Safe nuclear: UK eyes thorium

By Mark Halper | May 18, 2012, 3:08 AM PDT

Prime Minister David Cameron wants clean energy, including nuclear. Will thorium be part of the mix in Britain?

Welcome back to the thorium trail, the long and winding road to an altogether different and safer way of generating nuclear power by using thorium instead of uranium as fuel.

Last week we stopped in the U.S., where the thorium debate took to the national airwaves.We also ventured to India, to have a look at a thorium reactor that’s rising there.

Today, we pull into the UK, where we note that the government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC, the UK equivalent of the U.S. DOE) has spotted thorium on its radar, and is looking into it.

First, my standard review for newcomers, because the parade of interested travelers on this road is growing all the time:

Thorium should replace uranium because, its supporters say, it does not yield nasty, weapons-grade waste the way uranium does. And its waste lasts for only a few hundred years, not the tens of thousands associated with uranium. It can work in conventional, water-cooled reactors. But when combined with alternative reactor designs, like a “molten salt” or “liquid fluoride” reactor, it offers even more advantages including greater efficiency, Flibe Energy and others claim. The U.S built a thorium molten salt reactor in the 1960s at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, but the Nixon administration halted thorium development in favor of more weapons-prone uranium.