Word: thorium
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Designer Felix Trombe has a long list of experiments that he intends to perform with his pure heat. Most urgent: making hard-to-melt ceramics out of zirconium, thorium and aluminum oxides...
...power only" reactors of the future can burn all of their uranium, not merely the .7% that is naturally fissionable. There will be no need for the Government to buy their plutonium; it will be burned too. If uranium gets scarce, the "fertile blanket" can be made of thorium, which neutrons turn into fissionable U-233-Dr. Zinn did not give the cost of natural uranium, but he estimated that if it cost $35 a Ib. (probably a generous figure), the fuel cost of the power produced from it would be only .0013? a kilowatt-hour. The fuel cost...
...million on easy terms to buy the necessary 2,000,000 long tons of grain. The terms would be left up to ECA (probably 35 years to pay at 2½% interest), and India could repay the loan in strategic materials such as monazite (a source of fissionable thorium), jute and manganese...
...radioactive rock does not contain uranium. It may contain thorium (also radioactive), in which the AEC has only a faint interest. The booklet describes a rather complicated process by which the prospector can test his find with ultraviolet light...
...comes into use will depend largely on the supply of uranium. If uranium is cheap and plentiful, it will be used more or less in the natural state. If uranium proves scarce, the supply can be eked out by "breeding." A reactor will be surrounded by a blanket of thorium or the plentiful but nonfissionable uranium isotope, U-238. When these absorb excess neutrons from the reaction, they turn into fissionable plutonium...