Red Symons, host of the breakfast program on 774 ABC Melbourne

Credit: ABC Radio

Thorium is a naturally-occurring, slightly radioactive metal discovered in 1828 by the Swedish chemist Jons Jakob Berzelius, who named it after Thor, the Norse god of thunder. It is found in small amounts in most rocks and soils, where it is about three times more abundant than uranium.

It also has the capability to generate power inexpensively, offers no possibility of a meltdown, creates no weapons grade by-products and burns up existing high-level waste as well as old nuclear weapon stockpiles.

Red Symons spoke to Wilson da Silva of COSMOS Magazine to find out more about this super-element and why it is still largely unheard of and under-utilised.

"It's been stumping us for a while, it's so obviously a fabulous technology that should be looked at, it doesn't produce greenhouse gasses so it's something that people are rather interested in now," Wilson explains.

"If you've gone camping and you've used those white mantles, that white stuff that you put on top of the mantle and you light is made of thorium. It's just lightly radioactive but it's radioactive enough to start a nuclear reaction if you either pack some uranium with it or you attach a particle accelerator and cook it up," he continues.

Into this amazing core of thorium you can just pour old nuclear waste and warheads and it will just cook it all - it's like a broth, it just gets rid of it!

"Once you've got that going it completely changes the physics of the reactions. All sorts of nasty stuff, like producing waste that stays radioactive for ten thousand years - some if it lasts ninety thousand years - that all disappears. And it means that into this amazing core of thorium you can just pour old nuclear waste and warheads and it will just cook it all - it's like a broth, it just gets rid of it!"

So why are we not using thorium already?

"An old physicist gave us the clue: years ago they could have [started using it] but because you can't make weapons out of it it's not that attractive. However in this day and age it's being looked at again. Some places like India, who has so little uranium but has the world's second largest reserves of thorium, have been working on it for a while."

Research into thorium use has been conducted in Europe and Russia, but Australia has been slow on the uptake.

There is only one Australian who is doing any research on this and he's completely funded by the Germans.

"Recently the U.S. has been funding a program in the former Soviet Union to try and get rid of weapons stockpiles. The Europeans are really interested, in Madrid there's a complex of three reactors and they're thinking of building [a thorium] one right next to it so it can chew up the waste produced by the other reactors and test the concept…but there is only one Australian who is doing any research on this and he's completely funded by the Germans," says Wilson.

"Nobody's actually built a full-scale model to test this out, it would cost about 1.1 million to build it, but lab tests and the smaller prototypes that are built seem to work so the physics looks right. Even if you just built one not just to generate power but to get rid of old waste, that's a really good option."

Considering that Australia has the world's highest reserve of thorium (at 300,000 tonnes, followed by India at 290,000 then Norway at 17,000) it seems it could definitely be within the country's interest to be looking at this research.