I just found a really nice report at a swiss website, I´d like to share with all of you:
The american company Laser Power System, who´s based in Connecticut, is engineering a new drive method for vehicles using one of the densest materials of nature: thorium. This is the result of a report by Industry Tap. The company experimented with small thorium blocks. The heat released from the material is used for a laser that heats up water and supplies a mini-turbine with the water vapor. The turbine, in turn, generates the electric current with which the vehicle is driven. The drive does not generate any pollutant emissions.
Thorium - a forgotten alternative
Liquid fluoride-thorium reactors: What initially sounds chemically and dangerously is, in reality, a revolutionary reactor concept, which I would like to introduce in more detail below. Thorium reactors do not use uranium, but thorium. This element is about three times more abundant than uranium in the Earth's crust, so that even with an extensive global deployment, the supplies would be secured for centuries. Moreover, in the naturally occurring form it is practically non-radioactive (unlike the uranium, which is radioactive in the naturally occurring ores such as pitchblende), the half-life of the only naturally occurring isotope, thorium-232, is over 14 billion years. In order to render this isotope of thorium at first fissionable, it must be fired with neutrons, then it is transformed into thorium-233, which in turn decomposes to proactinium-233 in a few minutes. This must now be protected by a further neutron capture, so that it can decay to uranium-233 in about 27 days.
Uranium-233, in turn, is an excellent nuclear reactor fuel that allows a chain reaction to be sustained: with neutron uptake, Uran-233 releases further neutrons that induce further uranium-233 to cleave-and, in addition, convert further thorium-232 to thorium-233 , which closes the circuit. The fission products of uranium-233 are much more short-lived: the radioactive waste would no longer be dangerous after 300 years. Longer-lived radioactive nuclides are produced only in very small quantities. Moreover, the total amount of radioactive waste per usable energy is smaller by a factor of 1000. This is mainly due to the fact that around 98% of the fuel is actually burnt, in contrast to uranium fuels, where the fuel must be disposed of as waste after 2-5% of incineration (depending on whether it is recycled or not).
Why has not thorium been used before?
The positive thing is that various countries like Norway, China and India are finally starting to build thorium reactors. The technology was already researched in the USA in the 1960s. However, since it does not produce a plutonium waste, it was quickly dropped again. The military-industrial complex, which also controls the energy market, needed the plutonium to build its A-bombs. For this reason, the highly efficient and environmentally friendly thorium has been abandoned in favor of uranium. Sad but true ...
Thorium is also quite cheap. In order to replace all the electricity from the Swiss nuclear power plants by thorium reactors, about three tons of thorium would be required each year. With a world market price of 60 dollars per kilogram, Switzerland could be supplied with around 200,000 Swiss francs for one year. Uranium is, on the contrary, about five times more expensive (in addition, the production of the same amount of electricity needs more uranium, because of the lower conversion efficiency), tendency is increasing.
Conclusion: Unlike uranium, thorium is clean, efficient and cheap. It is too good to be marketable in our system. Yet many people still argue that we owe progress and prosperity to our system. This naive argument is rebutted by the example of thorium. Our system is not interested in people or their comfort and prosperity. In another system, such as the resource-based economy, there would be no world problem, and most likely no resource wars.
In this context, I should also like to point out that there are still other highly efficient and clean sources of energy that are still being deprived of us from the elite to this day. Scarcity and deficiency are artificially created to keep us "trot".
You find the original posting in German language here.