The Abandoned Element

I. Atomic Number 90

In the periodic table, thorium sits at position 90. A weakly radioactive metal, silvery-white, more abundant in Earth's crust than tin or lead. Three to four times more common than uranium. It occurs in igneous rocks, in heavy mineral sands, as a byproduct of rare earth mining. It is, quite literally, lying around everywhere.

Thorium cannot be split directly — it is not fissile. But it can be converted into uranium-233, which is. This process, transmutation, was discovered in 1940 by Glenn Seaborg during the Manhattan Project. The physics was clear from the beginning. The question was never whether thorium works as nuclear fuel. The question was always only whether anyone would do it.

That question has been answered over the past sixty years by the history of the West with a clarity no political essay could achieve. Thorium is not an energy story. It is the story of institutional decay, compressed into a single element.

II. The Proof Nobody Cared About

At Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment — MSRE — ran between 1965 and 1969. A small research reactor in which nuclear fuel was dissolved in molten fluoride salts that simultaneously served as coolant. The reactor operated above 700°C but without the high pressure of conventional light-water reactors. It ran first on uranium-235, then on uranium-233 bred from thorium. It achieved every research objective. Every single one.

Then it was shut down. Not because it had failed. Not because the physics didn't work. Not because the engineers gave up. But because the director of the reactor program, Milton Shaw, deprioritized molten-salt reactors in favor of the uranium-based fast breeder. The fast breeder produced plutonium — usable for weapons. Thorium did not produce weapons-grade plutonium. In the budget negotiations of the Nixon era, that was a death sentence.

Alvin Weinberg, the director of Oak Ridge and one of the fathers of light-water reactor technology, fought for the molten-salt program. He argued that the technology's inherent safety — no high pressure, no risk of classical meltdown, passive safety mechanisms — made it the superior choice. In 1973, he was removed as director. The molten-salt program was terminated. The reactor was placed in standby and then left to decay.

The files were declassified. They sat there. For decades.

III. Seventy Years of Preparation

India possesses a quarter of the world's thorium reserves — over 500,000 tons in readily extractable form. Homi Bhabha, the father of India's nuclear program, recognized in the 1950s that India's uranium reserves were limited but its thorium reserves were vast. He designed a three-stage program: stage one uses natural uranium in heavy-water reactors to breed plutonium. Stage two uses the plutonium in fast breeder reactors to produce more fissile material and convert thorium into uranium-233. Stage three uses the uranium-233 in thorium breeder reactors for permanent energy supply.

It is an elegant plan. Indian scientists validated every single step: thorium oxide fuel pins were tested in heavy-water reactors. Uranium-233 bred from thorium powered the KAMINI research reactor at Kalpakkam. Fuel fabrication, reprocessing, and irradiation studies were completed.

What never happened was the final step. The Advanced Heavy Water Reactor — AHWR — designed specifically for thorium operation, has existed for over twenty years as a design. On paper. The Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor at Kalpakkam, the crucial second stage, began core loading in 2024 — decades behind schedule. And then something telling happened: when the 2008 Indo-US Nuclear Deal facilitated uranium imports, the urgency dropped. Why take the difficult final step when imported uranium is cheaper and easier?

The irony is hard to bear. India laid the foundation, built the reactors, proved the fuel cycle — and the commercial breakthrough came from a startup in Chicago. Clean Core Thorium Energy developed a blended thorium-HALEU fuel that can be used in existing Indian heavy-water reactors. In August 2025, the company received only the second US export license for nuclear technology to India in nearly two decades.

Seventy years of planning. Zero commercial reactors.

IV. Thirteen Years

In 2011, the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics — SINAP — of the Chinese Academy of Sciences launched a thorium molten-salt reactor program. The foundation: the declassified files from Oak Ridge. Dr. Jiang Mianheng, son of former President Jiang Zemin, led a delegation to non-disclosure talks at Oak Ridge. What America had abandoned, China carried home in briefcases.

In 2018, construction began on a 2-MW thorium molten-salt reactor in Wuwei, Gansu Province, at the edge of the Gobi Desert. The team grew from a few dozen to over 400 scientists and engineers.

October 2023: Criticality — a self-sustaining chain reaction.

June 2024: Full operational power.

October 2024: The world's first refueling of a thorium molten-salt reactor during operation — without shutdown. A technical first never achieved in sixty years of research history.

November 2025: The conversion of thorium-232 into fissile uranium-233 inside the reactor — proof that the thorium fuel cycle works.

Thirteen years from start to proof of concept. No committee leaving a design on paper for twenty years. No nuclear deal lowering the urgency. No budget fight subordinating technology to weapons logic. Just a state that decides, builds, and delivers.

The scaling plan is already in place: a 10-MWe demonstration reactor in the same area, operational by 2030. A 100-MWe project by 2035. Full commercialization by 2040. And — almost as an afterthought — China State Shipbuilding Corporation and the China National Nuclear Corporation are developing a thorium-powered container ship. Design phase complete by 2026, construction by the end of the decade. The world's first cargo vessel to cross oceans without fossil fuels.

V. Europe: Not Even Absent

One might say Europe is absent from thorium research. That would be too generous. Absence presupposes that one was invited and didn't come. Europe was never invited because it never asked.

The only European thorium initiative is Copenhagen Atomics — a Danish startup developing a molten-salt reactor in the format of a shipping container. Their critical experiment — the first real chain reaction under controlled conditions — takes place in 2026 at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland. Not in Denmark. Denmark has no nuclear research center that could provide the infrastructure.

That is the state of affairs. A continent of 450 million inhabitants, the greatest research universities in the world alongside the American ones, trillions in accumulated industrial capital — and the entirety of thorium activity consists of a startup that must conduct its experiments abroad.

No Euratom program for thorium. No Horizon Europe focus. No national strategy in Germany, France, Italy, or anywhere else. France, the country that once generated 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear power and possessed the technical knowledge to build every reactor type in the world, has eroded its nuclear expertise through thirty years of deindustrialization and political ostracism to the point where it cannot even complete conventional EPR reactors on time and on budget. Flamanville 3: planned for 2012, completed 2024, costs quadrupled. And that is a light-water reactor — proven technology. France could not build a molten-salt reactor today even if it wanted to.

Germany decided to exit nuclear energy in 2011 and shut down its last reactors in 2023. The word "thorium" does not appear in any energy policy document of the federal government. Not as a rejected option. Not as a future technology. Not even as a footnote. It does not exist.

VI. Why Thorium Was Abandoned

The standard explanation is that thorium lost to uranium in the 1970s because uranium light-water reactors were better understood and had been developed for the Navy. This is not wrong. But it is the story the second role tells itself — the story of pragmatic decisions under constraints.

The deeper answer has three layers.

First: Weapons. The American nuclear program was from the beginning a weapons program that incidentally produced electricity. Uranium-based light-water reactors produced plutonium-239 — usable for bombs. Thorium produced uranium-233 — usable for energy, but harder to weaponize. In a world where the Pentagon determined research budgets, this was not a technical detail. It was the selection criterion.

Second: Industry. By the 1970s, a multi-billion-dollar uranium supply chain already existed — mining, enrichment, fuel element fabrication, reprocessing. Each of these stages was a company, a lobby, a set of jobs. A thorium economy would not have supplemented this chain but replaced it. The uranium industry had no interest in its own disappearance — and it had the lobbyists to prevent it.

Third: Time preference. Thorium is a generational investment. The fuel cycle is more complex than uranium's: thorium must first be converted into fissile material before it produces energy. Upfront costs are high, returns lie decades in the future. Democratic governments that think in four-year cycles do not optimize for decades. They optimize for the next election. And a reactor type that will be cheaper than everything else in thirty years loses to a reactor type that connects to the grid in five — even if it is more expensive, more dangerous, and more dependent on imported uranium in the long run.

Weapons, industry, time preference. Three reasons, each rational when viewed individually — and which together prevent a civilization from using the superior technology it invented itself.

VII. The Symmetry of Failure

What is so remarkable about the thorium story is not the individual failure of a single country. It is the symmetry: every Western democracy abandoned thorium for different reasons, but the outcome is everywhere identical.

America abandoned it because weapons logic dominated. India abandoned it because uranium imports were more convenient. France abandoned it because nuclear energy became politically toxic before thorium was on the table. Germany abandoned it because it abandoned all nuclear energy. Britain abandoned it because since Thatcher it has systematically dismantled the state capacity to execute large technology projects. Europe as a whole abandoned it because Europe has no technology policy — only regulatory policy.

Different reasons. Same mechanism. In every case, the first role decided, the second role implemented, and the third role was silent. In America, the Pentagon decided, the national labs complied, the public knew nothing. In India, the bureaucracy decided that uranium was sufficient, the scientists complied, the population continued hearing about thorium as the future — a future that was never allowed to become the present. In Europe, the political class decided that nuclear energy has no future, the energy companies followed, and the public applauded an exit whose consequences it did not understand.

China had none of these obstacles. No weapons logic distorting research budgets — China has long had enough nuclear weapons and does not need thorium for them. No uranium lobby blocking the transition — China builds conventional reactors and thorium reactors in parallel, as complements, not substitutes. No democratic four-year cycles making generational investments impossible. And — crucially — a state that understands industrial policy as a core function, not as an ideological aberration.

VIII. What Thorium Says About the West

There is a prevalent narrative that says: the West is innovative, China copies. This narrative was plausible in the 1990s. Today it is a self-deception.

China did not copy thorium. China took declassified basic research and did something America failed to do for fifty years: translate it into a working reactor. The online refueling — October 2024 — Oak Ridge had never achieved. The thorium-uranium conversion inside the reactor — November 2025 — had not been accomplished in sixty years of research history. These are not copies. They are original contributions, building on a foundation the West itself discarded.

The pattern repeats. High-speed rail: in the 1960s the Japanese Shinkansen ran, in the 1970s the French TGV. Germany developed the Transrapid — and built it in Shanghai instead of Munich. Today China operates the largest high-speed rail network in the world: over 45,000 kilometers. Europe is still debating the Stuttgart–Ulm route.

Solar panels: the photovoltaic cell was invented in 1954 at Bell Labs in New Jersey. Europe and America supported the technology with subsidies but without industrial strategy. China built the factories. Today China controls over 80 percent of global solar production.

Battery storage: the lithium-ion battery was commercialized in 1991 by Sony in Japan, based on research from Oxford and Texas. China built CATL and BYD into the world's largest battery manufacturers. Europe launched the European Battery Alliance in 2017 — and is today years behind schedule.

And now thorium: invented and proven at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Commercialized in Wuwei, Gansu.

This is not a pattern of copying. It is a pattern of adoption — the systematic takeover of abandoned technologies by a state that possesses the institutional capacity to finish developing them. And it is, in its mirror image, a pattern of self-amputation: the West severs capabilities it possesses, not because they don't work, but because the political economy stands in the way of their further development.

IX. Thorium and the Container Ship

A detail at the margins of the thorium story reveals the strategic depth of Chinese thinking better than any production statistic.

China State Shipbuilding Corporation is developing, together with the China National Nuclear Corporation, a container ship with thorium molten-salt propulsion. Design phase: completion 2026. Construction: end of this decade. If it succeeds, it would be the world's first cargo vessel to cross oceans without fossil fuels — not with batteries, not with hydrogen, not with ammonia, but with a reactor that runs for years without refueling.

One must consider what this means. Global commercial shipping accounts for roughly three percent of worldwide CO2 emissions — more than any single country except the five largest. The International Maritime Organization has set decarbonization targets but has identified no technology that can achieve them. Batteries don't reach across oceans. Hydrogen is too voluminous. Ammonia is toxic and corrosive. Maritime decarbonization is the unsolved problem of the energy transition.

China is solving it not through regulation but through technology. And not through just any technology, but through one the West invented and abandoned.

When in the 2030s Chinese container ships transport goods emission-free while European shipping companies pay carbon levies on their diesel engines, no one will be able to say they didn't see it coming. The information was open. The technology was proven. The decision not to use it was conscious — or, worse, unconscious, because no one was left to ask the question.

X. The Real Question

It would be easy to end this essay with a call to action: Europe must invest in thorium. But that demand misses the core of the problem.

Europe cannot invest in thorium. Not because the money is lacking — the EU has mobilized trillions for things less important. But because the institutional capacity is missing to execute a generational investment in a politically contaminated technology. That capacity was amputated — through thirty years of privatization, deindustrialization, and political banishment of nuclear energy from the realm of the thinkable. One cannot invest in a technology when one no longer has the engineers, has closed the institutes, no longer possesses the political language in which one can discuss it without being considered an enemy of progress.

That is the real lesson of thorium. Not that China is better than the West. Not that democracies are slower than autocracies. But that a civilization which systematically dismantles its own capabilities — not because it doesn't need them, but because they are politically inconvenient — eventually reaches a point where it can no longer do something it once could. And then it discovers that rebuilding capabilities is orders of magnitude harder than destroying them.

Atomic number 90. Silvery-white. More common than tin. Lying around everywhere. And the civilization that could use it has forgotten how to build things.