Happy Nuclear year , Dan.
If someone moves into your house , Loudmouth, and gives you your garage with pc link, all is good. You have what you need.

Yes nick my typed 100 (one hundred) somehow became 10 (ten)? I'm saying that a $100.00 worth of easily recovered thorium, would power both my house and car for the next 100 years! And the very reason why we're not all using thorium as our principle source of clean safe cheap energy!

Joe, Can you imagine what that ($1.00 a year per person) would do to the four trillion a year fossil fuel profits? Or big nuclear! Or the nuclear weapons industry!

Or, those politicians from both sides of the aisle, already in those very voluminous pockets? If you think Watergate was a big deal, you ain't heard nothing yet! [Expose that Jules if you can!?]

Understand Joe, these folk have already acted to suppress not just the facts, but any ongoing research, wherever they retain influence.

A deliberately misled populous, misled by mendacious mischief making vexatious activists, whose only brief is to mislead and suppress the facts as long as we allow it!? Is the only reason we are not already powering our homes and industry with this stuff!? And in so doing, effectively mitigate against climate change!

And let's not forget former K.B.G chief Putin (and thousands like him in positions of power) thinks a warmer Siberia , Alaska, Antarctica etc, would be wonderful?

Maybe, always providing that increased warmth wasn't accompanied by routine life and property destroying, howling gales, provided by the reported, recorded, increased global convection, the other unwanted side effect of (imagined) GW!

Suggest you get online and U tube and hear what principle NASA scientist, Kirk Sorensen has to say on the subject, or indeed a number of eminent scientists, some of who operated the Oak Ridge, molten salt thorium reactor for 5 trouble free years! Or watch a documentary that shows the build phase in complete detail!

Why aren't we all using it? Good question and needs to be answered by the folks suppressing the facts? Or should that read, factiness?
Alan B.

A gold panning dish to get your big bang buck of thorium is $6.
But the separation from monazite (Ce,La,Nd,Th)PO4 will cost you.

"Breeding in a thermal neutron spectrum is slow and requires extensive reprocessing. The feasibility of reprocessing is still open... 2012 report by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, about using thorium fuel with existing water-cooled reactors, would "require too great an investment and provide no clear payoff," and "from the utilities’ point of view, the only legitimate driver capable of motivating pursuit of thorium is economics." There is a higher cost of fuel fabrication and reprocessing than in plants using traditional solid fuel rods.

Thorium, when being irradiated for use in reactors, will make uranium-232, which is very dangerous due to the gamma rays it emits.. The irradiation would then make uranium-233 in lieu of uranium-232, which can be used in nuclear weapons to make thorium into a dual purpose fuel."

However Alan could dig up his back yard , sell the processed monazite to North Korea and buy solar to power the magnetic separator .

Thanks Alan,

I did learn to tie my own shoelaces quite some time ago, but thanks for your careful lesson. Yes, of course, people with huge investments in certain industries are likely to try to influence policy to inhibit any developments in alternatives, so of course fossil fuel - and renewable - industries are not friendly to cheaper alternatives like thorium nuclear reactors, IF they work.

But any investor with half a brain would also bet both sides by investing in precisely those industries, since the scope for their use on a massive scale would also be profitable. Nineteenth century investors in railways probably had the sense to switch some of their portfolio to road vehicles (and road-making, fossil fuels and service stations) in the twentieth. After all, no sensible investor would put everything into one alternative, IF some other industry seemed viable. There's money to be made, after all, from fossil fuels, renewable energy AND - IF it works - thorium.

Capitalism has no gods, it has no loyalties whatever, it will back whatever makes a buck. A billion dollars @ 15 %, say, no matter in what, is a preferable investment to one @ 14 %.

Or have I got that all wrong ?

Cheers,

Joe

May be profitable , may not..
" One large hole that can be punched in the argument for thorium involves the economics of thorium reactors. Experts say compared to uranium, the thorium fuel cycle is more costly and would require extensive taxpayer subsidies."
Or the other way around.

Thanks Nick,

Want don't you understand about the word 'IF' ?

Joe