Guest Post by David Archibald
There is a rich tradition of rational weathermen taking an interest in the potential of thorium-based nuclear power.
Witness this video made by John Coleman:
The irrational have also taken an interest in thorium’s potential. A warmer journalist by the name of Richard Martin has written a book entitled “Super Fuel” published on 8th May, 2012. Like all warmers, his grip on reality is a bit weak. One example of this is on page 55 where he states “the container ship Altona, bound for China and carrying a load of 770,000 tons of uranium concentrate.” The biggest ship on the planet carries some 500,000 tonnes and the world yellowcake market is about 80,000 tonnes per annum. Perhaps he meant 770,000 lbs instead of tons, but nobody else in the editing and publishing chain picked up the mistake either.
A second howler is on page 195 which states “After the Fukushima-Daiichi accident, there was a brief run on supplies of iodine-131. An isotope of iodine produced in specialised reactors, iodine-131 is used to prevent thyroid cancer from radiation exposure.” What he meant was that there was panic buying of potassium iodide which is used to prevent thyroid cancer from iodine-131. For those interested in buying potassium iodide before the next nuclear scare instead of after it, the motherlode is Nasco in Wisconsin who will sell you half kilo of granules for $57.25. That’s enough to treat 360 people.
There is also the warmers’ naïve world view on display. For example, on page 238 he predicts that “Enhanced energy security, and the economic power and diplomatic prestige that come with it, allow India to reach a lasting détente with its perennial foe, Pakistan.” Haste is also evident – on page 132, Alvin Weinberg is referred to as “Weinberger”.
But I wouldn’t be mentioning the book at all if it wasn’t also useful and interesting. A large part of it is taken with recounting the history of two of the main protagonists of the early years of the nuclear age: Alvin Weinberg and Hyman Rickover. Weinberg was the earliest promoter of the molten salter reactor burning thorium. The coup de grace to the thorium programme was delivered by Milton Shaw when he was director of the reactor research and development at the Atomic Energy Commission. The world has been side-tracked on the dead end of uranium-burning light water reactors ever since. While not in the same league of storytelling as “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” by Richard Rhodes, “Super Fuel” gets the reader up to speed on thorium’s history quickly and relatively painlessly.
June 2012
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@ur momisugly David Archibald
========
You shouldn’t write a post this well and then just stop
But we don’t NEED thorium. There’s enough energy in just spent fuel rods sitting around to power us for a very long time:
http://www.businessinsider.com/waste-annihilating-molten-salt-reactor-2012-6
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=smarter-use-of-nuclear-waste
There’s real potential in developing thorium reactors but, for now, it’s just that – potential.
I know some would have us burn as much coal and oil as possible while waiting for a thorium breakthrough but that’s a potent blend of lunacy and wishful thinking.
Kirk Sorenson works hard at promoting thorium development but we can’t put all our eggs in any one basket.
I imagine India is keen on thorium research given their abundance of monazite but they’ve expended of lot of years and effort and and commercial exploitation is still decades away.
I would recommend Sorensen’s talks, his Energy From Thorium website and FB page over any book by a layman.
D Marshall;
I know some would have us burn as much coal and oil as possible while waiting for a thorium breakthrough but that’s a potent blend of lunacy and wishful thinking.>>>>
Oddly I cannot think of a single person who thinks we should burn as much coal and oil “as possible”. Nor do I think that the pragmatic amongst us are intent on sitting on our hands until a thorium breakthrough arrives. The pragmatic amongst us are confident that fossil fuels can be used with minimal environmental impact, and that human ingenuity will eventually deliver cost effective alternatives long before fossil fuels are depleted (provided that government intervention into the direction of science research doesn’t first exhaust our financial resources on dead end technologies like wind mills and solar panels).
Thorium is an option, and an interesting one. Who would have predicted the internet or the flat screen TV or the 200 channel universe or the cell phone network or many other taken for granted technologies just 25 years ago? Thorium is one of many possibilities, many of which nobody has even thought about….yet. See you in 25 years. It will be a different world in ways nobody can predict.
There are two new generation nuclear reactors currently competing to become the next generation of nuclear technology. Bill Gates company is promoting the Traveling Wave Reactor and Dirk Sorrenson is promoting the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR). I haven’t taken sides in that matter, but I do plan a second Thorium TV report soon built around Bill Gates involvement.
In any case, it will take at least ten years for either of these technologies to be accepted, built, tested and make operational. In the meantime, hopefully the global warming scare campaign can step aside and let us continue to power our civilization with fossil fuels.
I wrote and posted a blog when I did my first Thorium Special Report a month ago. Here it is:
“THORIUM will power the world”… That is the bumper sticker of the future.
The ugly debate about energy has gone on and on. It is costing us billions of dollars. It is beginning to cripple our nation. I have been looking for a source of abundant, cheap electric power that short cuts the raging, highly destructive debate; a source all sides can support. I think I have found it. It is thorium.
Thorium is nothing new. It was successfully demonstrated in the 1960s. I am not the only one to find it; there are now 100s, maybe even thousands of scientists, promoting it. But it has largely been forgotten and overlooked ever since the military/industrial complex and their political and bureaucratic servants dumped it 50 years ago.
I am asking for all sides in the climate change, global warming, carbon dioxide, carbon footprint debate to consider supporting thorium. It is green; it produces no “greenhouse gasses”, no particulate pollution, leaves little waste and produces no risk of explosion, radiation or pollution in the atmosphere or ocean. It is cheap; an abundant resource found in the desert salts and rocks in virtually every country on Earth. It is relatively cheap and simple to use.
I see every reason why, despite their huge, continuing differences on other issues, that thorium power can be accepted and promoted by all sides. I think Richard Lindzen and Michael Mann, Joe Bast and Peter Glieck, Fred Singer and James Hansen, Lord Monckton and Al Gore, Roger Pielke and Joe Romm should all set aside their debate long enough to help get the move to thorium electric power generation rolling.
I have just finished my first television report on thorium. It is over fives minutes long; a true monster of a long “package” by television news standards. Yet KUSI-TV News Director Steve Cohen gave his full support and approval and cleared it for telecast today, Monday, May 21st. It can be viewed here: http://youtu.be/F9e64AFieCM
After you have watched, please, do a little internet digging of your own. The Thorium Alliance website is a good place to look:
http://thoriumenergyalliance.com/ThoriumSite/portal.html
http://thoriumenergyalliance.com/
http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com/downloads/ThoriumSummary_Alex_Cannara.pdf
It will take a mountain of enthusiasm from a broad range of well positioned people to move the politicians and bureaucrats to back thorium. It would also be great if a major supplier of generating stations would climb aboard. I fear it is going to take a lot of political donations to move our Congress. And, I don’t think this can move forward without Congress.
If you’re interested enough to learn about thorium power here and now, read on:
—–
Is Thorium the Biggest Energy Breakthrough Since Fire? Possibly
By William Pentland, Contributor
For the past several months, a friend of mine has been telling me about the potentially game-changing implications of an obscure (at least to me) metal named Thorium after the Norse god of thunder, Thor.
It seems like he is not the only person who believes thorium, a naturally-occurring, slightly radioactive metal discovered in 1828 by the Swedish chemist Jons Jakob Berzelius, could provide the world with an ultra-safe, ultra-cheap source of nuclear power.
Last week, scores of thorium boosters gathered in the United Kingdom to launch a new advocacy organization, the Weinberg Foundation, which plans to push the promise of thorium nuclear energy into the mainstream political discussion of clean energy and climate change. The message they’re sending is that thorium is the anti-dote to the world’s most pressing energy and environmental challenges.
So what is the big deal about thorium? In 2006, writing in the magazine Cosmos, Tim Dean summarized perhaps the most optimistic scenario for what a Thorium-powered nuclear world would be like:
What if we could build a nuclear reactor that offered no possibility of a meltdown, generated its power inexpensively, created no weapons-grade by-products, and burnt up existing high-level waste as well as old nuclear weapon stockpiles? And what if the waste produced by such a reactor was radioactive for a mere few hundred years rather than tens of thousands? It may sound too good to be true, but such a reactor is indeed possible, and a number of teams around the world are now working to make it a reality. What makes this incredible reactor so different is its fuel source: thorium.
A clutch of companies and countries are aggressively pursuing Dean’s dream of a thorium-powered world.
Lightbridge Corporation, a pioneering nuclear-energy start-up company based in McLean, VA, is developing the Radkowsky Thorium Reactor in collaboration with Russian researchers. In 2009, Areva, the French nuclear engineering conglomerate, recruited Lightbridge for a project assessing the use of thorium fuel in Areva’s next-generation EPR reactor, advanced class of 1,600+ MW nuclear reactors being built in Olkiluoto, Finland and Flamanville, France.
In China, the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited and a clutch of Chinese outfits began an effort in mid-2009 to use thorium as fuel in nuclear reactors in Qinshan, China.
Thorium is more abundant than uranium in the Earth’s crust. The world has an estimated 4.4 million tons of total known and estimated Thorium resources, according to the International Atomic Energy Association’s 2007 Red Book.
The most common source of thorium is the rare earth phosphate mineral, monazite. World monazite resources are estimated to be about 12 million tons, two-thirds of which are in India. Idaho also boasts a large vein deposit of thorium and rare earth metals.
(I edited out a technical discussion here)
I have no idea whether thorium is the panacea many people claims it is likely to be, but I believe we’ll be hearing more about it in the years to come.
—–
The entire article including the part I edited out is from Forbes at:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/09/11/is-thorium-the-biggest-energy-breakthrough-since-fire-possibly/
There is more to come. Let’s get focused on this concept and try to see it through. It could save our modern, high technology way of life.
John Coleman
jcoleman@kusi.com
I have tried in the past to read warmist books, the last one was Manns howler. I usually have to put them down as soon as I read some BS. But since David has read it I will give it a whorl.
I have spoken to a few greens and they are in favor of thorium-based nuclear power.”The mind boggles with those greens”!
David! You should have said more, I always find your thinking extreamly informative. 🙂
Thorium is an option, yes.
One of its downsides: It produces weapons-grade uranium in a form that allows chemical extraction. More details here.
Try hard not to wander off in your own version of unicorn farts and rainbows.
Since doing my first Special Report on Thorium a month ago, I have been studying the two next generation nuclear reactor proposals that are battling for acceptance. They are the Traveling Wave Reactor proposed by a company founded by Bill Gates and Dirk Sorrenson’s Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR). I am working on a follow up report featuring Gates. I am not smart enough to know which of these proposals is better.
But I know that when one of them is finally accepted it will take at least ten years to build and test and install the first units. That means for now we must all work to set aside the CO2 pollutant scare campaign that is strangling our development of new sources of fossil fuels, power plants. refineries and pipelines.
Yes, many greens support the new generation of nuclear power reactors. That is good news to me; perhaps we can all work together to move that forward. I wrote a blog about this when I did my first Thorium report on KUSI. Here is that blog:
“THORIUM will power the world”… That is the bumper sticker of the future.
The ugly debate about energy has gone on and on. It is costing us billions of dollars. It is beginning to cripple our nation. I have been looking for a source of abundant, cheap electric power that short cuts the raging, highly destructive debate; a source all sides can support. I think I have found it. It is thorium.
Thorium is nothing new. It was successfully demonstrated in the 1960s. I am not the only one to find it; there are now 100s, maybe even thousands of scientists, promoting it. But it has largely been forgotten and overlooked ever since the military/industrial complex and their political and bureaucratic servants dumped it 50 years ago.
I am asking for all sides in the climate change, global warming, carbon dioxide, carbon footprint debate to consider supporting thorium. It is green; it produces no “greenhouse gasses”, no particulate pollution, leaves little waste and produces no risk of explosion, radiation or pollution in the atmosphere or ocean. It is cheap; an abundant resource found in the desert salts and rocks in virtually every country on Earth. It is relatively cheap and simple to use.
I see every reason why, despite their huge, continuing differences on other issues, that thorium power can be accepted and promoted by all sides. I think Richard Lindzen and Michael Mann, Joe Bast and Peter Glieck, Fred Singer and James Hansen, Lord Monckton and Al Gore, Roger Pielke and Joe Romm should all set aside their debate long enough to help get the move to thorium electric power generation rolling.
I have just finished my first television report on thorium. It is over fives minutes long; a true monster of a long “package” by television news standards. Yet KUSI-TV News Director Steve Cohen gave his full support and approval and cleared it for telecast today, Monday, May 21st. It can be viewed here: http://youtu.be/F9e64AFieCM
After you have watched, please, do a little internet digging of your own. The Thorium Alliance website is a good place to look:
http://thoriumenergyalliance.com/ThoriumSite/portal.html
http://thoriumenergyalliance.com/
http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com/downloads/ThoriumSummary_Alex_Cannara.pdf
It will take a mountain of enthusiasm from a broad range of well positioned people to move the politicians and bureaucrats to back thorium. It would also be great if a major supplier of generating stations would climb aboard. I fear it is going to take a lot of political donations to move our Congress. And, I don’t think this can move forward without Congress.
If you’re interested enough to learn about thorium power here and now, read on:
—–
Is Thorium the Biggest Energy Breakthrough Since Fire? Possibly
By William Pentland, Contributor
For the past several months, a friend of mine has been telling me about the potentially game-changing implications of an obscure (at least to me) metal named Thorium after the Norse god of thunder, Thor.
It seems like he is not the only person who believes thorium, a naturally-occurring, slightly radioactive metal discovered in 1828 by the Swedish chemist Jons Jakob Berzelius, could provide the world with an ultra-safe, ultra-cheap source of nuclear power.
Last week, scores of thorium boosters gathered in the United Kingdom to launch a new advocacy organization, the Weinberg Foundation, which plans to push the promise of thorium nuclear energy into the mainstream political discussion of clean energy and climate change. The message they’re sending is that thorium is the anti-dote to the world’s most pressing energy and environmental challenges.
So what is the big deal about thorium? In 2006, writing in the magazine Cosmos, Tim Dean summarized perhaps the most optimistic scenario for what a Thorium-powered nuclear world would be like:
What if we could build a nuclear reactor that offered no possibility of a meltdown, generated its power inexpensively, created no weapons-grade by-products, and burnt up existing high-level waste as well as old nuclear weapon stockpiles? And what if the waste produced by such a reactor was radioactive for a mere few hundred years rather than tens of thousands? It may sound too good to be true, but such a reactor is indeed possible, and a number of teams around the world are now working to make it a reality. What makes this incredible reactor so different is its fuel source: thorium.
A clutch of companies and countries are aggressively pursuing Dean’s dream of a thorium-powered world.
Lightbridge Corporation, a pioneering nuclear-energy start-up company based in McLean, VA, is developing the Radkowsky Thorium Reactor in collaboration with Russian researchers. In 2009, Areva, the French nuclear engineering conglomerate, recruited Lightbridge for a project assessing the use of thorium fuel in Areva’s next-generation EPR reactor, advanced class of 1,600+ MW nuclear reactors being built in Olkiluoto, Finland and Flamanville, France.
In China, the Atomic Energy of Canada Limited and a clutch of Chinese outfits began an effort in mid-2009 to use thorium as fuel in nuclear reactors in Qinshan, China.
Thorium is more abundant than uranium in the Earth’s crust. The world has an estimated 4.4 million tons of total known and estimated Thorium resources, according to the International Atomic Energy Association’s 2007 Red Book.
The most common source of thorium is the rare earth phosphate mineral, monazite. World monazite resources are estimated to be about 12 million tons, two-thirds of which are in India. Idaho also boasts a large vein deposit of thorium and rare earth metals.
(I edited out a technical discussion here)
I have no idea whether thorium is the panacea many people claims it is likely to be, but I believe we’ll be hearing more about it in the years to come.
—–
The entire article including the part I edited out is from Forbes at:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/09/11/is-thorium-the-biggest-energy-breakthrough-since-fire-possibly/
There is more to come. Let’s get focused on this concept and try to see it through. It could save our modern, high technology way of life.
John Coleman
jcoleman@kusi.com
u.k.(us) says:
June 7, 2012 at 8:00 pm
“@ur momisugly David Archibald
========
You shouldn’t write a post this well and then just stop”
Agree! We would like to hear more from you, David!
D Marshall says:
June 7, 2012 at 8:34 pm
“There’s real potential in developing thorium reactors but, for now, it’s just that – potential.
I know some would have us burn as much coal and oil as possible while waiting for a thorium breakthrough but that’s a potent blend of lunacy and wishful thinking.”
D Marshall,
OK – I’ll bite. If burning as much coal and oil as possible is feasible (and it is and coal is cheap!), why do you deem this to be a “potent blend of lunacy and wishful thinking”? I’m not ‘moon struck’ or prone to fantasies. Please elucidate, for our mutual edification.
MtK
The most radical, WWF, Greenpeace, UNEP etc etc are in this for the radical change of the Western society.
They don look for or want solutions to their selfmade problems they want problems ideas that will change the world.
I’m all for it. But I wanna hear how the molten fluoride salt is not gonna corrode whatever they build those reactors out of. And what’s gonna happen if they are wrong.
u.k.(us) says:
June 7, 2012 at 8:00 pm
At 400 words-odd, it is half as long as it should be. I knew this but thought it best to stop. To go on any further would have meant putting in the stuff that Mr Martin left out and it would also mean imposing my opinions on the reader rather than being just a straight review. As I wrote it late yesterday after a night on the turps in a karaoke bar, we should be thankful for small mercies.
Ric Locke says:
June 7, 2012 at 10:39 pm
Produced weapons grade uranium???? Even Wiki knows better than that. You can’t simply divert 233U. The contaminating 232U decays with isotopes producing hard gamma rays. It is not suitable material for bombs. http://www.articlesbase.com/ask-an-expert-articles/thorium-fuel-cycle-2879587.html
crosspatch says:
June 7, 2012 at 8:16 pm
Indeed. Only 1-3% of the fuel is actually used in these rods. What a waste. A big part of the problem is the solid fuel pellets. These accumulate isotopes (e.g. 135Xe) that absorb neutrons, and the pellets themselves swell and crack. Using solid fuel is a big reason the thorium-based Pebble Bed reactor is not a good idea. A liquid core would not have these problems. A liquid core can have contaminants removed in a continuous process. Some of these can have important medical uses, or other industrial uses.
We have twice as much Th available as U. We should find a way to use up the material in spent rods. It is a waste. Yucca Mountain should never be needed (it was an expensive show that was not necessary anyway – see the ref above). If we use the fuel we have in hand already, we should have enough to last a couple of centuries without digging any more out of the ground.
We should have a goal of 100% energy independence, and using more energy per capita. Energy use is necessary to make ilfe better.
Oops. That’s “life” and I’m tired. See you tomorrow same Bat time, same Bat channel.
John Coleman gave some good links above and here is a two hour, everything you want to know about a LFTR (liquid floride thorium reactor) down to the automatic chemical processing and U-233 denaturing for those who can absorb the science. It seems to have it all in very good, but long, video.
crosspatch says:
June 7, 2012 at 8:16 pm
We will need the plutonium from reprocessed fuel rods to start off the molten salt reactors. The alternative is U235 which would mean making a lot of transuranics from the entrained U238. One of the wise things that Obama did (the only one?) was to not have the fuel rods buried in Yucca Mountain. We need those spent fuel rods on the surface so that some future sensible government can extract the plutonium.
Ric Locke says:
June 7, 2012 at 10:39 pm
While it is theoretically possible to make a bomb from U233, nobody in their right mind would bother to do so. Off the top of my head, the minimum critical mass for a U233 bomb is 60 kg whereas plutonium weapons start at about 6 kg. The U232 in the weapon means that it would have to assembled remotely whereas sub-critical pieces of plutonium can be handled with gloves. The U233 device would also be radiating heat at 1,000 watts from the decay of that U232. Pu239 is the optimum solution for bomb making. You can make 1 gram a day per MW thermal of capacity.
pochas says:
June 7, 2012 at 11:42 pm
Consider, Pochas, that a molten salt reactor would run at about 700 degrees C whereas an aluminimum smelter, for example, runs at about 1,100 degrees C. In the latter, the working fluid is doing a hell of a lot of work. In the molten salt reactor, all the working fluid is aware of is heating and cooling in about a 300 degree C range. Chalk and cheese.
India seems to have woken up to Thorium a long time ago and has plants preparing it for use in various types of reactors, bottom of the page here:-
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf53.html
India has had operating thorium reactors for more than 50 years and still doesn’t have a commercial reactor. I must assume substantial technical issues remain.
As someone who worked in the nuclear industry and supports its expansion, I have to say that I think that the thorium proponents are misguided. They are trying to put together in one facility both a power reactor and a fuel reprocessing facility. They do not explain what/how they will deal with the waste that is generated and removed continuously from the molten fuel. Current reactors that use discrete fuel elements have the option to allow them to sit in reasonably safe, secure storage for quite a long while to make ultimate reprocessing relatively simple in a purpose-built facility. If you combine both activities in one place, you increase the complexity enormously, especially as you have to actively contain all of the short-lived fission-products that can be quite nasty to work with.
The last thing the nuclear industry needs is more demonstration reactors that end up costing a fortune and then sitting idle for years waiting for someone to clean them up. This is exactly what the greens want, so that they can use them to point to the basic technology as unproven, uneconomic, and unsafe.
The alternative to LFTR is the TWR, Travelling Wave Reactor, which is being promoted by your friendly Microsoft owner Bill Gates. The TWR uses liquid sodium as a coolant and no more dangerous and reactive a substance could I imagine to use as such. The LFTR is far safer to use and is self regulating so does not need all the complex control addons. The fission products are of low volume and one, an isotope of bismuth, is useful for the fight against cancer in that it can be easily targeted and is an alpha emitter which means that the side effects are near zero.
So the LFTR seems the right route to go and has the added plus that an experimental reactor ran for 5 years without problem in the 60’s before it was shut down for political reasons.
The Indian problem, according to Kirk Sorensen is that their route is to use a dry fuel not liquid which seems to produce a simpler design and easier/safer running.
John Coleman @ur momisugly June 7, 2012 at 9:46 pm “In any case, it will take at least ten years for either of these technologies to be accepted, built, tested and make operational.”
The UK is likely about that time frame away from correcting it’s wind mill fantasy and shuttering all those hydrocarbon generators. Thorium would be near perfect for the UK – small footprint, safer than Michael Mann, won’t freeze in winter and might make pensioners happy.
Obtw, the folks at Los Alamos (who claim to be nuclear scientists) did a study some years ago
(here: http://bioage.typepad.com/greencarcongress/docs/GreenFreedom.pdf )
to manufacture hydrocarbons as discussed in the NYT here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/science/19carb.html
Then, as typical, the greenies went after them and they produced the standard fear article here:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/federal-lab-says-it-can-harvest-fuel-from-air/
Los Alamos used “conventional” nuclear for power. The numbers would all trend vastly lower since thorium plants could be built with components made from assembly lines.
One hopes the UK, and others, will dismantle all those ghastly killing wind machines.
I’m a big fan of Thorium energy but the video in the article is so wrong about so many things it’s really, really sad.
– “and that waste can not be used to make bombs”
the statement makes false impression that thorium reactors cannot be used to make military nuclear materials – but they can, because the working material contains weapon-grade uranium
– “no chance of that mushroom cloud armageddon”
That’s not what happened in any of nuclear accidents besides nuclear bomb tests. Pictures of atomic mushrooms besides nuclear plants are and always were propaganda and this is just another propaganda trying to beat the original one.
– “thorium nuclear plants will operate at standard air pressure”
Current nuclear reactors don’t need high pressure to operate. The steam turbines which actually create the electricity need it. It’s irrelevant whether the steam is created by uranium or thorium. In other words, thorium reactors will use high pressure as well unless someone discovers more effective way to convert heat to electricity than steam.
– “thorium nuclear plants don’t use power rods”
That’s the funny one. What’s so safer on molten salt compared to solid rods? To transfer the heat effectively they’ll need to run it through some pipes so here you have your rods again, even in a pre-molten state ready for problems.
– “drain tank”
Current nuclear reactors use one, too – for the case the fuel melts.
– “if an earthquake and a 747 and a tidal wave hit it all at once…”
… then their containment tank would rupture just as it happened in Fukushima, releasing radioactive materials to the sea just like in Fukushima.
– “our fossil fuel usage would be diminishing every year”
It sure wouldn’t be as high but I don’t think thorium reactors would be mounted on cars. Quite probably they wouldn’t be mounted on any moveable vehicles except military just as today. And coal/oil would still be used in chemistry which is just another way of releasing CO2 from them. The whole end is full of sweet dreams but most of them would not happen even if the thorium was chosen over uranium.
Yes I think thorium is our future. But to get there, we need realistic approach, not propaganda.