December Reading: Thorium!!!!!

I read political mags, many of them. With the traveling this past season, though, I bought science mags at airports instead of The Nation, The National Review, The Economist, Harper's, Tikkun, et alli. The science mags lead me to what Jung would have called a kind of universal memory moment, like the memory that makes us afraid of snakes and lions, but in the other direction.

Do you recall personally, or from learning history, or just vaguely and dreamily that in the post-war years we Americans were all hyped up over the "infinite and clean" energy of thermonuclear reactions? I do. I have this vague memory of this  utopian promise.

Well, there were two plans for fission. One involved uranium and its conversion to a fissile material. This substance had two uses: it could make electricity, AND, and this is key, it could make nuclear bombs. This, since we had us some Russians to contain, and mutual assured destruction seemed the most reasonable route to this end. But, the other substance is thorium. It can make electricity, but not bombs. It doesn't contaminate the earth. Its reactors are tiny and require no population buffer zone, and its waste is smaller in both volume and radioactive shelf life than uranium by orders of minitude. It gives off more just plain old steam than waste matter. It is freakishly more abundant than uranium. There's enough of it, thorium nerds think, in the lower 48 to power the US for 1000 years. This makes the electric car look much greener than it does now. Maybe.

What I don't know is what kind of damage is required to mine it. But, here you go: a possible game changer. See these links: Uranium Is So Last Century at Wired, and some rather technical info at Thorium in Wikipedia, and much discussion at the thorium blog.

Happy New Decade? Possibly.

I also discovered that these bugs that live behind the exterior walls of my garage are Kissing Bugs, that they carry Chagas Disease, which is B A D, so you win some, you lose some.