Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear rush for thorium

We could then stop arguing about wind mills, deepwater drilling, IPCC hockey sticks, or planned reliance on the Kremlin. History will move on fast. Muddling on with the position quo is not a grown-up policy. The International Energy Agency says the world must invest $26 trillion over the next 20 years to avoid an energy shock. The scramble for scarce fuel is by now leading to friction between China, India, and the West. There is no certain stake in nuclear physics but work by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN on the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe option to uranium in reactors may be the magic bullet we have all been hoping for, though we have hardly begun to crack the potential of solar power.

Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal named after the Norse god of thunder, who also give us Thor’s day or Thursday produce as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A simple fistful would light London for a week. Thorium eats its hold hazardous waste. It can even hunt the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. "It’s the Big One," said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering. "Once you start look more closely, it blow your mind away. You can run civilization on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s basically free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels," he said.

Thorium is so common that miners luxury it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are filled of the stuff. So are the stonework rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially working as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium. After the Manhattan Project, US physicists in the late 1940s were tempted by thorium for use in civil reactors. It has a higher neutron yield per neutron absorbed. It does not require isotope separation, a big cost saving. But by then America needed the plutonium residue from uranium to build bombs. "They were really going after the weapons," said Professor Egil Lillestol, a world rights on the thorium fuel-cycle at CERN. "It is almost impossible make nuclear weapons out of thorium because it is too hard to handle. It will not be worth trying." It emits too several high gamma rays.