As the nuclear fuel consumption increases and the supply of uranium remains uncertain (but being found all over the world), thorium is being considered as a possible alternative to uranium to provide safe and abundant nuclear power at a reasonable cost. For example, India has been interested in thorium-based nuclear energy for decades, according to the USGS. Still, extracting its latent energy value in a cost-effective way remains a challenge technologically, meaning much more research and development is required.
The question of whether thorium works for energy production was answered in 2013, when privately owned Norwegian company, Thor Energy, began to produce power at its Halden test reactor in Norway using thorium. It is the fundamental first step in the thorium evolution, Thor Energy CEO, Oystein Asphjell, told Reuters at the time.
Nuclear giant Westinghouse, a unit of Toshiba, is part of an international consortium that Thor Energy established to fund and manage the experiments. An established player in nuclear energy, Westinghouse provides viewpoints on the research to China as well.
Thor Energy is not the only company engaged in researching whether or not it is a viable alternative to uranium in nuclear energy. In fact, firms from the U.S., Australia, Czech Republic, India, China, and Russia have also been working on thorium reactor designs and other elements of fuel technology using the metal. However, Thor was the first to begin energy production using the radioactive metal.
The U.S. is not the only place that contains thorium resources. According to the USGS, in 2014 exploration and development of rare earths projects associated with thorium were underway in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Greenland, India, Russia, South Africa, the U.S. and Vietnam.
Thorium may be useful not because uranium fuel is getting scarce (it is not) but because when thorium is used in reactors, it produces less waste than when using uranium. But there are still issues.
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