Why Is An "Alternative" To Thorium Needed?
Behind The Confusion Deliberately Cultivated About Molten Salt Reactors and Their Practicality
Update: Looks like President Trump reads the Vault-Co Substack. The dream might just happen after all.
“A pot, a pipe and a pump.” That’s what Alvin called it, disparaging his own invention as trivial. Truly an amazing person and humble as hell about it.
The inventor of the technology said it was simple enough that he could show a child how to assemble it and start it up.
It’s simple technology powered by abundant fuel which can be produced by refining beach sand. The experimental installations in the 1960’s were so successful that they had to be shut down to conceal the truth from mankind … nuclear energy is safe, clean and nearly free to operate. In comparison with the entire existing fuel industry there is no comparison to molten salt reactors - they are safer, more maintainable and cheaper than coal, oil, hydro dams, solar and wind.
There is only one possibly reason that we would have suffered under a regime for sixty years of deliberate government intervention to make the technology illegal, unverifiable and unobtainable … it’s too simple and too inexpensive.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out I have a personal reason for advocacy of this technology. When I was 12 years old I went on a field trip from school and visited the University of Nebraska where I personally saw the molten salt reactor and dipped my hand into it as I looked down at the cool blue glowing core twenty feet down underwater. I saw the gigantic room that held the university’s atomic clock and all the equipment in the lab that was powered by the core’s electricity. It was one of the most powerful experiences of my life when I was younger and I never forgot it. When all the other kids ran off to see the sculpture exhibit, I asked for special permission to stay behind with the funny nerds in the reactor laboratory and questioned them extensively about the reactor and how it worked. With each revelation I got more enthralled. When they told me the only substantial waste product of the reactor was fresh drinking water, I reeled at the thought of the future. I figured someday we’d all have one of these things in our backyards, albeit on a smaller scale. What good regular energy production sources when tech like this existed in the world? The lab was shut down in the 90’s and the reactor turned off and dismantled. It’s not the only one in Nebraska, either. Molten salt reactors were all over Nebraska in Omaha and Lincoln. They were maintained and run for decades with as little effort as you spend on your lawn. Not only were they all dismantled (not just decommissioned but actually carted off site after being broken down by crews) but you will discover it is getting very hard to even see any information about them online anywhere.
If you’re going to feed people bugs and keep them in pods, you don’t want them knowing about any of these things. Like in Orwell’s 1984, the first order of the day is to wipe out all memory of the past.
The atomic clock filled the room in the university and it took a lot of power. Amazing to think that today they fit in the palm of your hand and run off a computer serial port.
I think the reason that the Fallout games have had such fascination for me from the first couple minutes I played the first version back in 1997 is that they represented the future after a nuclear war that I had been expecting.
In August 2021, China announced the completion of its first experimental thorium-based nuclear reactor. Built in the middle of the Gobi Desert in the country’s north, the reactor over the next few years will undergo testing. If the experiment proves successful, Beijing plans to construct another reactor potentially capable of generating electricity for more than 100 000 homes.
Have you noticed the repeating pattern here? America pioneers, debugs and proves a new technology and then it gets mothballed. When it re-emerges it is in the hands of foreign nations who demonstrate they are not stupid by immediately putting the forgotten tech into production and profiting enormously from it. These are the series of “advances” we have seen in Russia and China. Innovation paid for by taxpayers in America to benefit everybody else in the world except its own citizens.
The ugly reality is that the average person hates geniuses. The mob hates geniuses more than they hate any other group of people based on the circumstances of their birth. It’s a fact of human existence. The worst kind of genius is the sorts who are always present and active during the birth of a civilization - the kind that solves problems in one fell swoop. One swoop and they have terrific crop yields. One swoop and they have great water canals. One swoop and everybody has got a flush toilet. We could say that Europeans civilizations have been successful more than any other because they can swallow their bile and temporarily put up with geniuses so they can profit and advance from their inventiveness.
Hitler believed that only a dictatorship could provide the protection from the mob that the genius requires to prosper and secure a stable enough situation to develop his ideas. Whether or not that was accurate, at the end of World War II the biggest priority for the United States was importing the top scientists from Germany who had been promoted by the Nazis. It is almost certain that the U.S. produces similar people of potential in its own country even now - the demands of wartime brought them out of the woodwork. For some reason, perhaps related to Hitler’s rationale, the Nazis had identified and pulled these people out of the margins. There is no better example of this phenomenon than Wernher Von Braun. In peacetime, it is beyond contention that such people languish and die anonymously in most cases.
Once they shot President Kennedy, the masters of decline moved in to attack the very notion that civilizations only exist because critical problems were solved by individuals at its founding. Whether you want to call them geniuses or innovators or just repairmen, these people have different psychology and different internal makeup. The nature of decline in civilization is the antipathy felt towards the individual in general and particularly gifted people. Once they got John Kennedy out of the way, they began to celebrate criminals, mediocrities and morons and laud the halfwits and the violent and the least exceptional people. This is why today we live in the pathocracy - a cage around us built of evil leadership that could only exist after they assassinated our real leaders. Kennedy certainly was not perfect at all and yet he was set on improving America, not tearing it to pieces.
Although they are not much for problem solving, our “leaders” now have set themselves the task of villifying the very notion that individual savants can solve our problems in one fell swoop. Admitting to it highlights their incredible track record of never ending failure and dismal performance.
Of all the scientists of the last 200 years in America, one of the people they hated, envied and resented the most was Alvin Weinberg, the inventor of the molten salt reactor at Oak Ridge Laboratories. He has been labeled as the single most important example of the man who claims that problems can be solved with a single technological fix that mediocre people were not even aware of.
There’s a whole school of thought in academia devoted to badmouthing Weinberg and the notion of solving problems. Marxists hate Weinberg the most of the brilliant minds at Oak Ridge Laboratories because he is the epitome of the singular genius who goes around producing miracle solutions that make problems just vanish.
Even when he was alive, Weinberg was recognized as an optimist who believed that mankind can solve its problems using our intelligence because we are made in the image of God. This is the antithesis of all Marxism, which insists we are animals who must be centrally managed by authority figures.
Nixon fired Weinberg for the very reason he was associated with the Jetsons future and the American ideology that problems could be solved with brainpower. This entire school of thought is not favored by the intellectually deficit and Nixon was a prime example of a guy who is not exactly a deep thinker. Weinberg had to go, Admiral Rickover next. The two of them were regarded as renegade Jews by Kissinger and everybody controlling the White House on down. These two guys were not down with the long term plan and the long term strategy was to destroy optimism. As Antonio Gramsci points out in his “Notebooks,” Marxism could never succeed by delivering anything. It was only going to be able to make life worse in the name of “crisis management” for the environment. Gramsci admitted that Marxism had never delivered any of the benefits that free market societies had produced for their people and never would. Everybody on the gravy train of Nixon’s “nuclear power” bandwagon knew the tech had to be monolithic, expensive and very dangerous in order to make the big money off the industry.
With the interior of the United States melting down into degeneracy, decadence and terminal madness, our competitors have seen all the promise in the abandoned miracles we began to silently shutter up after Kennedy’s death and harvested all of our remaining marvels and advances for the future of their own countries. One of the hallmarks of declining societies is that they begin to fail to uptake innovation - their own as well as others - and instead begin to recycle the flawed ideas that have proved themselves useless over time. They actually develop amnesia in the last throes of their death cycle and cannot even remember their own successful strategies in the past.
Ancient Greece (forgot how to make Greek fire)
Ancient Rome (failed to replace slaves with windmills to grind bread)
Ancient India (flush toilets vanish and population craps in the street)
Modern West (forgot how to make one-way gas valves on toilets so they stink again)
The other nations are simply taking advantage of our weakness, forgetfulness and general senility. This points to them being our successors the way things are going. In all things the West resembles an old man with dementia toddling along in a walking frame who does not remember anything of his life any longer. The piano lessons are gone and so is the knowledge of how to do anything well.
China is not alone in its intentions to reap thorium's unique properties. In the past, India, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and other countries have demonstrated enthusiasm for research into the possible application of thorium in nuclear power. The appeal of this metal is its potential to be a more abundant and efficient substitute for uranium, the dominant nuclear fuel.
However, using thorium for energy production is not without challenges, and these are discussed in a new IAEA publication Near-Term and Promising Long-Term Options for the Deployment of Thorium-Based Nuclear Energy. Comprehensively summarising the results of a four-year IAEA coordinated research project focused on the possibilities of developing thorium-based nuclear energy, the report examines the benefits and the challenges of using thorium as a fuel and analyses its application in different types of reactors — from the most commonly deployed water-cooled reactors to molten-salt reactors.
“Many countries consider thorium as both a viable and very attractive option for generating power and meeting their growing energy needs,” said Kailash Agarwal, a Nuclear Fuel Cycle Facilities Specialist at the IAEA and one of the authors of the report. “Our research project helped share valuable knowledge and experience among national laboratories and research institutions in the use of thorium, culminating in this publication.”
Thorium is a silvery, slightly radioactive metal commonly found in igneous rocks and heavy mineral sands. It was named after Thor, the god of thunder in Norse mythology. It is three to four times more abundant in nature than uranium but historically has found little use in industry or power generation. This is partly because thorium in itself is not a nuclear fuel, but it can be used to create one. Thorium-232, the only naturally occurring isotope of thorium, is a fissionable material but not a fissile one, meaning that it needs high-energy neutrons to undergo fission — the splitting of atomic nuclei which releases energy that is used for electricity generation. However, when irradiated, thorium-232 undergoes a series of nuclear reactions, eventually forming uranium-233, a fissile material that can be burned up as fuel in nuclear reactors.
What can thorium offer?
Thorium boasts several advantages over the conventional nuclear fuel, uranium-235. Thorium can generate more fissile material (uranium-233) than it consumes while fuelling a water-cooled or molten-salt reactor. According to estimates, the Earth's upper crust contains an average of 10.5 parts per million (ppm) of thorium, compared with about 3 ppm of uranium.
“Because of its abundance and its fissile material breeding capability, thorium could potentially offer a long-term solution to humanity’s energy needs,” Agarwal said.
Another advantage is that thorium-fueled reactors could be much more environmentally friendly than their uranium counterparts. In addition to the fact that these reactors — and nuclear power in general — do not emit greenhouse gases in operation, they also produce less long-lived nuclear waste than present-day uranium-fueled reactors.
Not without challenges
However, there are several economic and technical obstacles making the deployment of thorium challenging. Despite its abundance, the metal is currently expensive to extract.
“The mineral monazite, which is a major source of rare earth elements, is also a primary source of thorium,” said Mark Mihalasky, a Uranium Resources Specialist at the IAEA. “Without the current demand for rare earth elements, monazite would not be mined for its thorium content alone. Thorium is a by-product, and extraction of thorium requires methods that are costlier than for uranium. So, as it stands, the amount of thorium that can be pulled out of the ground in a cost-effective manner is not as great as for uranium. This, however, could change if there was a higher demand for thorium and its application in nuclear power.”
They are admitting that the absence of a rare earth industry in the West - discussed here on Vault-Co previously - is a huge obstacle to any economies of scale. It continues to be experimental in that one guy, one team, one organization has to reinvent the supply chain each time. That should have happened over the past fifty years but the Western world was too occupied with piano ties, Rubix cubes and cocaine to even bother with any of this stuff.
Equally expensive are research, development and testing of thorium-powered nuclear installations due to a lack of significant experience with thorium and uranium's historical role in nuclear power. “Another hurdle for thorium is that it can be difficult to handle,” said Anzhelika Khaperskaia, Technical Lead on Fuel Engineering and Fuel Cycle Facilities at the IAEA. Being a fertile and not fissile material, it needs a driver, such as uranium or plutonium, to trigger and maintain a chain reaction.
They are tacitly conceding here that the West is fake and ghey and full of pretend smart people. The real engineers and quality technical workers that once made these things look easy have long since vanished. Even finding college graduates who can read and write is becoming nearly impossible. Even though thorium power is fairly simple in application, it would be risky to even allow modern engineers around anything more dangerous than plastic blocks. This comes up again and again in any discussion of these subjects.
“To meet growing energy demand and achieve global climate objectives, the world is looking for alternative sustainable and reliable energy technologies. Thorium may become one of those,” concluded Clément Hill, Section Head at the IAEA. “We will continue our research to deliver credible and science-based results for those interested in working with thorium.”
The real question is not if thorium is practical. It’s proven its worth already and is well tested technology. The question is, why won’t our own government permit us to develop it? Weinberg had originally expected the tech would replace conventional energy sources by the 1970’s.
For the same reason that Donald Trump was hated for making America energy independent within a few months of taking office, Weinberg was resented because he threatened to make the world a safer, better place and leave it that way far into the future. Our rulers had other plans for us.
Update: Admit it, this stack post was ahead of it’s time! President Trump signed an executive order opening up reactor technology to development again!!!
1 Corinthians 14:33 KJV
“For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints.”
Regards, Tex
There's also, IIRC, no way to supply material for a nuclear arms program from thorium reactors. And if you're gonna, like, make people's lives better and not incinerate them...then I mean who cares.
Regarding genius, and the theory that innovation is the product of many small minds accumulating many small insights...I challenge any proponent to merely glance at the works of Euler. Don't even open them, just look at how much space those tens of thousands of pages takes up on the shelf at your local university's library. Take them off the shelf and hold the weight of them in your hands. Then look the librarian in the eye and tell them, with perfect confidence, "this could just as easily have been me."