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Talk on the world nuclear stage has been focusing on the use of thorium in new nuclear reactors, particularly in India and China.

However, Bruce Power president and chief executive officer Duncan Hawthorne says there is no advantage of using thorium at the Bruce Nuclear site

"Of course it's being considered in India and China," he says. "They have no uranium but they have lots of thorium.''

Hawthorne says India started with CANDU nuclear reactors but is now looking at thorium reactors because of the plentiful supply of that resource.

Plus, thorium does not have to be enriched to use it, as has been done in Asian countries, including Japan, says Hawthorne. ''There is no advantage here for using thorium over uranium.''

Thorium is a naturally-occurring element discovered in 1828. A lot of work was done on it at the United States Oak Ridge Laboratory in the 1960s.

It is a much more common element than uranium. The U.S. has tons of it that are buried as a result of rare earth metals mining. Canada has large reserves of it.

According to some experts, thorium has some very nice safety features built into it. Thorium expert Kirk Sorensen says, "If it begins to overheat, a little plug melts and the salts drain into a pan. There is no need for computers, or the sort of electrical pumps that were crippled by the tsunami (in Japan). The reactor saves itself.”

Most experts agree that a well-designed thorium reactor would be safer than the ones spread across the world.  The reactions are not self-sustaining so you have to work to keep them going, whereas our traditional reactors' self-sustain and safety systems have to be multi-redundant. 

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Sunday, July 10, 2011