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Thorium: safe nuclear power?

By Wei Seng

So near on the periodic table, but so different in terms of safety?

In an article published in Today on March 22, produced from an article in The Telegraph, the writer Ambrose Evans-Pritchard asserts that safe nuclear does exist, in the form of thorium, and this comes from nowhere other than China, the country which supposedly is not very unenvironmentally friendly and has lax safety standards.

The article exhalts the benefits of thorium-based nuclear reactors in a backdrop of the escalation of global demand for power, especially in rising developing countries India and China. I was initially a bit skeptical about reading this article because of my reservations about China and how it sometimes may have the tendency to exaggerate its scientific discoveries. But assuming that the writer in The Telegraph did his factchecking correctly, thorium does have a multitide of benefits over uranium from its abundance all the way to the reactions in the power generation process.

If thorium really rises to the challenge as promised, perhaps the world will heave a sigh of relief, that nuclear disasters such as Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and the recent Fukushima incident would really be a thing of the past.

For those who are interested, this article explains in more scientific detail how thorium is better than uranium, a good read if you wish to know a bit more about the nuclear industry.

Doing a Google on thorium seems to yield quite a lot of promising articles. So is the hype really justified? Perhaps we have to adopt a wait-and-see attitude.