INTRODUCTION

One day in June 2009, I hiked along the Clinch River in northern Tennessee to what was once supposed to be the site of the most advanced nuclear power plant in the world. With my companions—John Kutsch, the owner of an engineering design firm in Chicago; Bruce Patton, a scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory 30 miles or so up the road; and Kirk Sorensen, an engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama—I clambered over a dilapidated chain-link fence and walked down the dirt road that followed the meandering river. It was the first really steamy day of summer. The woods were loud with crickets and desultory birdsong, and a double-crested cormorant launched itself off the surface of the sluggish river. We were trespassing on federal property, but it seemed unlikely that anyone would care. We passed the foundation of an old guard shack covered in foliage. It was like the setting for a postapocalyptic movie, except we weren’t being pursued by zombies.

After a mile or so we came to a wide clearing on the inner curve of a horseshoe bend in the river. Obviously manmade, it was empty save for grass and gravel and a few arborvitae trees. Nothing stirred.

“Eight billion dollars,” said Sorensen. “That’s what you’re looking at.”

What we were looking at was the abandoned site of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor. Planned in the 1960s, Clinch River was originally conceived as the prototype of a new class of futuristic nuclear reactors that would create more fuel than they consumed. The project officially began in 1970 and finally was abandoned in 1983, after innumerable studies, reports, and rhetoric, plus the eight billion dollars that Sorensen mentioned. Once advertised as the future of power generation in the United States, Clinch River is now synonymous with technological hubris and the failed promise of atomic power. We were standing in the graveyard of the U.S. nuclear power industry.

As we ambled back toward our cars, Sorensen—who at that time was studying for a master’s degree in nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee—talked about the folly of U.S. nuclear policy and about the little-known element that could transform it.

“Thorium was the alternate path,” he said. “It’s a safer, more abundant fuel that could’ve revolutionized nuclear power. The problem is, it has almost nothing in common with what we’re doing now.”

I was on assignment for Wired magazine, and that trip, which encompassed a round of interviews at Oak Ridge and a driving tour of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s extensive power-generation facilities, including the massive Watts Bar Nuclear Generating Station 25 miles or so to the south, was my introduction to the thorium power movement. This book is the outcome of the journey that started on that hot summer day in Tennessee.

I’ve written for Wired for ten years, and I’ve often joked that every story in the magazine has to use the word revolutionary. Thorium power actually seemed to justify that label. The more I learned about the lost history of thorium—especially the successful creation of a thorium-powered reactor at Oak Ridge in the 1960s and the career of the Oak Ridge director Alvin Weinberg, who championed safe thorium reactors and lost his job for it—the more astonished and outraged I became. Here was an inexpensive, safe, abundant energy source that could power every city on Earth, with enough left over for hundreds of millions of electric vehicles, for several millennia. And we were sitting on it, essentially doing nothing. It was insane. And the small band of technologists I was traveling with that day seemed like the only ones who were actually trying to bring the technology back to life, with zero encouragement from the government and plenty of disdain from the nuclear power industry.

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IN A WAY THIS BOOK WAS BORN not when I first saw a mention of thorium power online (in a guest post written by Charles Barton Jr., on the website The Oil Drum) but decades before, when I was in high school, backpacking in the Ozark Mountains of northwest Arkansas. I grew up in Little Rock, and my friends and I spent many, many weekends trekking through the Ozarks and camping in the thick forests that cover the deep gorges formed by the Buffalo River and its watershed.

For several years we went out every January 1 for a New Year’s backpacking trip. The Ozarks are spectacular in the winter. Daytime temperatures fall into the teens, the creeks are frozen over so the hiking is easy (but not so solid that water’s unavailable), and sunlight glitters through the bare elms, oaks, and walnuts. The solitude and stillness are absolute. Downed wood is plentiful in the Ozarks, and at night we built bonfires. Sitting around the fire, surrounded by the dark and frozen wilderness, forces on you a powerful impression of the energy that sustains our fragile lives. Backpacking requires you to carry with you all the fuel to sustain you for the length of the trek— for your camp stove, for your body, for igniting the energy stored in all that downed wood. Much time in the woods is spent calculating energy: How much should I eat now? How much wood do we need to gather? How much clothing should I wear to stay warm without sweating too much? How am I going to light my camp stove if my matches get damp? Will my flashlight batteries last?

I’m an early riser in the wilderness, and I used to awaken in the zero-degree dawn to light the morning fire. Relight it, actually: I prided myself on being able to restart the fire from the previous night’s still-glowing embers, rather than using a match. That’s when I began to wonder about energy. From where does it come? How is it that the glowing coals store their energy through the subfreezing night? Is energy infinite—could we ever burn all the dead wood this forest sheds? And so my thoughts ran until the sun came over the ridge and my companions emerged from their tents.

In a dim and intuitive way, I understood that energy knows no extinction, only transformation; that the energy in the wood, released as fire, is the same as the energy that fuels the stars that still throbbed in the lightening sky; that transformations of energy lie at the heart of all living things, and that energy lives in all things, no matter how dumb or inanimate.¹

Later I pursued more defined answers through my work. I’d been covering energy for more than two decades, and it was increasingly hard to see a way out of our current fix. In 1987, during one of the periodic crashes that regularly decimated the oil industry back then, I spent a month driving the Gulf Coast, from Houston to the Florida Keys, to write about the people whose lives had been upended when the price of a barrel of oil went from $50 to $20 in a little more than a year. A decade later I was one of the first Western journalists in Central Asia to cover the Caspian Sea oil boom. I’d gone 600 feet underground to report on the world’s richest uranium mine, at MacArthur River in northern Saskatchewan, and I’d flown across the frozen North Slope of Alaska to write about new horizontal drilling techniques that were pulling oil from under the permafrost near the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In 2001, a month after 9/11, I went to London to interview Royal Dutch Shell’s team of futurists, the Scenarios Group. A couple of years later I was in the empty hull of an oil tanker in a New Orleans shipyard reporting on the plague of “super-rust” that was eating away the industry’s supertankers. I’d come to respect, even admire, some of the people in the oil industry who I’d interviewed. But it was increasingly obvious that global climate change was going to wreak widespread havoc on, if not the complete destruction of, our oil-addicted society. I liked driving a car, and I liked being able to fly across the Pacific in a day. I didn’t want to go back to a pre-fossil fuel economy.

For all the promise of renewable energy sources and all the hype lavished on them, it was clear that wind, solar, geothermal, biofuel, and such stood no chance of replacing a significant amount of carbon-based sources in time to significantly slow down the relentless heating of the planet. Only one source is clean enough, inexpensive enough, and abundant enough to do this: nuclear power. And despite the talk of a nuclear renaissance, nuclear power was going nowhere. Thorium has the potential to change that. After my Wired story on thorium ran in December 2009, thorium got little attention. An occasional newspaper feature or article in the science press would appear touting its promise, but no one else in the mainstream media was covering it in a systematic way. Here was a story that needed covering on an ongoing basis, and I was the only one on the thorium beat.

There was another factor at work. The thorium power movement was not static. In 2009 when I was reporting the Wired story, the thorium-heads, as I call them, were advocates, geeks, dreamers. They seemed like the kind of guys (they were all guys) who wrote letters to the editor of Popular Science. They had passion but no power, beliefs but no business plans. Their ideas were powerful, but they lacked the means to accomplish their desired ends. They discussed arcane topics in nuclear physics and materials science endlessly in online forums, conversations that never reached beyond the thorium community. As Kutsch, a pragmatist, liked to say, they were “building a boat in a basement.”

Gradually that started to change. By the summer of 2011, when I was deep into the writing of this book, developments around thorium power were happening too fast for me to keep up. My story had played a small role in that—it helped Kirk Sorensen, who was featured in that story, get a job as the chief nuclear technologist at the nuclear supplier Teledyne Brown. Later he founded the thorium power start-up Flibe Energy. Groups like the Thorium Energy Alliance, a nonprofit formed by John Kutsch, moved the cause forward, too. Mainly, though, it was the involvement of actual business people (like George Langworth, featured in chapter 8), with actual business plans that had the potential to attract actual funding, that turned thorium power from a small movement of a dedicated few into a worldwide, if diffuse, program to build real reactors. Something big was afoot, and I was in position to witness it and tell the world about it.

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ALL THIS WAS HAPPENING AGAINST THE BACKDROP of two wars in the Middle East, the rise of China as an economic superpower, total political paralysis in Washington, the worst financial crash since the Great Depression, and oil prices that looked to be headed permanently beyond the $100-a-barrel mark. In other words, most Americans did not have time to concern themselves with the disappearance of the Arctic ice cap or the inundation of South Pacific islands because of global warming. Few of the major accomplishments in American history have ever been achieved purely out of concern for the environment or for future generations. What I came to understand, though, is that thorium power is connected to just about all these issues and has the potential to solve, or at least address, many of the big problems we face as a nation and a society.

The development of safe, clean, essentially limitless thorium power technology could help right the U.S. trade imbalance with China. By supplying inexpensive electricity and desalinated water, thorium power could help cure some of the ills that still face the economies of the Middle East after the Arab Spring. By creating jobs, calling forth a surge in technological innovation, and slashing the price of electricity, thorium power could help put the economy back on a sustainable track while providing opportunity and hope to millions of increasingly disenfranchised young people. It’s a nonpartisan energy source that both Republicans and Democrats could get behind. Supplying clean, inexpensive electricity could help us wean ourselves from the ruinous dependence on imported oil. And so on.

It sounds like I believe that thorium is a panacea. And many in the energy industry will dismiss this book as a piece of misguided hype. The one question I hear more than any other when I describe thorium’s potential is: “So why aren’t we using it now?” The nuclear power establishment—the nuclearati, as I call them in this book—turns that question around as an argument against thorium: “If it was so great, we’d already be using it.” This book, in a sense, is a long demonstration of why that’s not so and why the structure of the nuclear power industry, its origins at the end of World War II, and its historical subservience to the interests of the military have prevented thorium from taking a place in the portfolio of world energy sources.

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A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE TERMS “energy” and “power”: Often used interchangeably, they’re actually distinct. Put most simply, power is defined as energy expended or spent during a specific time interval. Think of a ton of wood. A certain amount of energy is stored in the wood. When the wood is burned, it releases energy in the form of heat. Energy is measured in joules; a ton of wood might have 18 billion joules of energy stored. If you burn that ton at a rate of one stick an hour, you’d release that energy at a certain rate, measured in joules per second—usually called watts. That rate is power. If you burn all the wood at once in a single conflagration, you get a higher level of power, but the total amount of energy doesn’t change. Power is the rate at which energy is released.

Energy can be stored; power is an instantaneous measure. Energy can change its form; power cannot. To oversimplify, energy is the potential and power is the output. A thorium atom has a certain amount of energy stored within it. The rate of power output of a nuclear plant is usually measured in megawatts: a thousand-megawatt reactor, for example. The amount of energy actually released in a nuclear reactor is called the burnup. As I will show, the burnup achieved in thorium reactors is much higher than that of uranium. This is a major reason why thorium is such a better nuclear fuel than uranium.

I use “power” and “energy” in this book mostly according to their original meanings. The confusion of the two in the popular mind, though, leads to some misconceptions that affect our ideas about, and our policy toward, energy and power. We don’t have an energy crisis. We have a power crisis. There is plenty of energy on Earth—streaming down from the sun, stored in deep geothermal reservoirs, packed into thorium atoms—to power human society effectively forever. The crisis lies in turning it into power—creating an output that can do work. Oil and coal, lying relatively close to the surface, easy to burn, with a high energy content by volume, were the easy sources to develop. With them we embarked on the Industrial Revolution, brought light and air-conditioning to millions of people around the world, fashioned a mobile car-based society, went to the moon and back, and built gleaming cities of skyscrapers where lights burn 24 hours a day. Now comes the hard part.

The choices we have to make are not easy ones. Thorium is no panacea, but of all the energy sources on Earth, it is the most abundant, most readily available, cleanest, and safest. We can’t afford not to develop it. We also can’t afford to continue making power choices based on politics, ignorance, pseudoscience, and the dominance of the rich over the poor. At its core this book is not just about a wondrous element that has the potential to solve our power crisis. It’s about the choices we make as a society.