Thorium as the future of nuclear power?
Interesting article over on Wired about Kirk Sorensen and the community served by his Energy From Thorium blog. To hear these people tell it, Thorium fission in fluid fuel reactors offers an idyllic vision of a boundless-energy-from-the-atom type future no one has really believed in since the early 50s. Thorium, reportedly, is abundant, safe, highly efficient as a nuclear fuel, and produces waste that is radioactive only for a few hundred years instead of tens of thousands. Also, the waste products from the Thorium cycle cannot be reprocessed to make bombs, which is the sole reason why it was not chosen as the basis for American nuclear energy technologies back in the 50s.
