Nuclear Waste One of the main objections to nuclear energy stems from the waste that it generates. To run today’s typical 1 gigawatt light water reactor for one year requires 250 tonnes of uranium and you are left with 35 tonnes of fission products and 0.3 tonnes of plutonium which must be...

Ratan Kumar Sinha, Director of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Trombay, took over on Monday as Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and Secretary of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), from Srikumar Banerjee, who retired after 45 years of distinguished service. Mr. Sinha is one...

Oslo, Norway, 30 April 2012 - Algeta ASA (OSE: ALGETA), a company focused on the development of novel targeted cancer therapeutics, announces that its research collaboration with Sanofi (previously Genzyme) has been extended. This collaboration, which was announced in April 2011, is focused on...

Charles Barton on his blog talks about why we need thorium even if uranium is renewable. He writes: The use of the DMSR will provide major benefits. First the technology has late been tested already. The DMSR draws heavily on the technology already used in the ORNL Molten Salt Reactor...

If the year is 2011, you are likely watching the above video on a Mac OS computer or a Windows computer. Those two obvious possibilities represent only the tail end of many not-so-obvious choices, the ones that determine, for better or worse, the direction that technology takes. Some things win...

In nature, virtually all thorium is found as thorium-232, and it decays by emitting an alpha particle, and has a half-life of about 14.05 billion years (other, trace-level isotopes of thorium are short-lived intermediates of decay chains). It is estimated to be about four times more abundant than...

As the world community grapples with whether to pursue nuclear energy and at what pace, a “new” paradigm is getting thrown into the mix -- one that its advocates say is abundant in nature and which does not create the near the levels of radioactive waste that uranium does. Attention is now on...

Lars Ivar Igesund brought this article to my attention on the environmental challenges of the Albertan tar sand projects. Potential solutions of the non-nuclear kind is also discussed. Thanks to its deposits of buried ­bitumen, Canada is one of the world's fastest-growing oil producers. New...

A few weeks before the tsunami struck Fukushima’s uranium reactors and shattered public faith in nuclear power, China revealed that it was launching a rival technology to build a safer, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper network of reactors based on thorium. This passed unnoticed –except by a small...

The story of the slightly radioactive element thorium, a much-touted alternative fuel for nuclear power plants. Abundant in the Earth’s crust, thorium has been used in various industrial processes since its discovery in 1828. Advocates, writes Martin, an award-winning journalist and senior...