S&P 500 Analysis & ETF Trading

[kiy]

Thorium...is a start and a better direction...
I think China has 500 reactors under construction because they don't have to sale the use of reactors they just build them and say live with it...

I posted in the past about thorium and also the recent rare earth post on REE having a proprietary processing technology to process Thorium out of the Rare Earth ores which is a major issue because most rear earth deposits aren't being mined because they're too radioactive to try and separate out the rare earths...=(is kind of my understanding; I wasn't expecting to explain these issues so soon but USU brings it up and Thorium should be sold to the public as the direction of nuclear energy...creates JOBs and is safer....)



http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Current-and-Future-Generation/Thorium/
Thorium is more abundant in nature than uranium.
It is fertile rather than fissile, and can only be used as a fuel in conjunction with a fissile material such as recycled plutonium.
Thorium fuels can breed fissile uranium-233 to be used in various kinds of nuclear reactors.
Molten salt reactors are well suited to thorium fuel, as normal fuel fabrication is avoided.
The use of thorium as a new primary energy source has been a tantalizing prospect for many years. Extracting its latent energy value in a cost-effective manner remains a challenge, and will require considerable R&D investment. This is occurring preeminently in China, with modest US support.
Nature and sources of thorium
Thorium is a naturally-occurring, slightly radioactive metal discovered in 1828 by the Swedish chemist Jons Jakob Berzelius, who named it after Thor, the Norse god of thunder. It is found in small amounts in most rocks and soils, where it is about three times more abundant than uranium. Soil contains an average of around 6 parts per million (ppm) of thorium.
Thorium exists in nature in a single isotopic form – Th-232 – which decays very slowly (its half-life is about three times the age of the Earth). The decay chains of natural thorium and uranium give rise to minute traces of Th-228, Th-230 and Th-234, but the presence of these in mass terms is negligible.
When pure, thorium is a silvery white metal that retains its lustre for several months. However, when it is contaminated with the oxide, thorium slowly tarnishes in air, becoming grey and eventually black. When heated in air, thorium metal ignites and burns brilliantly with a white light. Thorium oxide (ThO2), also called thoria, has one of the highest melting points of all oxides (3300°C) and so it has found applications in light bulb elements, lantern mantles, arc-light lamps, welding electrodes and heat-resistant ceramics. Glass containing thorium oxide has both a high refractive index and wavelength dispersion, and is used in high quality lenses for cameras and scientific instruments.
The most common source of thorium is the rare earth phosphate mineral, monazite, which contains up to about 12% thorium phosphate, but 6-7% on average. Monazite is found in igneous and other rocks but the richest concentrations are in placer deposits, concentrated by wave and current action with other heavy minerals. World monazite resources are estimated to be about 12 million tonnes, two-thirds of which are in heavy mineral sands deposits on the south and east coasts of India. There are substantial deposits in several other countries (see Table below). Thorium recovery from monazite usually involves leaching with sodium hydroxide at 140°C followed by a complex process to precipitate pure ThO2. Thorite (ThSiO4) is another common thorium mineral. A large vein deposit of thorium and rare earth metals is in Idaho.

***Anyway the direction of thorium is we all have a reactor in our back yard...I haven't seen enough about this and other safer reactor designs which I've been hearing for years can be done/has been done.
[url][/url][tag]Thorium nuclear reactor trial begins, could provide cleaner, safer, almost-waste-free energy[/tag]

Thorium reactors are the latest flavour in nuclear power hype.

According to their enthusiastic proponents, these reactors will be “smaller, safer, cheaper, cleaner”, will take over the energy market in great numbers, and
...will reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years.

Yet the present situation of thorium nuclear reactors is a confusing one. While on the one hand, thorium as a nuclear fuel, and thorium reactors are being hyped with enthusiasm in both mainstream media and the blogosphere, the nuclear lobby is ambivalent about this.

The explanation becomes clearer, when you consider that the nuclear industry has sunk $billions into new (uranium or plutonium fuelled) large nuclear technologies, as well as into lobbying governments and media. Would big corporations like Hitachi, EDF Westinghouse, Toshiba, Areva, Rosatom be willing, or indeed able, to withdraw from the giant international operations that they already have underway? Would they, could they, tolerate a mass uptake of the new thorium nuclear reactors — which is what would be needed, to make the thorium market economical?

There is a video here...
http://www.independentaustralia.net/environment/environment-display/dont-believe-thorium-nuclear-reactor-hype,4919
Yet, the nuclear lobby, in Australia and overseas, doesn’t just tolerate the thorium hype, they participate in it — although with not as much enthusiasm as the diehard thorium fans.

Thorium