The Thorium Cult

“The Thorium Dream” is a short documentary from Motherboard TV about the Thorium Energy Alliance, a campaign group in the United States trying to convince whoever is interested about the blessings of thorium-based nuclear reactors. 

The documentary isn´t *that* interesting, and says relatively little about the thorium reactors themselves. Instead, we get a series of Messianic sales pitches from the Alliance leaders. The whole thing looks very geeky and even slightly cultish, although the “cultists” are self-ironic, since one of them even talks about thorium energy being “like an Ashram in the sixties”! LOL. 

That being said, I happen to suspect that these guys (or geeks) are on to something. Yes, thorium reactors probably can “save the world”, or at the very least make us less dependent on fossil fuels and uranium-based nuclear energy. The problem is that any large-scale conversion from our present energy system to another one will take a long time and cost a lot of money (and, I suppose, energy). Do we still have the time? Donald Trump is dizzy on fossil and fracking, while Europe is waking up from its “solar and wind” stupor only to embrace that good ol´ uranium that made the world MAD-ly safe during the latest Cold War. “The Thorium Dream” claims that China – as usual – is developing thorium reactors, and in other sources, India is the main suspect. 

While I don´t think anything can play the role of Secular Messiah (for us humans, one day is not like a thousand years), thorium reactors are at the very least worth a try. Unless, of course, you want to move in with the hippies featured in this documentary, and then die of the bubonic plague.