I agree with every bit of this article.

I read a book 70 years ago on this subject. I was written by Ian Idriess. I think the title mentioned a boomerang of land from coastal north Queensland to the inland plains suitable for irrigation.

Idriess proposed dams on North Queensland coastal rivers and diversion of coastal rainfall water through the northern Great Dividing Range to those inland plains.
John Turner

How can the politicians have got this so wrong? They rely on advisers and if it is as glaringly obvious this is a hopeless idea how did it get to this point?
Alternatively is this the usual push by the usual subjects to stop anything progressive in our country?
Questions, questions.

A scheme like that was mooted around the turn of the last century but rejected due to the horrendous cost!

Moreover, entirely dependant on rainfall, that can be impacted on by evaporation etc.

We never ever needed Adani! Just political Leaders with both vision and balls. Prepared to finance some relatively modest research into molten salt thorium based power. And just because it's the most energy dense material in the world and the promise of very safe, extremely clean, ultra cheap energy, with a median of less than an estimated 2 cents per KwH.

Couple power costing that little to new, space age deionization dialysis desalination; and we can put truly affordable potable water virtually anywhere.

Even massive desert region irrigation projects that will forever change the face of our Australia and the numbers she can sustain! And the enormous new wealth and job opportunities she can create!

All that's missing is true patriotism and in this nation's leaders or alternative leaders!

That's all, nothing else prevents this vision splendid!
Alan B.

I'm completely on board with Alan B on this one. If only we had the right pollies we could start installing thorium reactors and all our problems would be solved within six months of next Tuesday week.

What's that you say?....commercial thorium reactors don't exist?

Please don't bother me with frivolous detail.

Alan B, you are very passionate about thorium and I do not want to be disparaging or rude but what is stopping this? I cannot believe that if there was even an outside chance that someone would not have had a go at thorium?

Come on Everald, time to join the real world.

Greenies hate dams & irrigation even more than they hate coal mines.

My grandkids would be dead before you got through the bull dust & could start building those dams

As with Foyle, I read Ian Idriess book on this in the early 50s. I am afraid that no amount of windmills could generate the power to pump so much water up the hill. You would need one of Alan's Thorium thingies, proper nuclear, or another big new coal fired power station to do the job.

If you really want to do something so useful like this, you will have to eliminate a large number of greenies first. Even if as likely, the water proved then too expensive for economic agricultural use, if the lead up had eliminated enough ratbag greenies, it would still be a worthwhile project.

JBowyer,

" but what is stopping this?"

No thorium reactor has ever been built except for an experimental one in the US in the 1960's which produced not a skerrick of usable energy and which, after being closed down after 5 years, took a further 40 yrs to clean up.

The Chinese think that it might be possible to build a usable thorium reactor and have been working on it for about 10 years. Despite early optimism, they have recently advised that they won't have a workable test plant until 2024, IF (repeat..if) they are able to resolve a series of technical problems that currently bedevil the project. Given that timing the earliest the Chinese (and they are ahead of everyone else on this issue) will have a working commercial plant will be mid 2030's - and that's if the current problems are resolved and unexpected problems don't arise.

But for the Alan's of the world, all this is mere detail.

If anyone believes the chinese aren't progressing toward a workable 350 MW model, they're Kidding themselves. Simply put, the Brazilians are looking at modeling a molten salt thorium reactor, on FUJI's successful, 350 MW molten salt model.

The Oak Ridge reactor never ever generated a single watt of power! What does that prove? Neither has the conventional reactor at Lucas heights.

The successfully trialled without accident or incident, Oak Ridge reactor, was mothballed for decades, left to rot.

Little wonder these so called experts encountered alleged difficulties. Decommissioning didn't take forty years, rubbish, given that's about the time it was mothballed.

And now legislated forbidden technology in the same place, where the patent holder of the first working uranium reactor also invented this, which his notes, evocation/advocacy, suggested most strongly, he Alvin Weinberg, Father of nuclear technology.

Considered his molten salt, non pressurised reactor, superior in every degree!

We need to listen to experts like Kirk Soresen, Former NASA scientist, and nuclear technologist who had complete access to all the notes and material left by the scientists, who operated the Oak ridge reactor between the fifties and seventies. And toured the facility!

I've listened to a couple of these same Gentlemen who scoff at some of the patent rubbish being generated by those with the most to lose, if we restart our R+D into thorium!

The main problem for the fuel fabricators, is the fact that all the alleged problems they've encountered with thorium only became an issue, because it doesn't lend itself to their fuel fabrication business model!

And that being the case they cannot authoritatively debunk thorium!

And therefore need to keep inventing reasons for keeping this technology suppressed or forbidden!?

Someone needs to invite Kirk Soresen, the world's leading nuclear savay expert on thorium energy, to speak at the national press club.

If only to ensure we have all the relevant facts and debunk some of the vexatious mischief now substituting for bona fide information pertaining to thorium! And put there by those folk with the most to lose if ever thorium gets a guernsey.
Alan B.

Well said Everald. We suffer so badly from those putting us at so much risk, just so they can go home feeling all warm and fuzzy.

I wonder if Everard has ever lived in the part of Queensland which he is championing. Has he ever taken out a map and had a good look at the vast area involved. I would hate to be dragged by the hair of my head from Richmond or Hughenden up to the Cape. We used to have taxation incentives to compensate people who lived annd worked there. It isn't the benign environment in which most people want to live. As a consequence, housing and services costs are also much higher.

Get real man.

David

Con"troll" to VK3AUU

Your flying a bit low there Dave....over...

Professional detractors like OUr Russian friend Adian are forever rubbishing thorium and virtually anyone who, through scientific understanding, advocates it! He continually challenges The figure of 2 cents per KwH as the median!

One need look no further than Ivy League Professor (ret) Economist and author of, Thorium cheaper than coal. To have this number confirmed by someone more economically literate than the world's leading expert on everything, Russian troll Adian.

Suggest you get online and Google tech talks to get the estimated numbers straight from a world leading economist's mouth and where he says the median is $001.98. Or if you will one point nine eight cents! Quote unquote!

Power that cheap has to make already cost effective desalinated irrigation water, desalinated using space age deionisation dialysis, even more cost effective, as potable irrigation water for broad scale agriculture, virtually anywhere we can pipe or pump it!

I would also advise listening to eminent Scientist and nuclear technologist Kirk Sorensen, one of a handful of nuclear experts to have toured the facility at Oak Ridge, talked at length to the very scientists who ran it, without accident or incident, between the fifties and seventies and only stopped because the funding, all of it, was pulled.

Kirk is one of a very few having complete access to all the scientist's ACCURATE notes daily diaries pertaining to this operation and its history.

And quite scahting in his rebuttal of some of thorium's debunkers. Who do you want to hear from, a fully informed nuclear expert of the usual raft of fear mongering anti nuke activists?

Which includes, it would seem, big nuclear, the fossil fuel industry and the professional propagandists claiming to be concerned environmentalists!
Alan B.

Given the evidence of his routinely illogical or ill informed posts, Adian is one of those anti nuclear greenies, who thinks all we need is wind and solar and a battery backup?

Has no understanding of industry or the 24/7 nature of steel smelting? Or that even a 100MW battery would only be good for a mere 45 minutes or so, with relation to something as energy demanding as a direct reduction steel mill totally reliant on very big amperage arc furnaces!

And how does he expect our industry to compete for as much as our own dometic market with the energy/backup costs he would cripple it with?

Or perhaps our resident challenger of substantiated facts and evidence, thinks he and the unemployed he would create, could peddle fast enough for long enough to make good the shortfall, we can expect when the sun goes down and the wind dies in the ass!

And through the sheer genius of thinkers just like him and other intellectually superior experts on everything. Needs to challenge Nuclear technologist and former NASA scientist Kirk Sorensen, Or world leading economic Professor, Robert Hargreaves. Or prize winning Author and investigative journalist, Richard martin.

What make you thinks you know better genius! A massive superiority complex?

Just don't look or listen, except or if you would be fully informed by the facts and marshalled evidence!

London to a bridge he has never read or listened to any of those three, let alone all of them and or done more than merely skim their respective publications if at all!

Not alone but in good company with most of our alleged (coal addicted) representatives? Who are served by anything but the facts and substantiated evidence?
Alan B.

Sure we won't see thorium power as practical working walk away safe, molten salt, thorium reactors for at least seven years. Even if we remove the GOVERNMENT CREATED current prohibitions on, for peaceful purpose only, nuclear R+D!

And there is money waiting in the wings as soon as those, government created and imposed, prohibitions/rules and regs are removed!

And that's all that prevents progress here! And one assumes, in some forlorn hope that they can " motivate"? Some energy provider to build a new coal fired power station?

And in the face of a complete loss of appetite among the banking and investment fraternity or coal or fossil fuel?

As long as the coal fired dinosaurs in the room keep rubishing thorium, even though it is the most energy dense material on the planet! It'll remain merely a proposal!

Which shows just how clever these detractors really are and just how well they like paying over the odds for everything, with an energy component in it, which is after all everything we use or need!

And demonstrates as nothing else can just how clever the detractors are!

Whadda reckon? More money than brains? Or just gluttons for punishment?
Alan B.

Alan, I think your friends who feed you this 2 cents per KWH are failing to take account of the cost of the incredibly countless hours and money that is being spent trying to get thorium powered generators of any practical size running. It would not surprise me if you need to multiply that piffling amount by a factor of something more than ten before that happens. I am not sying that it won't be done some time in the future, but we would be better advised to build fourth generation reactors of proven design to produce power for our immediate needs into the foreseeable future.

David