... the current disaster should actually be considered to show how safe nuke plants are. The point being that it took a 9.0 earthquake, multiple aftershocks, a 25-foot tsunami, and days of power loss to cause the plant to be in the state it's in. Plus, the containment building still seems to be holding.

Rajendran Raja, a physicist at Fermilab — the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois — said by telephone that the benefit of adding thorium to the fuel mix would be to create much more fuel using existing abundant resources and to reduce waste.

This could be done by building a high-intensity proton accelerator with the capacity to produce fast neutrons that could convert nuclear waste, thorium-232 and uranium-238 into fuel, he said. But to accomplish this, a proton accelerator would need to be 10 times more power-intense than anything that has been produced to date.

The concept of an accelerator-driven subcritical system, known as ADS, has been around since the 1990s. It differs from conventional reactors which operate at criticality, which is the point at which a nuclear reaction can be self-sustaining. But if a chain reaction gets out of control, accidents like those at Chernobyl could occur, and high levels of radioactive material could be released into the atmosphere.

Subcritical reactors, however, would use neutrons provided by the accelerator to continue the fission. This means that criticality could be avoided by switching off the accelerator, which in turn would switch off the neutrons.

Another thorium reactor opportunity is thorium consumes its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer, now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering, and closely watched Internet commentator and educator says, “It’s the Big One, once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilization on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels.” He’s right; thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product when they dig up rare earth metals. The U.S. and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall in the UK. Some beaches in India are loaded with thorium. Not so much mining is needed: all thorium is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7% from uranium as much of the uranium has already decayed.

U.S. scientists knew in the late 1940s that thorium was a high potential fuel, but weapons priorities pushed uranium and plutonium to the front. Yet by the early 1970s thorium research had produced a highly workable, safe and low cost reactor design that the U.S. put on the shelf. Uranium industry competition with thorium won the struggle for research and development funding.