On Tuesday, March 28th, United States President Donald Trump signed an executive order that undercut the Clean Power Plan of former President Barack Obama. A critical detail within the order is that individual energy agencies do not have to share interagency standards and can, therefore, develop their own. Additionally, it could constrict standards to national borders while the issue that they attempt to address, climate change, is irrespective of borders. Consequently, the perceived effects of carbon emission could become relative based on individual desires to curb it. This order deals a solid blow to the climate change community and only further emphasizes the pressing need to enact a secure, clean energy alternative that can adequately support civilization.
Although an alternative form of energy may prove to be feasible for mainstream usage, the environment has too much inertia for its change to be halted immediately. Therefore, the form of energy the world needs to convert to must provide a positive long-term solution that can actually sustain humanity. Solar, wind, geothermal, and hydroelectric energy sources all provide satisfactory results on a local level but simply do not possess the necessary power production that will carry both the United States and the world into a more secure future. Uranium-based nuclear energy will forever hold the stigma of fallout and destruction and will not be able to get the general public wholly behind it. The best solution that could potentially even start an energy renaissance is something that has already been developed decades ago and abandoned foolishly: thorium based nuclear power.
Thorium-based nuclear energy consists of neutrons breaking apart thorium-232 to make protractium-233 and uranium-232. Thorium is a radioactive element that is as common as lead. The sheer availability of it, if harnessed, could potentially provide energy security for over a thousand years. The volume of nuclear waste produced is markedly lower than uranium-based power, by almost a thousand times less, and its breakdown time reduces it to negligible amounts within a lifetime and to background levels in a few centuries instead of a few thousand. Thorium itself cannot be used to make a nuclear weapon and its byproduct, uranium-232 is very difficult to turn into one. The US, by chance, has the second largest thorium deposits in the world, which accounts for over fifteen percent of world reserves.
This process was explored by the US government during the 1950s and 1960s and a prototype reactor was built. However, it was ultimately abandoned because it was not capable of producing a nuclear weapon, which the United Sates was more interested in during the Cold War than energy stability. It has been theorized that if the US had committed to the construction of a thorium reactor then, it would have led to energy independence by 2000.
Yet like all energy sources, there are distinct drawbacks to thorium-based nuclear power. The primary reason why it has not taken off the ground in the past half-century is finances. It is not a proven technology like uranium power plants and would cost about a billion dollars to develop. One of the products of the process is gamma rays, which are highly lethal, but these can be contained if proper measures are instated. Additionally, its protractium-233 product can be extracted to produce weaponized uranium-233. However, the development of a uranium-233 weapon is very difficult.
Although there are negatives to thorium-based nuclear energy, its potential benefits outweigh its downsides. It poses a solution to the existential problem of energy consumption and human sustainability. If it were to be harnessed and properly tempered, it would provide practically unlimited energy for human consumption, which would allow countries like the US to permanently end their reliance on fossil fuels. Much of the human-inflicted damage to the environment borders on irreparable at this point, therefore this need to enact proper environmental policies and expressing the willingness to invest in our future and survival are imperative and time-sensitive.
A key note that should be brought up is that the mantra of saving the environment is misleading. Earth existed before humanity and it will exist after humanity. Life will continue without us. Energy dependence and climate change are not issues about saving the environment, they are about saving ourselves. It is about allowing the continuation of humanity and the sustainability of civilization. The more humanity pushes the planet and buries its head in the sand, the more it undermines its own ability to maintain itself. Energy is the key to the future. It will simply be a matter of time soon enough.
It is no longer a matter of finding a solution to our problem, it is a matter of accepting the solution.
