There is a little-known substance that has been a nuisance to miners looking for rare-earth metals; for years they have been tossing it aside in great [slightly] radioactive piles when they found no use for it. But according to a new study, it could be up to two hundred times more potent than uranium, and even cleans up after itself! As thorium (named after Thor) fuses in a reactor, the particles released seem to be compatible with each other, and the final waste is actually not radioactive. These particles can even scavenge waste left in the reactor from uranium or plutonium and continue to make more energy; it 'wastes' almost nothing, whereas uranium is only 7% usable even in pure form. It also decays rather slowly, so it has a shelf life of about 27,240,000,000 years (at least 5 times the age of earth). So not only is it [possibly] more potent than any other -anium, and cleaner, there is also plenty of the stuff, just waiting to be picked up by anyone. Wither pre-mined and left out in the sun, or is chilling underground busy outnumbering uranium in abundance three times over.
The US alone has 400,000 metric tonnes of it already mined out, and that's only 15% of what's down there. So according to my rough calculations with what thorium we have already mined, we could power, say, Boston (estimate based on London example), for around 17,000,000YEARS!... with almost no radioactive waste we have to rocket into the sun later. That's even the low end of my estimate, I had to assume that "a fistfull" was about a pound, you could easily say it would be a half pound. So, despite all these ridiculous numbers, one of the only countries investing in researching the material for practical use is India, and I don't think they'll be sharing their recipe, or trading for more of it, when they are the only ones getting practically free energy and have about a third of the world's supply in sand banks off their south and east coasts (enough to power a single city for 170,000,000 years).
I imagine that once they start doing large-scale thorium reactor tests, if it works, people will forget about coal, oil, uranium, whatever, and just invest full-scale into these new reactors. But even with this amazing new power supply, there will yet be chances of reactors melting down. So really, there are only two thing holding us back from slicing our energy bills to less than half of what it is, are two things: thorium research, and reactor containment research... let's get on that shall we?
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