element90

Thorium 232 should be the basis of the fuel system for Nuclear power stations as it can be used to produce Uranium 233 which is the most fissile of the Uranium isotopes it will, split 80% of the time if hit by a neutron. The best part about using Thorium is the LTFR or Liquid Thorium Fluoride Reactor which operates at normal atmospheric pressure, the fuel is already molten so meltdown is not a problem. All nuclear power stations currently use solid fuel which is then regarded as waste when only 0.7% of the Uranium has been used, a LFTR can use 100% of its fuel.

There are many advantages of using Thorium, it just needs some investment and much cheaper and smaller power stations will result with greatly reduced waste. In fact the Uranium in the solid fuel can be used in the LFTR so that the so called waste can be used as fuel because after all the Thorium is there only to produce more Uranium 233. The heat produced by a LTFR has at least two very useful applications: de-salinisation of sea water and the production of synthetic hydrocarbons such as methane, petroleum spirit ("petrol" in the UK, "gas" in the US) for cars, diesel for lorries, taxis, buses etc. all from water and carbon dioxide.

So, yes I am a fan of Thorium.

Regarding Mars and Phobos for an other of your comments, those programs were never released to the general public and I stopped development on them when they became the basis for Saturn and Titan which have been released and currently at version 3.0.1 for Linux and Windows. I working on version 4.0.0 which is based on the Qt tool kit instead of Gtkmm so Saturn and Titan will be available for OS X in addition to Linux and Windows.