Thorium: A Lifetime of Energy in the palm of your hand!
Executive Summary:
U.S. Development of Affordable Clean Energy that is Cheaper than Coal
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“Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.” President John F. Kennedy
A problem with most traditional natural energy resources, such as coal and oil, is that they are cheap only when they are abundant, and expensive when they are not. These peaks and valleys in our energy markets are a result of accessibility and abundance. Simply put, the more abundant an energy source is, and the easier it is to access, the more affordable it is. But interrupt supply, or reduce it, and prices skyrocket. Embracing fossil fuels, along with their constant boom and bust cycle, is a long-‐term energy plan that will have our economy riding the roller coaster of success and failure respectively in times of boom and bust. It is not a long-‐term plan to provide any type of lasting stability to the markets. Fossil fuels simply are neither abundant enough nor accessible enough. What we need is a clean energy resource that is abundant, accessible, safe, reliable, and affordable. Until now, energy that was cheap tended to be the dirtiest (solid and liquid fossil fuels), and energy that is clean (renewables) was the most expensive. Expensive energy puts the brakes on the economy and hurts those that can least afford it, the poor, by increasing our cost of living. Dirty energy hurts our environment and our health and is not a sustainable long-‐term policy either. We are at an energy and environment crossroads: we want clean energy, but we do not want to pay any more for it. If we sacrifice our economy by the government’s mandating the use of expensive clean energy technologies to improve our health, many of us, including our poor, will not be able to afford our energy bills for gasoline and electricity. Our neighborhoods will suffer, and eventually the health effects of poverty caused by the unavailability of cheap and abundant energy will negate any benefits of a cleaner environment.
And it is not just our bills for direct energy consumption that go up. Higher energy costs amount to an increased “tax” on everything we buy and use. Everything we make, everything we grow, everything we transport, uses energy. If the cost of diesel fuel rises, truckers pay more to transport goods, and that increased cost is passed on to the eventual consumer. When a trucking company passes on its increased fuel costs to, say, McDonalds, to keep them supplied with hamburgers and buns, McDonalds covers these increased costs by increasing the price of its hamburgers. If they did not do this, they would not stay in business, and no one would have McDonalds hamburgers any more. When energy prices rise, all of us pay the price in everything we buy, not just for the gasoline and the electricity we use. But there is a solution to this. What if we had an energy resource that was so common, so abundant, and so cheap that everyone would have the ability not only to sustain themselves, but to thrive? That resource is the element Thorium, and every nation has it! Thorium can provide us with ultra clean energy cheaper than coal! Dr. Carlo Rubbia, who shared the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physics, described Thorium as having "absolute pre-‐eminence" over all other fuels, including fossil fuels and Uranium.
Thorium: The Smart Choice!
China, Russia, and India are all aggressively pursuing the commercialization of Thorium energy technology. A few American companies want the chance to develop this technology. We missed our first and best chance to do that ourselves. America was well on its way to commercializing Thorium technology in the 1970’s, but when there was a downturn in the economy, the technology was shelved at the time due to the cost to commercialize it. Today, more than ever, we need affordable and accessible energy if we are to remain competitive in the world marketplace, and it must be clean energy. With abundant, low-‐ cost energy from Thorium, our economy will stop shipping jobs overseas because our manufacturing costs will go down, wages will increase, and there will be many more jobs here.
In addition to electricity, Thorium technologies will provide inexpensive fresh water from seawater; inexpensive synthetic gasoline and diesel to get America completely off foreign oil; and two kinds of medical isotopes: one for which there is now no American supply, and is used in over 320,000 diagnostic procedures in the U.S. per week; and a second isotope, now very expensive and in short supply, which is needed for cancer research and for a possible cure for many cancers. Finally, Thorium technology will produce isotopes to power NASA’s deep space probes. To learn more goto: http://www.Th90.org