By Neena Bhandari
Sydney, 20.05.2011 (IANS): India and Australia should work together in building Thorium-based nuclear reactors to meet the growing energy needs, said former Indian President, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, during his recently concluded four-day (May 17-20) visit to Sydney.
He said, “Thorium-fuelled reactors are supposed to be much safer than uranium-powered ones, use far less material (1 metric ton of thorium gets as much energy 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 as against 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”.