What would we gain? A few jobs? Presumably. Cheaper iPads? Presumably not. Higher incidences of cancer and other diseases? Presumably. Contamination of land? Highly presumably.

I agree up to "Higher incidences of cancer and other diseases?" and "Contamination of land". (You already know why I don't see cancer coming from this.)

Contamination of land is a matter of where the rare earths / thorium comes from. An existing phosphate mine, iron ore mine or aluminum mine dump rare earths and thorium in talings ponds. Less than a bonna fide rare earths mine, but it is there. That asset is left untouched, for the same reason Molycorp had access to valuable heavy rare earths in their light-rare-earths-only mine, but choose to dump them into a tailings pond... by seperating the thorium out, suddenly that exact same material is a regulated liability. It was there all along... in the lake... dilute. The same net quantity at a different (and I would argue harder to manage environmentally) density.

We have 2 untouched assets. And the up-side of thorium is a long way off. The up-side of heavy rare earths is immediate. People could actually start building consumer electronics in the US again. (And in other countries eager to buy the heavies from the US.)

The risk-reward ratio just isn't there, and the risk is being put upon innocent third parties...

If you're talking about the environmental impact due to mining, then you have to be strictly speaking about someone starting a new mine. Any new mine will have some negative impact. But there's enough byproduct across multiple non-dedicated-rare-earth-mine sources to potentially fulfil 100% of US demand.

Again, refining heavy rare earths is not an easy process. But the ease/challenge/impact has zero to do with thorium. It was there already, and removing it is incidental to the seperation process.

while the reward is kept primarily to the manufacturers so it's definitely something where the state has a valid reason to not allow the risk to be taken.

US can benifit from being able to control the supply chain for military hardware... GPS = heavy rare earths. Batteries = heavy rare earths.

All true, but also not without risk. We can't even keep pig shit from poisoning land and water, what makes you think we'd keep thorium from leaking Into the environment?

As it did, from a tailings pond, shutting down Molycorp. They probably would have preferred to seperate out the thorium, and sell it to someone interested in powering a Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor. Or sell it to China, where such reactors are currently under development. (They wouldn't have gotten much money for it, as China seperates and stockpiles thorium as a future energy resource already.)

I'd rather China be better about this too, but I have no say in the matter, they are already doing it, and we aren't discussing changing them, we are discussing changing us. And finally, I am selfish enough to rather have someone else pollute their own land than pollute mine. Most everyone is like this.

I guess me too, except the jobs are important, and I suspect that impact (lower net unemployment, growth in high-tech manufacturing the most bestest kind of manufacturing) will be larger, so much as it can be quantified, than the environmental imapct.

Even so, I'm against China's pollution of their own land as well. Do you know of a way I can stop them? I don't either.

Agree, a damn-the-environment approach in China can't be stopped (not all their mines are like that but most are), but them having a monopoly on heavies means they control the volume of that impact relative to quantity of heavies produced.

If US was able to supply 1/2 the world's deman for heavies, then China's approach is lessened and a cleaner approach is increased.

And we are discussing whether it is worth a smaller impact on Americans? No, we are discussing whether to increase our impact from basically zero.

Again, you are correct in regard to refining heavies. But I can't see moving thorium from tailing ponds into storage casks as having anything but a positive impact.

False equivalency. Just because we won't be as bad as China, that doesn't make it good. Drinking a tablespoon of fluoride isn't as bad as a tablespoon of cyanide, but both will kill you.

Think this has been covered in aggregate.

I'm concerned about lead in the environment as well, that doesn't mean I think we should dump more into it. What kind of logic is this? "We have a problem, so let's make it worse!"???

There's already thorium in the environment. Your concern is that it becomes more dangerous as it is pulled up, seperated from heavies, and stored? The inverse of this would be to take nuclear waste currently stored on-site in nuclear power plants (not a great long term solution, but it is it quite concentrated), and just dump it in the ocean or spread it around in landfills. Dilute the problem. Now thorium is not dangerous like that radioactive waste... that stuff is hetrogenious, can melt and burn (if concentrated but not cooled as needed), and there's all sorts of elements that our bodies will metabolize should that happen. But we're just sort of talking about radioactive "stuff" here, right? I mean you don't have a particular concern with thorium specifically (it seems). So can we look at the existing mining operations, with their tailing ponds as sort of a question, what would you like to do with those tailing ponds full of REE + thorium? Leave them as they are? Dilute them over the original mine surface or landfills? Or seperate the materials and deal with each accordingly?

Anything that goes into the environment ends up in your food and water, unless there's evidence to the contrary.

No one is talking about releasing thorium into the environment, except that coal fired plants do as they burn coal. Thorium can be stored dry and requires no cooling, as already demonstrated by US gov in Nevada (thorium stockpile buried underground).

No, the lie was that we just assumed about what happens at low levels. The higher levels are known. We now know more about lower levels, including that at very low levels, radiation can even be protective.

Yes, this is something I suspect is true, although I don't believe we know for sure. Low levels are safe. But thorium having 14 billion year half-life means it is incredibly low level.

Do you have a mechanism by which industrial waste will spread out in a even blanket across the land and not collect in higher concentrations, like most everything does?

This is not to be released into the environment, unless you (justifiably) are worried about leaving it in a tailings pond. Even if thorium was consumed in a Th-MSR, it isn't like there's thorium floating up a smoke stack. It fissions. Changes into other elements, which then also fission. The point is to fission as much away as possible into energy, a process we can do much more effeciently in a Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor than a Uranium Solid-Fuel Reactor. I mean you can actually reduce the planet's net radioactivity with this process, if that's on anyone's to-do list.

Or dump it into the streams, or store it in leaky facilities, and you'd better hope your reclamation systems don't let it get into the smoke stacks, etc.

Well it goes in tailings ponds right now (bad solution) because it has value that can't be utilized. It is treated as waste. Allow it to be bought, sold, fissioned and then there's an incentive (beyond gov regulation) to see it used instead of discarded.

Oh, and don't cut corners, or have any fraud in contracts, maintenance, regulatory compliance, etc.

You seem to be singling out one element as especially prone to ethical abuse. We already see this with petrolium. Nuclear has the safest ratio of power generated to lives lost of any power source.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

We're looking at something far safer than today's solid fuel reactors. Which were designed with nuclear weapons material as a byproduct in mind, and safety was a secondary concern. (During the cold war of course.)

What I'm ultimately getting at is that it's insulting to call anyone who is concerned about radioactive pollution "non-rational" (as the OP did), it's absurd to dismiss increased pollution simply because there's already some pollution anyway, and even though a system can be designed to be relatively safe, that does not mean it's likely to be enacted as planned. And for what? The dubious benefit of being able to possibly build iPads in the US? That's not even a likely outcome. The only likely outcome is that a component of electronics might be refined in the US. Nice for a few jobs, to be sure, but potentially hazardous for many more people, and only really serving to enrich a few at the top of the economic food chain? Is that supposed to be worth it? I'm not at the top of the economic food chain. I'm not going to deliberately take on risks so someone else can get richer.

Would iPad manufacturing move to US? I wouldn't bet on it. China has a kick-ass supply chain. But are iOS development and financial schemes the future of US economy? We can design stuff, but not built it? Not even prototypes for fast iteration? As more cars become hybrids, do we want to risk China replacing detroit? Wind turbines need heavies, so they get built in China. Solar panels (increasingly) involve heavies. Heavies are so versatile it is hard to imagine what type of future phycial product might not come to depend on them in the manufacturing process.

Apple built a chip fab in Texas. That can't be anything but good news, apparenly today's generation of CPU don't depend on heavies. What if they did? There must be some industry the US can't afford to lose, and maybe that too will come to depend on heavy rare earths.