Word: thorium
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...help from them. Its first four full-sized stations (100,000 to 200,000 kw. each) will burn natural uranium, turning a little of the nonfissionable U-238 into plutonium. When enough plutonium is available, more efficient reactors will use it as fuel, some of them turning comparatively cheap thorium into fissionable U-233. Eventually Britain will build breeder reactors that produce more fuel than they consume...
...multiply fast enough to take care of all needs for additional electricity, rising toward 15 million kw. by 1975. The ministry does not anticipate trouble with uranium supply. "Recent evidence," it says guardedly, "suggests that uranium is more plentiful than was once thought." Available also is "the substitute fuel thorium, which should be available in considerable quantities if it is required...
Lawyers in the Bush. Long before Joe Hirshhorn got interested in the Blind River area, geologists knew that there was radioactivity there. But most thought it came from thorium, because the outcrops yielded little uranium ore. Geologist Franc R. Joubin, who was working as a private consultant in the area, thought differently; he believed that oxidation of the outcrops had leached away their uranium content, but that underneath there lay a treasure trove of uranium ore. Joubin told Joe Hirshhorn his theory, and Hirshhorn agreed, with associates, to put up $30,000 in 1953 to take core samples...
...uranium bonanzas have been found in India yet, but there is plenty of low-grade ore that can be mined economically by cheap hand labor. Probably more important are India's thorium deposits, the richest in the world. Thorium cannot be used directly as nuclear fuel. It must be turned into uranium 233 in a reactor, just as uranium 238 is turned into plutonium. Dr. Bhabha thinks that this conversion may be standard practice a few years from now. Uranium 233 derived from thorium is in many important respects the most desirable of all the nuclear fuels...
...plutonium could be made into atom bombs, but Dr. Bhabha is sure that India will never make a bomb. He wants to use all the plutonium in breeder reactors to turn India's thorium into ever-growing amounts of nuclear fuel...