I spent a little time yesterday reading up on Thorium per link and elsewhere. It was abandoned as a fuel in the US and EU by the mid-80s. India is the only place with three or four reactors that use Th as a fuel. That tells me that India is uranium poor. The fuel cycles require uranium and some other fissile material like plutonium to get to reactor grade. The production processes look about as toxic as uranium, except some of the waste process has somewhat shorter half-lifes. Otherwise Th is subject to the same toxic waste objections.
I looked up where the principle deposits were in the US. They seem to be located in the northeast. I am not familiar with the ecology issues of that region so I have no idea what mining Thorium rich ore would mean there. Here is a hint:
http://www.epa.gov/superfund/25anniversary/photo/pages/11hale.htm
Doesn't look too eco-friendly to me. By coincidence I watch Democracy Now yesterday and what Massey Energy has done to its Appalachia coal operations. Here's that link:
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/31/we_are_tearing_down_our_mountains
I don't like to sound conspiratorial, but I think Thorium is essentially equivalent to the mythic clean coal, as somehow the green nuke. It is basically a political move by big energy to syphon off `green energy' money for nuclear power development with its toxic waste problems, expensive energy production, environmental pollutions, and so forth.
I tracked down Steven Chu, the DOE secretary and found this:
``He has joined the Copenhagen Climate Council,[20] an international collaboration between business and science, established to create momentum for the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.
Chu was instrumental in submitting a winning bid for the Energy Biosciences Institute, a BP-funded $500 million multi-disciplinary collaborative project between UC Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley Lab and the University of Illinois. This sparked controversy on the Berkeley campus, where some fear the alliance could harm the school’s reputation for academic integrity.[21][22][23][24][25]
Based partially on his research at UC Berkeley, Chu has speculated that a global "glucose economy", a form of a low-carbon economy, could replace the current system. In the future, special varieties of high-glucose plants would be grown in the tropics, processed, and then the chemical would be shipped around like oil is today to other countries...''
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Chu
I don't like the sound of this glucose model either. Translation into corporate agriculture, in turn reads like a monoculture plantation style tracks where the Amazon rain forest used to be. Chu seems to start in the general good intended direction and then go off track. This probably comes from working with energy industry `stake holders' as partners. Well, we all know how Copenhagen turned out.
Reading between the lines in the wiki quote on Chu, there is big energy and big agriculture solutions to global warming caused by their development and economy, to be fixed by more of the same. For those who don't know the link interest between the two is nitrogen fertilizers which are petro-chemical based. These would at a guess be required in huge quantities to implement Chu's glucose model. The nitrogen fertilizer run off in California basically kills off the fisheries. Hate to think what those would do to the Amazon basin rivers.
In the current US political climate, I see the best use of Thorium as a tool of obfuscation. It is something useful to keep the nuclear option on the table and ignore regulating green house gas emissions as impossible to get by the Senate. Same old game. BTW whatever happened to the Kerry-Boxer bill?
Let's start adding up some of the Obama administration energy-climate initiatives. Off shore oil leases, green nukes, bio-fuels, cap&trade, and I am expecting clean coal to pop up sooner or later. This is not looking good. Not even close.
CG