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Could thorium make nuclear power safe?

The world can have cheap nuclear power without Japan-level risks by swapping thorium for uranium, some scientists claim. Is that too good to be true?

Japan's escalating disaster at its Fukushima reactors is putting a damper on the nuclear power industry, just as nuclear energy was starting to bask in a post-Chernobyl glow. But instead of giving up on nuclear power, say an "almost cult-like" group of nuclear scientists, we should just switch from uranium-based reactors to ones . What is this miracle metal — and could it really bring us safe nuclear power?

What is thorium?A silvery metal (symbol: Th; atomic number: 90) close to uranium on the periodic table of elements, with just two fewer protons. It was discovered in 1828, and is named after the Norse god of thunder. As an added bonus, it's "almost as common as dirt," .

Why are fans so excited about it?Thorium-fueled reactors are supposed to be much safer than uranium-powered ones, use far less material (1 metric ton of thorium gets as much bang as 200 metric tons of uranium, or 3.5 million metric tons of coal), produce waste that is toxic for a shorter period of time (300 years vs. uranium's tens of thousands of years), and is hard to weaponize. In fact, thorium can even feed off of toxic plutonium waste to produce energy. And because the biggest cost in nuclear power is safety, and thorium reactors can't melt down, , they will eventually be much cheaper, too.

How cheap would it be?If a town of 1,000 bought a 1-megawatt thorium reactor for $250,000, using 20 kilograms of thorium a year with almost no oversight, every family could pay as little as $0.40 a year for all their electricity, . And small reactors like that aren't just potentially cost-effective, he says; they're much safer, too.

Where can we get thorium?Lots of places. The U.S. has an estimated 440,000 metric tons, Australia and India have about 300,000 metric tons, and Canada has 100,000 metric tons. Until recently, U.S. and Australian mining companies threw it away as a useless byproduct. There is enough thorium to power the earth for about 1,000 years, boosters say, versus an estimated 80 years' worth of uranium.

If thorium's so great, why do we use uranium?To make a "long story very short and simple," , weapons and nuclear subs. U.S. researchers were developing both uranium-based and thorium-based reactors in the Cold War 1950s, but thorium doesn't create weapons-grade plutonium as a byproduct. Plus, nuclear submarines could be designed more easily and quickly around uranium-based light-water reactors.

OK, but there must be a downside to thorium, right?Indeed. Firstt will take a lot of money to develop a new generation of thorium-fueled reactors — America's has been dormant for half a century. China is taking the lead in picking up the thread, building on plans developed and abandoned in Europe. And part of the reason Europe dropped the research, according to critics, is pressure from France's uranium-based nuclear power industry. Others just think the whole idea is being oversold. If "an endless, too-cheap-to-meter source of clean, benign, what-could-possibly-go-wrong energy" sounds too good to be true, , it's because it is.

Sources: , , ,

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Ben Sherman Leather Strap Watch combines best of both worlds

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If you think about it, your choice of watch generally says a lot about your personal style. Whether you go for a traditional timepiece or a sleek digital one, its a tough choice. Fitting your personal sense of style into one of two categories doesnt leave much room for self-expression, with either a classic leather-strapped analog watch or a metal and plastic science-nerd design. Designer Ben Sherman has attempted to create a hybrid of the two opposing watch personalities, and the result is a timepiece that has elements of both cutting-edge design and traditional masculinity. The($72) has a steel base for the digital screen and a textured leather strap that will certainly wear better than plastic. The watch is water-resistant but not meant for swimming or diving, but you already knew that.

Setbacks mount in Japan at leaking nuclear plant

Setbacks mounted Wednesday in the crisis over Japan's tsunami-damaged nuclear facility, with nearby seawater testing at its highest radiation levels yet and the president of the plant operator checking into a hospital with hypertension.

Nearly three weeks after a March 11 earthquake and tsunami slammed and engulfed the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, knocking out cooling systems that keeps nuclear fuel rods from overheating, Tokyo Electric Power Co. is still struggling to bring the facility in northeastern Japan under control.

The country's revered Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko reached out to some of the thousands displaced by the twin disasters — which have killed more than 11,000 people — spending about an hour consoling a group of evacuees at a Tokyo center.

"I couldn't talk with them very well because I was nervous, but I felt that they were really concerned about us," said Kenji Ukito, an evacuee from a region near the plant. "I was very grateful."

At the crippled plant, leaking radiation has seeped into the soil and seawater nearby and made its way into produce, raw milk and even tap water as far as Tokyo, 140 miles (220 kilometers) to the south.

The stress of reining in Japan's worst crisis since World War II has taken its toll on TEPCO President Masataka Shimizu, who went to a hospital late Tuesday.

Shimizu, 66, has not been seen in public since a March 13 news conference in Tokyo, raising speculation that he had suffered a breakdown. For days, officials deflected questions about Shimizu's whereabouts, saying he was "resting" at company headquarters.

Spokesman Naoki Tsunoda said Wednesday that Shimizu had been admitted to a Tokyo hospital after suffering dizziness and high blood pressure.

The leadership vacuum at TEPCO — whose shares have plunged nearly 80 percent since the crisis began — comes amid growing criticism over its failure to halt the radiation leaks. Bowing deeply, arms at his side, Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata announced at a news conference that he would step in and apologized for the delay.

"We must do everything we can to end this situation as soon as possible for the sake of everyone who has been affected," said Yuhei Sato, governor of Fukushima prefecture. "I am extremely disappointed and saddened by the suggestion that this might drag out longer."

Although experts have said since the early days of the crisis that the nuclear complex will need to be scrapped because workers have sprayed it with corrosive seawater to keep fuel rods cool, TEPCO acknowledged publicly for the first time Wednesday that at least four of the plant's six reactors will have to be decommissioned.

"After pouring seawater on them ... I believe we cannot use them anymore," Katsumata said. Japan's government has been saying since March 20 that the entire plant must be scrapped.

On Wednesday, nuclear safety officials said seawater 300 yards (meters) outside the plant contained 3,355 times the legal limit for the amount of radioactive iodine — the highest rate yet and a sign that more contaminated water was making its way into the ocean.

The amount of iodine-131 found south of the plant does not pose an immediate threat to human health but was a "concern," said Hidehiko Nishiyama, a Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency official. He said there was no fishing in the area.

Radioactive iodine is short-lived, with a half-life of just eight days, and in any case was expected to dissipate quickly in the ocean. It does not tend to accumulate in shellfish.

"We will nail down the cause, and will do our utmost to prevent it from rising further," he said.

Highly toxic plutonium also has been detected in the soil outside the plant, TEPCO said. Safety officials said the amounts did not pose a risk to humans, but the finding supports suspicions that dangerously radioactive water is leaking from damaged nuclear fuel rods. There have been no reports of plutonium being found in seawater.

The latest findings on radioactive iodine highlighted the urgent need to power up the power plant's cooling system. Workers succeeded last week in reconnecting some parts of the plant to the power grid.

But as they pumped in water to cool the reactors and nuclear fuel, they found pools of radioactive water in the basements of several buildings and in trenches outside.

The contaminated water has been emitting many times the amount of radiation that the government considers safe for workers, making it a priority to pump the water out before electricity can be restored.

Complicating matters, the tanks storing the contaminated water are beginning to fill up. Pumping at one unit has been suspended since Tuesday night while workers scramble to drain a new tank after the first one reached capacity. And the water just kept coming Wednesday, when a new pool was found.

In another effort to reduce the spread of radioactive particles, TEPCO plans to spray resin on the ground around the plant. The company will test the method Thursday in one section of the plant before using it elsewhere, Nishiyama said.

"The idea is to glue them to the ground," he said. But it would be too sticky to use inside buildings or on sensitive equipment.

The government also is considering covering some reactors with cloth tenting, TEPCO said. If successful, that could allow workers to spend longer periods of time in other areas of the plant.

Meanwhile, white smoke was reported coming from a plant about 10 miles (15 kilometers) from the troubled one. The smoke quickly dissipated and no radiation was released; officials were looking into its cause. The Fukushima Daini plant also suffered some damage in the tsunami but has been in cold shutdown since days after the quake.

The spread of radiation has raised concerns about the safety of Japan's seafood, even though experts say the low levels suggest radiation won't accumulate in fish at unsafe levels. Trace amounts of radioactive cesium-137 have been found in anchovies as far afield as Chiba, near Tokyo, but at less than 1 percent of acceptable levels.

Experts say the Pacific is so vast that any radiation will be quickly diluted before it becomes problematic. Citing dilution, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has played down the risks of seafood contamination.

As officials seek to bring an end to the nuclear crisis, hundreds of thousands in the northeast are trying to put their lives back together. The official death toll stood at 11,257 on Wednesday, with the final toll likely surpassing 18,000.

The government said damage is expected to cost $310 billion, making it the most costly natural disaster on record.

In the town of Rikuzentakata, one 24-year-old said she's been searching every day for a missing friend but will have to return to her job at a nursing home because she has run out of cash.

Life is far from back to normal, she said.

"Our family posted a sign in our house: Stay positive," Eri Ishikawa said. But she said it's a struggle.

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Associated Press writers Eric Talmadge in Fukushima, Jay Alabaster in Rikuzentakata, and Shino Yuasa, Noriko Kitano and Elaine Kurtenbach in Tokyo contributed to this report.

MIDDLE EAST OUTCOME IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SEE

revolutions" spreading in overlapping arcs from Tunisia and Egypt to Yemen and Libya.

So I thought it not unusual for me to ask: "What would you GUESS would be the outcome of these revolutions? Just your intuitive feeling?"

To my surprise, no one said anything.

So I asked the question again, stressing the importance of the word "guess," as against something you would write in a formal academic paper.

Again, no one said anything. Finally one friend, who has held important positions in the region, volunteered: "It's impossible even to speculate about at this point -- besides, we don't even know if these are revolutions yet."

I mention this little personal anecdote because it is so typical of the mood here in Washington. There are no certainties, even much-qualified ones; instead, all we have are questions, voiced over and over and over again.

Was Egypt a revolution? Is Libya a revolution or merely a rebellion? Will these conflicts devolve into new autocratic regimes instead of democratic ones? Why are we involving ourselves in Libya anyway, when we're already in Iraq and Afghanistan? Should we be in favor of the government in Yemen, which has supported us on anti-terrorism, or on the side of the rebels? And is Syria next on the list?

In this season of revolt brewing and boiling over across the Middle East, I can't help but feel that the press, and particularly television, is hardly helping us in one area to grasp the central -- and inevitable -- uncertainty of these revolts. The media criticism of American and NATO involvement in Libya has trivialized the seriousness of the moment by asking one question ad infinitum: "How do we know what will come out of this?"

Well, the answer is that we don't, that we can't, and that we won't, perhaps not for decades. Remember that when Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was asked his opinion of the French Revolution, he answered, "It's too early to tell." And that was a mere two centuries after that revolution. Remember, too, how many decades it took the egalitarian impulses of our Civil War to become embedded in law and practice, and how World War I, the "war to end all wars," led directly to World War II within merely a quarter of a century.

Equally foolish and self-defeating, it seems to me, are the endless questions on TV interview shows or newspaper editorial pages about how President Obama can say we want to see Gadhafi removed, while the U.N. Security Council says we are taking part in military actions in Libya in order to protect the Libyan people.

Anyone who has taken part in a neighborhood organization, YMCA council or school board meeting knows that when there are many participants (as there are nations in NATO), leaders often need to finesse differences in order to get something done, and that wording needs to be crafted so that all sides can come out feeling that at least they have not totally lost. That is what has happened in Libya; and, frankly, congratulations!

It makes me think of Gen. Douglas MacArthur on the USS Missouri at the ceremony marking the end of the war in the Pacific when he refused to humiliate the defeated Japanese because he knew that he would have to work with them in the future.

Then comes the other question as to whether these actually ARE revolutions, or merely a congeries of little revolts. Me? I opt for revolution. When you have country after country, and people after people, and tribe after tribe arising against a status quo of 50 or 60 years, these are revolutions, linked by their complaints and hopes, on a scale of those of 1848, 1917 or 1989 in Europe.

To those who say we have handled it badly or too late, I point them to the words of the moderate and well-informed professor Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland: "Could the United States have acted earlier? Not if Security Council backing was necessary: A U.N. resolution was unlikely without Arab League support. But once the Arab League agreed, the U.N. Security Council moved rapidly.

"Could Washington have acted earlier without U.N. support? Only at a high cost, both internationally and in Arab public opinion.

"The Obama administration has rightly been careful to balance the region's suspicion of the West with the need to intervene. While this does not satisfy everyone, the receptivity in the region to the international intervention -- and Gadhafi's inability to sell it as 'a colonial Crusader' war -- is itself extraordinary, given historic opposition to Western intervention."

So I have a hard time figuring out why exactly we should criticize the administration for getting universal approval (the U.N.) and serious allies (NATO, the Arab League) in its attempts to help the people of Libya.

But, of course, care must be taken. Remember how Lenin and his furtive communists hid and waited behind the Russian Revolution's barriers while "the people" fought in the streets. Only when it was relatively safe did the Reds come out and take over the revolution, never giving up until the wondrous days of 1989.

That kind of takeover of the young Facebook revolutionaries by the radical and not-so-radical Islamists, particularly in Egypt (the Islamic Brotherhood and the Salafists) and Yemen (traditional Islamists), is surely possible.

So we must wait and watch, for this is a moment of consummate historic importance, and its outcome will be more Machiavelli than military. As someone said along the way, "We have not yet reached the end of the beginning, much less the beginning of the end."

Rome booked out for John Paul II beatification

ROME (AFP) – More than two million pilgrims are expected to throng the streets of Rome for the beatification ceremony of John Paul II on May 1, leaving travel agencies desperate for accommodation and hotel prices soaring.

The Vatican expects as many as two and a half million people to flock to the ceremony, according to Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

The ceremony will be led by Pope Benedict XVI in St Peter's Square, where John Paul II's funeral took place only six years ago.

"Since the beatification announcement, bookings have exploded," said Giuseppe Roscioli, head of Federalberghi Roma, which represents around 500 hotels and offers around 90,000 of the capital's 150,000 beds.

Hotels and city authorities are bracing themselves for crowds as big as the ones that descended on the Vatican when John Paul II died on April 2, 2005, after a pontificate that spanned a quarter century.

Roscioli said the Vatican's decision to hold the celebration on May 1 complicated matters, because it coincides with a public holiday in much of Europe and is a peak period of tourism in Italy.

"It's like wanting to organise an event in Monaco during the Formula One Grand Prix. It's absurd. It?s obvious that the Vatican's calendar has nothing to do with day-to-day life," he said.

"Our hotels published this year's prices last year, when we had no idea what date the beatification would be. If a hotel wants to raise its prices it risks being punished by the law," said Roscioli.

However, since the date was announced, prices have sky-rocketed. Some two-star hotels are hoping for 330 euros ($447) a night and some four-stars are asking 1,760 euros ($2,386) for a suite.

Specialist religious tourism agency Raptim said it has been swamped by requests from Africa, Brazil and John Paul II's homeland of Poland in particular.

"We have 500 people on the waiting list and we're still getting requests!" said group leader Gabriella Pandolfini.

Despite logistical problems plaguing some pilgrims planning their trip to Rome, excitement reigns in one of the city's most unusual watering holes, Pub John Paul II, which opened last year in the city centre.

"John Paul II is the saint for youth and we want this place to be a place to remember him," said Massimo Camussi, who is organising musical evenings and film showings at the pub in the run-up to the beatification.

The pub first opened as a kind of permanent reminder of World Youth Day, which was celebrated in Rome to mark the Catholic Church's Jubilee in 2000.

The Vatican has yet to publish the details for the big day, but sources suggest a vigil may be held in Rome's Circus Maximus arena the evening before the beatification, with a mass in St. Peter's Square on the day.

The Vatican square will be open from midnight the night before the ceremony and entrance to the basilica will be free for pilgrims.

The celebrations may turn out to cost Rome's city hall dearly though. When mourners flocked for John Paul II's funeral, the city's cleaning bill came to eight million euros.