Thorium: Energy's Once and Future Marvel
The forgotten nuclear tech that could power AI, laser defenses, large-scale space travel, and an era of dirt-cheap electricity, all without proliferation risk — if we let it.
NOTE: Recently I told you about Trump’s unfolding nuclear renaissance, why it matters, and where it’s headed. It’s happening — and investible — now. But there’s another technology that could literally change the world, one that almost everyone (except China) has forgotten: Thorium. It could eradicate most of the world’s poverty with nearly zero risk of nuclear weapons proliferation.
It’s time to understand and demand it. — RDM
by Rod D. Martin
February 9, 2026
The world is running headlong into an energy wall. Not because we’re “running out” of oil and gas — we’re certainly not — but because our ambitions are beginning to overtake our grid.
AI and data centers’ power demand is expected to explode this decade. By 2030, the IEA estimates the U.S. will use more electricity for data processing than for steel, cement, aluminum, chemicals, and all energy-intensive manufacturing combined. Add in EVs, reshored manufacturing, crypto, always-on cloud everything, and the directed-energy weapons (you know, lasers) that will define 21st-century warfare, and the numbers go crazy in a hurry.
The International Energy Agency now talks about a nuclear renaissance, because even its climate-obsessed models can’t make the math work any other way. And while Western elites drone on about “net zero,” hundreds of millions of people — roughly 1 in 11 human beings — still have no access to electricity at all.
That’s children doing homework by kerosene lamp, surgeries without reliable power, entire nations locked into permanent poverty.
So yes, we’re going to need shale, LNG, SMRs, and a very serious build-out of uranium-based nuclear just to stay even. But there’s another card we buried half a century ago: thorium. Forbes once called it “the biggest energy breakthrough since fire.”
So why don’t we have it? In a word, Washington.
The Advanced Reactor We Built and Forgot
In the 1960s, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the United States built and ran a thorium-powered reactor: the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE). It reached first criticality on June 1, 1965, operated at about 8 MW thermal, and logged more than 11,000 hours of critical operation, proving that liquid-fuel reactors could run at high temperature with stable behavior.
Thorium is several times more abundant than uranium, widely distributed, and often treated as waste in rare-earth mining. It absorbs neutrons and breeds uranium-233, a superb reactor fuel. What it can’t do, at least not well, is explode.
Yes, thorium means nuclear power without nuclear proliferation. But it gets even better. We’ll come back to that.
MSRE wasn’t just a science experiment. It proved you could run a reactor with fuel dissolved in molten salt instead of solid rods, operate at atmospheric pressure without massive steel pressure vessels, and use thorium in a practical fuel cycle.
The engineers at Oak Ridge weren’t guessing. They saw a path to commercial molten-salt breeder reactors that could multiply fuel resources by orders of magnitude, drastically reduce waste, and operate with passive safety — the sort of “walk-away safe” design everyone now pretends was invented in the 2010s.
Then Washington killed it.
Some today claim that Ronald Reagan killed advanced nukes. That’s false. The damage was done by his Democrat predecessor, Jimmy Carter.
By the mid-1970s, the U.S. nuclear establishment had made its choice: light-water reactors using uranium. They were big, familiar to the Navy, and — this is key — produced plutonium as a by-product. Thorium, by contrast, produced uranium-233, which is extremely difficult to turn into a weapon. But in Washington’s Cold War logic, that was a bug, not a feature.
Then, in 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would indefinitely defer commercial reprocessing and recycling of spent nuclear fuel. The theory was that reprocessing would increase the enrichment level of the waste, creating proliferation risk. Carter’s team never explained how every other U.S. nuclear facility could be secured, but a single reprocessing plant could not.
Carter wasn’t aiming at thorium per se. But his decision froze the entire nuclear ecosystem in place: no reprocessing meant no closed fuel cycles; no closed cycles, no molten-salt breeders; no breeders, no natural home for thorium.
So in the name of “nonproliferation,” Washington locked us into light-water uranium reactors that produce more long-lived waste, deepen dependence on enrichment, and make us more — not less — reliant on elaborate security and diplomatic gymnastics. The one technology that could have slashed waste, stretched fuel for centuries, and made proliferation dramatically harder was left to gather dust.
That is the Carter nuclear legacy: bureaucracy over innovation, fear over engineering, security theater over real nonproliferation — and we’ve been living with the result ever since.
Why Thorium Matters
So why dig up this “lost” tech now, when SMRs, TRISO fuel, and Gen-IV uranium designs are finally coming into their own?
Because thorium does three things that should make every strategist, diplomat, and energy investor sit up straight.
