Enough Natural Resources for Sustainable Energy Production Can Be Produced in the US Says Thorium Energy

SALT LAKE CITY Thorium Energy, Inc. announces that it can make the USA self-sufficient in the rare earth metals and thorium production required for alternative energy production.

Jack Lifton, who writes about less common and rare metals published two articles, Wind Power organizers challenged and A PROPOSAL FOR THE PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES that identified a natural resource supply problem, which is common to all efforts to substitute sustainable energy production technologies for energy derived from burning fossil fuels.

Sustainable energy production depends critically on the use of less common and rare metals, which as a group Lifton calls “the technology metals.” Thorium Energy, Inc. can produce enough of both the rare earth metals and thorium to make the USA self-sufficient.

• The most efficient, highest output, and lowest maintenance electric generators for wind turbines, hydroelectric, tidal, geothermal, and even nuclear plants cannot be built without the rare earth metals used to build their powerful permanent magnets.
• Hybrid cars such as the Toyota Prius could not be built without the rare earth metals used to build their nickel metal-hydride rechargeable storage batteries.
• The less common metals, uranium and thorium, are needed to prepare and construct the fuel for a nuclear reactor to produce electricity. In this last case, however, it does turn out that nuclear power reactors can be built with either uranium- or thorium-based fuels. Thorium Energy, Inc. has perhaps the world’s largest mineable deposit of the primary thorium minerals, thorite and thorianite.

The United States has the largest variety of natural resources of any nation on earth yet the USGS yearly commodity mineral surveys show that the US is steadily becoming more reliant on foreign sources, some politically unstable and even hostile, for strategic and critical minerals which the US, paradoxically, has in abundance.

American manufacturers today utilize foreign manufacturers and rare earth metals to make the large rare earth-type permanent magnets for wind generators and rare earth-using nickel metal-hydride storage batteries for any purpose, including vehicle electrification.

Utilizing Thorium Energy’s natural resource deposits in Idaho and Montana, the US could be self-sufficient in rare earth metals and thorium and bring home the complete production of wind generators, nickel metal hydride-type storage batteries, and thorium-based fuel for nuclear power reactors.