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Business Daily: The solution to climate change?

23/06/2011

The solution to climate change?

BBC World Service - Business Daily, The solution to climate change?

We investigate a low carbon energy source which is also cheap, plentiful and safe

Could an element called Thorium solve the crisis of global warming?  We'll be exploring the potential of a low carbon energy source which is also cheap, plentiful and safe.

In today's programme Justin Rowlatt explores the potential of a low carbon energy source which some people claim could solve climate change.

Now, the reason climate change is such an intractable problem is that modern life is completely dependent on the processes that cause it.  Every time you turn on a light, turn the key in your car or buy anything you are causing greenhouse gases to be pumped into the atmosphere.  That's because so much of the energy we use to power our lives comes from fossil fuels.  

What we need is the holy grail of electricity generation: a low carbon source of power which is - crucially - also cheap, reliable and safe.  Well, forget water, forget wind - could a alternative source of nuclear power be the answer?  

At a nuclear industry conference I was buttonholed by a man championing an alternative to traditional nuclear power.  Like the Ancient Mariner, John Durham held me with his glittering eye and told me the good news about a radioactive element called Thorium.  

As you will hear Thorium could have incredible potential but John Durham is - by his own admission - no nuclear expert.  

We are always open to new ideas here at Business Daily but I must admit, I was a little worried that Thorium reactors might turn out to be some kind of "perpetual motion machine" - a hypothetical ideal but a practical impossibility - so we decided to seek some expert help.  

I asked Ian Hore-Lacy from the World Nuclear Association whether he thought that Thorium might have the power to save the world from global warming and if so why no one had developed it before.

And finally while Thorium could one day help solve some of the world's energy problems, for now we're still very dependent on oil to keep our economies going.  And, with world prices rising some countries are finding that supplies of refined oil products like petrol and kerosene are becoming harder to come by.  

That shouldn't be a problem in Nigeria though, the country is, after all, one of the biggest producers of oil on the planet.  But fuel shortages are increasingly common in Nigeria and our commentator there, Sam Olukoya, thinks he knows why.

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