The Thorium Dream

The Thorium Dream explores the growing grassroots movement in the United States behind the element thorium, and the powerful forces that could keep it buried in the dustbin of history. After the Fukushima disaster, nuclear energy faces it’s biggest questions in decades. But a ragtag band of Internet enthusiasts is on a mission to spread their answer: more nuclear power than Walt Disney could have dreamed up, green enough to save the climate (the energy secretary and NASA’s chief climate scientist are curious) and safe enough that if you walked away from the reactor it would calmly turn itself off. There’s just one problem: the idea was already killed by the government forty years ago. Bringing it back won’t be easy. But some are staking their whole livelihoods on it. That’s just what life’s like with the thorium dream.