Yes, thorium.
From MIT's Technology Review, August 29:
A new license for Clean Core Thorium Energy to sell its fuel to India could revolutionize the nation's nuclear industry.
For just the second time in nearly two decades, the United States has granted an export license to an American company planning to sell nuclear technology to India, MIT Technology Review has learned. The decision to greenlight Clean Core Thorium Energy’s license is a major step toward closer cooperation between the two countries on atomic energy and marks a milestone in the development of thorium as an alternative to uranium for fueling nuclear reactors.
Starting from the issuance last week, the thorium fuel produced by the Chicago-based company can be shipped to reactors in India, where it could be loaded into the cores of existing reactors. Once Clean Core receives final approval from Indian regulators, it will become one of the first American companies to sell nuclear technology to India, just as the world’s most populous nation has started relaxing strict rules that have long kept the US private sector from entering its atomic power industry.
“This license marks a turning point, not just for Clean Core but for the US-India civil nuclear partnership,” says Mehul Shah, the company's chief executive and founder. “It places thorium at the center of the global energy transformation.”
Thorium has long been seen as a good alternative to uranium because it’s more abundant, produces both smaller amounts of long-lived radioactive waste and fewer byproducts with centuries-long half-lives, and reduces the risk that materials from the fuel cycle will be diverted into weapons manufacturing.
But at least some uranium fuel is needed to make thorium atoms split, making it an imperfect replacement. It’s also less well suited for use in the light-water reactors that power the vast majority of commercial nuclear plants worldwide. And in any case, the complex, highly regulated nuclear industry is extremely resistant to change.
For India, which has scant uranium reserves but abundant deposits of thorium, the latter metal has been part of a long-term strategy for reducing dependence on imported fuels. The nation started negotiating a nuclear export treaty with the US in the early 2000s, and a 123 Agreement—a special, Senate-approved treaty the US requires with another country before sending it any civilian nuclear products—was approved in 2008.
A new approach
While most thorium advocates have envisioned new reactors designed to run on this fuel, which would mean rebuilding the nuclear industry from the ground up, Shah and his team took a different approach. Clean Core created a new type of fuel that blends thorium with a more concentrated type of uranium called HALEU (high-assay low-enriched uranium). This blended fuel can be used in India’s pressurized heavy-water reactors, which make up the bulk of the country’s existing fleet and many of the new units under development now.
Thorium isn’t a fissile material itself, meaning its atoms aren’t inherently unstable enough for an extra neutron to easily split the nuclei and release energy. But the metal has what’s known as “fertile properties,” meaning it can absorb neutrons and transform into the fissile material uranium-233. Uranium-233 produces fewer long-lived radioactive isotopes than the uranium-235 that makes up the fissionable part of traditional fuel pellets. Most commercial reactors run on low-enriched uranium, which is about 5% U-235. When the fuel is spent, roughly 95% of the energy potential is left in the metal. And what remains is a highly toxic cocktail of long-lived radioactive isotopes such as cesium-137 and plutonium-239, which keep the waste dangerous for tens of thousands of years. Another concern is that the plutonium could be extracted for use in weapons.
Enriched up to 20%, HALEU allows reactors to extract more of the available energy and thus reduce the volume of waste. Clean Core’s fuel goes further: The HALEU provides the initial spark to ignite fertile thorium and triggers a reaction that can burn much hotter and utilize the vast majority of the material in the core, as a study published last year in the journal Nuclear Engineering and Design showed.
“Thorium provides attributes needed to achieve higher burnups,” says Koroush Shirvan, an MIT professor of nuclear science and engineering who helped design Clean Core’s fuel assemblies. “It is enabling technology to go to higher burnups, which reduces your spent fuel volume, increases your fuel efficiency, and reduces the amount of uranium that you need.”
Compared with traditional uranium fuel, Clean Core says, its fuel reduces waste by more than 85% while avoiding the most problematic isotopes produced during fission. “The result is a safer, more sustainable cycle that reframes nuclear power not as a source of millennia-long liabilities but as a pathway to cleaner energy and a viable future fuel supply,” says Milan Shah, Clean Core’s chief operating officer and Mehul’s son.
Pressurized heavy-water reactors are particularly well suited to thorium because heavy water—a version of H2O that has an extra neutron on the hydrogen atom—absorbs fewer neutrons during the fission process, increasing efficiency by allowing more neutrons to be captured by the thorium.
There are 46 so-called PHWRs operating worldwide: 17 in Canada, 19 in India, three each in Argentina and South Korea, and two each in China and Romania, according to data from the International Atomic Energy Agency. In 1954, India set out a three-stage development plan for nuclear power that involved eventually phasing thorium into the fuel cycle for its fleet. ....
....MUCH MORE
July 2013 - Nuclear: "Bill Gates Is Beginning to Dream the Thorium Dream"
And earlier:
10:09 am May 30, 2007
Climateer wrote:
I was just told I was a bit cryptic in the comment above.
If you want to know more about thorium you can catch the poet at http://www.corneliastreetcafe.com/
Here’s some awards he’s collected:
* Nobel Prize
* Priestley Medal
* Arthur C. Cope Award in Organic Chemistry
* Inorganic Chemistry Award (American Chemical Society)
* Pimentel Award in Chemical Education
* Award in Pure Chemistry
* Monsanto Award
* National Medal of Science
* National Academy of Sciences
* American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow
* American Philosophical Society Fellow
* Foreign Member, Royal Society
September 2021 - "Experimental reactor could hand China the holy grail of nuclear energy"
This article is a bit hyperbolic but the fact China is getting close to firing it up is a pretty big deal.
I wish India were still pressing ahead. Fifteen years ago I would have bet on thorium reactors tripling India's GDP over a few decades but they decided to stick with coal....
And many, many more.
and a poem about same
http://www.roaldhoffmann.com/pn/modules/Downloads/docs/An_Unusual_State_of_Matter.pdf