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Gold/Mining/Energy : What is Thorium -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Diamond Daze who wrote (343)	2/27/2007 6:14:56 PM
From: Webster Groves	Respond to of 912

I should generally refrain from going into lecture mode, but here I go .... Do not interpret that quote from the website as literal. At best it is a metaphor for the nuclear processing of plutonium into other less dangerous elements from a nuclear weapons viewpoint. Nothing is really "burned", There is no oxidation. Think about it. When paper is incinerated, you get ash and CO2 combustion products. All the carbon in the paper is still there but processed into other compounds. One can also chemically incinerate plutonium in the presence of oxygen to create PuO2/PuO5, but the plutonium atom is still there. OTOH, if the company intends a literal interpretation then they are idiots, but I am not prepared to say that now so I prefer to think they construct simple parables to teach the masses. Thorium/plutonium reactors in fact are (or can be) designed to run "cool" inherently so that meltdown conditions are never possible in the event of loss of cooling water: iaea.org The idea is to keep temperature low - that means below 1600 C. Nothing is really burned. wg