Thorium Reactors? No Evidence That Thorium Reactors Ready for Prime Time

[The 4th Media Editor’s note: The following article was sent to us as a challenge to the article (Breaking News: Safe Nuclear Does Exist, China LEADING the WAY with Thorium: http://www.4thmedia.org/2013/01/10/safe-nuclear-does-exist-and-china-is-leading-the-way-with-thorium/) we posted on Jan….

Breaking News: Safe Nuclear Does Exist, China LEADING the WAY with Thorium

A few weeks before the tsunami struck Fukushima’s uranium reactors and shattered public faith in nuclear power, China revealed that it was launching a rival technology to build a safer, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper network of reactors based on thorium. This passed unnoticed –except by a small of band of thorium enthusiasts – but it may mark the passage of strategic leadership in energy policy from an inert and status-quo West to a rising technological power willing to break the mould. If China’s dash for thorium power succeeds, it will vastly alter the global energy landscape and may avert a calamitous conflict over resources as Asia’s industrial revolutions clash head-on with the West’s entrenched consumption.

Fukushima “Decontamination” Measures Are Making Things WORSE

Corruption and Cover-Up Lead to SPREAD – Rather than Containment – of Radiation from Fukushima Disaster   We’ve previously noted: Japan has severely underplayed the amount of radiation from Fukushima, putting Japanese residents and U.S. navy sailors in jeopardy…

Breaking News: Massive Coverup on the Risks of Nuclear Melt-Downs in the USA: Higher Than It Was at Fukushima Plants

Massive Cover-Up of Risks from Flooding to Numerous U.S. Nuclear Facilities “And U.S. officials are apparently a primary reason behind Japan’s cover-up of the severity of the Fukushima accident … to prevent Americans from questioning our similarly-vulnerable reactors.” Numerous American nuclear reactors are built within flood zones: Numerous dam failures have occurred within the U.S.: Reactors in Nebraska and elsewhere were flooded by swollen rivers and almost melted down. See this, this, this and this. The Huntsville Times wrote in an editorial last year: A tornado or a ravaging flood could just as easily be like the tsunami that unleashed the final blow [at Fukushima as an earthquake]. An engineer with the NRC says that a reactor meltdown is an “absolute certainty” if a dam upstream of a nuclear plant fails … and that such a scenario is hundreds of times more likely than the tsunami that hit Fukushima: An engineer with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) … Richard Perkins, an NRC reliability and risk engineer, was the lead author on a July 2011 NRC report detailing flood preparedness. He said the NRC blocked information from the public regarding the potential for upstream dam failures to damage nuclear sites. Perkins, in a letter submitted Friday with the NRC Office of Inspector General, said that the NRC “intentionally mischaracterized relevant and noteworthy safety information as sensitive, security information in an effort to conceal the information from the public.” The Huffington Post first obtained the letter.