User:Limulus

Interesting Items

 * Limulus
 * Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense
 * WP:ABF

Articles I've Done Significant Work On
(though not necessarily recently)




 * Anderson Cooper
 * Carl Linnaeus, and related articles:
 * Animalia Paradoxa
 * Commemoration of Carl Linnaeus
 * Expedition to Lapland
 * Linnaeus (disambiguation)
 * Flibe Energy and Closed-cycle gas turbine
 * Gee Gee James
 * Harris, Saskatchewan
 * Internet Explorer for UNIX
 * Judith Reisman
 * Krampus (mostly images and IPC section)
 * Krampus in North American popular culture
 * No-analog (ecology)
 * Pandora's Promise
 * List of pro-nuclear environmentalists
 * Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006
 * Toxicofera (formerly "Venom clade" :)
 * Template:Actinides vs fission products
 * Template:Ra to Es by HL
 * Voodoo Science

Thorium
By 1946, only eight years after the discovery of nuclear fission, three fissile isotopes had been publicly identified for use as nuclear fuel:


 * Uranium-235, which is already fissile, but occurs as <1% of natural uranium
 * Plutonium-239, which can be bred from non-fissile Uranium-238 (>99% of natural uranium)
 * Uranium-233, which can be bred from non-fissile Thorium-232 (~100% of natural thorium; about four times more common than uranium )

Th-232, U-235 and U-238 are primordial nuclides, having existed in their current form for over 4.5 billion years, predating the formation of the Earth; they were forged in the cores of dying stars through the r-process and scattered across the galaxy by supernovas. Their radioactive decay produces about half of the earth's internal heat.

For technical (outlined in a section below) and historical reasons, the three are each associated with different reactor types. U-235 is the world's primary nuclear fuel and is usually used in light water reactors. U-238/Pu-239 has found the most use in liquid sodium fast breeder reactors. Th-232/U-233 is best suited to molten salt reactors (MSR).

Alvin M. Weinberg pioneered the use of the MSR at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The Aircraft Reactor Experiment in 1954 and Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment from 1965 to 1969 both used liquid fluoride salts; the latter notably demonstrated the use of U-233 as a fuel source. Unfortunately for MSR research, Weinberg was fired and the MSR program closed down in the early 1970s, after which research stagnated in the United States.

Sorensen-related


 * Energy From Thorium Sorensen's website "Devoted to the discussion of thorium as a future energy resource, and the machine to extract that energy–the liquid-fluoride thorium reactor."
 * Thorium Energy Alliance Conference Proceedings
 * Kirk Sorensen - A Global Alternative @ TEAC4 Kirk Sorensen's presentation at Thorium Energy Alliance Conference #4 in Chicago.
 * Manchester Report: Thorium nuclear power
 * Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke
 * Forbes article: Is Thorium the Biggest Energy Breakthrough Since Fire? Possibly.

Thorium in India (map)
For Occurrence of thorium based on File:India-locator-map-thorium2012.svg updated with