China, the country that contaminates the most in the world, seeks to abandon its dependence on fossil fuels through transition to nuclear and renewable energy. The thorium is just one of the main bets of the Government of Xi Jinping to achieve energy independence, and thus supply its huge population practically forever.
The medium South China Morning Post He cited a declassified study that reveals that China could have enough Torio to meet their energy needs for 60,000 years. This supposed inexhaustible source of energy is found in the country’s mining waste, which “remain totally intact.” If the thorium is properly extracted (and this point is the main current challenge), this resource could end the dependence on fossil fuels (coal, natural gas and oil), not only from China, but of the entire world.
The study notes that in China there are 233 rich areas in Torio but it gives as an example an iron site that is in the Mining District of Bayan Obo, in the autonomous region of Interior Mongolia, north of China. In this place, five years of mining waste would suffice to produce a million tons of thorium, according to the estimates of geologists. This energy capacity would be sufficient even to meet the demanding demands of American households for a thousand years.
“For more than a century, the nations of the world have been engaged in wars for fossil fuels,” a geologist told the South China Morning Post, who preferred not to reveal his identity. “It turns out that the inexhaustible source of energy is just below our feet.” But if this “inexhaustible” resource can generate up to 200 times more energy than uranium (according to the Nuclear World Association) and is “just below our feet”, as the Chinese researcher, why has this large -scale resource been exploited so far?
What is the thorium?
In its pure state, the thorium (TH, atomic number 90) is a soft silver and slightly radioactive metal. It was discovered in 1828 by the Swedish chemist Jakob Berzelius, who baptized him in honor of Tor, the god of thunder in Nordic mythology. The thorium could be found in small quantities in most rocks and floors, where it is approximately three times more abundant than uranium.
In the extraction of chemical elements known as “Rare Earth”, the thorium is a byproduct of this mining activity, since it is found in a natural state in minerals such as Monacita, Torita and Torianita. Although the thorium has been found different practical and commercial purposes (bulbs, flashlight covers, arc lamps, cameras lens), scientists in China want to exploit this resource in a molten salt reactor, a type of nuclear plant that could provide huge amounts of energy.
Nuclear reactors create energy by making radioactive elements undergo a process called fission. Unlike Uranium-232, the thorium is not fisible on its own. Therefore, a conventional nuclear plant cannot transform thorio into energy, but the thorium can provide the base for a fission reaction in a molten salt reactor.
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