Can using thorium instead of uranium make nuclear energy safer

Thorium, a naturally occurring radioactive element establish in abundance in the Earth’s crust all around the world, might well be a better fuel basis than uranium for nuclear power generation for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, just one ton of the silvery metal can make as much energy as 200 tons of uranium or 3.5 millions tons of coal, according to Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia of the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Another advantage is that it come out of the ground as a 100 percent pure, functional isotope.

Unlike uranium, which contains only 0.7 percent fissionable material, thorium doesn’t need enrichment to be used in nuclear reactors. Also, the spent-fuel waste beginning thorium fission cannot be re-formulated for nuclear weapons like plutonium, the waste product of uranium-based fission.Also, proponents say that thorium doesn’t need the high temperatures and mitigation equipment of uranium-based reactors. “The plants would be a large amount smaller and less expensive,” Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering, told the UK’s Telegraph last year.

“You wouldn’t need those huge containment domes since there’s no pressurized water in the reactor.” With no high temperatures, thorium reactors can’t “melt down” and liberate radiation.“Once you start looking additional closely, it blows your mind away,” adds Sorensen. “You can run civilization on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s basically free.” The advocacy-oriented Thorium Energy Alliance reports that there is “sufficient thorium in the U.S. alone to power the country at its current energy level for over 1,000 years.”