In case you missed it, there was a pretty major event that transpired over the long weekend in the UK.
While many were stuck on the M40 motorway, attempting to get out of London for the Bank Holiday, it seems the Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard may have solved the world’s energy problems — possibly whilst cooking sausages over a coal-fired barbecue (although about that we can only speculate).
The solution, according to AEP, comes in the shape of thorium – an element named after the Norse god of thunder and which until the collision of Pritchard’s pen, paper and barbecue, was seemingly unnoticed by the larger energy community.
As he explains, thorium’s potential use in energy production is apparently huge:
If Barack Obama were to marshal America’s vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project, he might reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years.
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There is no certain bet in nuclear physics but work by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors may be the magic bullet we have all been hoping for, though we have barely 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 gave us Thor’s day or Thursday – produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.
And if you’re worried about radioactive Thorium waste . . .
Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge 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 looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels,” he said.
Which obviously sounds brilliant — especially if you consider there are no known downsides and the element itself is in abundant supply around the world.
So why has nobody thought of this before?
Well, we at FT Alphaville are definitely not scientists, but we can’t help feeling we have heard about this sort of particle-accelerator generated energy before.
For example:
The world’s largest scientific research facility-Switzerland’s Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN)-recently succeeded in producing the first particles of antimatter.
Antimatter is identical to physical matter except that it is composed of particles whose electric charges are opposite to those found in normal matter. Antimatter is the most powerful energy source known to man.
It releases energy with 100 percent efficiency (nuclear fission is 1.5 percent efficient). Antimatter creates no pollution or radiation, and a droplet could power New York City for a full day. There is, however, one catch . . . Antimatter is highly unstable.
It ignites when it comes in contact with absolutely anything . . . even air. A single gram of antimatter contains the energy of a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb-the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Until recently antimatter has been created only in very small amounts (a few atoms at a time).
But CERN has now broken ground on its new Antiproton Decelerator-an advanced antimatter production facility that promises to create antimatter in much larger quantities. One question looms: Will this highly volatile substance save the world, or will it be used to create the most deadly weapon ever made?
That was an extract from Dan Brown’s 2000 bestseller Angels & Demons.
Of course, there’s no reason to worry about thorium being used as a deadly weapon, since AEP specifically reassures us:
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 authority on the thorium fuel-cycle at CERN. “It is almost impossible make nuclear weapons out of thorium because it is too difficult to handle. It wouldn’t be worth trying.” It emits too many high gamma rays.
Phew.
Related links:
Estimating terrestrial uranium and thorium by antineutrino flux measurements – PNAS
Periodic table of Wall Street criminal elements – The Long Room
Energy from thorium – Forum and blog