In 1980, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) observed that protactinium, a chemical element generated in thorium reactors, could be separated and allowed to decay to isotopically pure ...

Scientists have built the first-ever thorium reactor. Thorium is both more easily accessible and less dangerous than uranium—the most common fission fuel. The system also uses molten salt instead of ...

In August 2021, China announced the completion of its first experimental thorium-based nuclear reactor. Built in the middle of the Gobi Desert in the country’s north, the reactor over the next few ...

In a remote region of the Gobi Desert, China has successfully launched a nuclear experiment that could alter the global energy landscape. Chinese scientists have achieved what no other country has: ...

Andrew Yang, like many of the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls, has an ambitious plan to wean America off of fossil fuels. Unlike many of the other candidates, however, a key piece of his plan to ...

Chinese media has reported that the country's geologists had uncovered vast deposits of thorium in the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia, which supposedly indicates the presence of enough of the ...

Atomic clocks have long been the gold standard for measuring time and frequency. Among them, optical clocks—using atoms like strontium or aluminum—have reached staggering levels of accuracy, with ...

Atomic clocks that excite the nucleus of thorium-229 embedded in a transparent crystal when hit by a laser beam could yield the most accurate measurements ever of time and gravity, and even rewrite ...

EXPERIMENTS on the processes arising in thorium under neutron bombardment have shown that nuclear fission is induced only by fast neutrons of energies of about 2 Mev. or more. There exists also a ...