APART from the vested interests, I find it puzzling why our Department of Energy does not consider thorium reactors, particularly after the Japanese problems when, because of the tsunami, their reactor exploded and is still causing problems now and possibly for millions of years to come.

Uranium reactors are not fail safe whereas thorium reactors are. As soon as any problem occurs with a thorium reactor it shuts itself down – not by any mechanical or electrical device or human input, but by using the immutable physical and chemical forces which operate throughout the universe.

To me that alone should be sufficient to make our politicians consider thorium reactors; but there are a lot more compelling reasons why we should use them. I will list them without elaborating on them to leave readers to research and verify what I have stated.

•Thorium is plentiful and exists throughout the world; so no wars over which country sits on top of a pile of fuel like oil, gas or uranium.

•Thorium can use up and make safe the left over stockpiles of nuclear waste from the uranium reactors.

•The leftovers of thorium reactors rapidly decay and are easily made safe.

•There are no greenhouse gasses given off.?This may not have been seen as important 30 years ago but we now realise that burning carbon is changing our world with consequences we do not fully understand.

•The disadvantage with thorium is that the leftovers cannot be used to make nuclear bombs.

Is this perhaps the reason why we are still using uranium? It certainly is the reason why we started using uranium in the 1940s and locked ourselves into using the dangerous and unsafe uranium reactors leaving us with huge stockpiles of dangerous waste.

The vested interests of the present nuclear industry seem to me to be persuading our politicians to maintain the status quo, and I do not see that our politicians will do anything without public pressure.

This can only come from individuals each writing to their MP or signing a petition on a government website or a petition website like 38 degrees.

It worked with the Forest sell off. Bear in mind that global warming might destroy our forests anyway.

– The Dreamer (name and address supplied).