What in the world does Thorium to have to do with economics? Well, if you click the link and watch the vid, you will SO understand so much more.
Electricity = Great quality of life.
How to make electricity, how to generate it? Uranium? No...check it out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyqYP6f66Mw
If the US was willing to create a centralized refinery for Thorium and thus incentivise rare earth OEMs to invest in what would be the only way to process thorium into a workable fuel source, I would be tempted liken us to Rockefeller. We would not have control over the production, nor the end state, of Thorium, but we would control the only source of the necessary intermediary step of refinement. Foreign rare earth element producers would likely not react to this adversely, as those who drilled oil did to Rockefeller. We would be giving them an outlet to refine the naturally occurring byproduct of REEs into something that would cease to be a useless, inert material and instead be a source of alternative, and comparatively clean, energy.
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