research into the radioactive element, preferring to go the uranium route.
Critics say thorium was pushed aside because uranium was an easier component for nuclear weapons. But times have changed,
and thorium s status as a safer alternative to uranium is now a help, not the hindrance it was during the Cold war.
has announced plans to build a thorium-based nuclear reactor by 2016. But it faces competition from China,
where the schedule to deliver a thorium-based nuclear power plant was overhauled recently, meaning scientists in Shanghai have been told to deliver such a facility within the next ten years.
While thorium nuclear exploration is had not New britain its own reactor in Dorset carrying out tests 40 years ago the will to make it a viable energy source is growing stronger.
Thorium is an alternative to uranium as a way of doing nuclear fission he told Metro.
He said thorium is safer because an overheating thorium reactor can be switched simply off, avoiding the problem that occurred at Fukushima, for instance.
Thorium also produces less radioactive waste than uranium, waste which needs to be secured for hundreds rather than tens of thousands of years.
Thorium is not fissile, meaning it cannot be split to release energy alone, but when exposed to neutrons it will react to produce a particular isotope of uranium (U-233) that becomes the nuclear fuel.
But who will be the first across the line in the thorium race? The Chinese have thrown a lot of resources at it,
Thorium is not without its critics, who point to its nuclear reaction producing U-232, the decay products
and Padmanabha Krishnagopala Iyengar, former DAE secretary, claim that Indian nuclear scientists are giving up prematurely on their thorium research programme in exchange for a few uranium reactors from abroad.
India has very little domestic uranium but one-quarter of the world's thorium reserves;
its thorium research programme focuses on turning the material into fissile uranium-233 for use as reactor fuel.
Fast breeder reactors, of the type under construction in Kalpakkam, would breed uranium-233 in thorium blankets surrounding a plutonium core.
Recovering plutonium and uranium-233 from spent fuel is key to India's thorium programme,
Still, at least one overseas company is betting on thorium. Last month, Thorium power in Mclean, Virginia, with a market capitalization of about $40 million
Ladee readings also revealed an unexpected source of some of the helium in the lunar exosphere. bout 20 percent of the helium is coming from the moon itself, most likely as the result from the decay of radioactive thorium and uranium
including molten salt reactors, thorium, fast neutron reactors, pebble bed reactors and fusion. Some of these could be potentially safer and more effective than conventional designs e
< Back - Next >
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011