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Reuters reports:
Japan plans to dispatch its largest warship on a three-month tour through the South China Sea beginning in May, three sources said, in its biggest show of naval force in the region since World War Two. China claims almost all the disputed waters and its growing military presence has fueled concern in Japan and the West, with the United States holding regular air and naval patrols to ensure freedom of navigation.
The Izumo helicopter carrier, commissioned only two years ago, will make stops in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka before joining the Malabar joint naval exercise with Indian and U.S. naval vessels in the Indian Ocean in July.
President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte said he may visit the warship. The Chinese navy plans to "shadow" foreign military vessels and aircraft. The U.S. is deploying an attack drone to South Korea to respond to recent North Korean missile launches.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday March 15 2017, @05:56AM (1 child)
> [...] it is regulated under the Nuclear non-proliferation treaty [...]
I watched the first 12 minutes of your video, and didn't see that claim. Merely mining and purifying thorium ought not to be relevant to the NPT; loading it into nuclear reactors--as your video, predictably, urges us to do--is another matter. To make efficient use of thorium as a nuclear fuel requires breeder reactors and a reprocessing programme.
All reprocessing can present a proliferation concern, since it extracts weapons usable material from spent fuel.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor [wikipedia.org]
Under the NPT, unless I'm mistaken, such programmes may be undertaken in the pursuit of nuclear energy. The goal of the treaty is the elimination of nuclear weapons by lessening their spread to additional countries, with the countries that already have them dismantling their stock-piles (the latter is more often breached than observed).
With breeder reactors and reprocessing, one could also make use of 238U, which yields 239Pu, which in turn is easily separated and can be weaponised. The wastes from reprocessing are highly radioactive. The video says that thorium has a 12.5-billion-year half life; other sources say that the most common isotope has a half life of 14 billion years. Regardless, it's very long-lived, hence only mildly radioactive.
https://www.britannica.com/science/thorium [britannica.com]
That radioactivity seems like less of a problem than the potential problems associated with the proposed solution.
The video advocates increased mining of monazite, which also contains radium. Most of the radium would have to be disposed of, or a use found for it. Careless disposal of thorium, uranium and radium in the 1940s may have led to "higher-than-normal rates of cancer" in St. Louis. I'm sure we could do better today, were we to decide to.
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/24/us/mountain-of-nuclear-waste-splits-st-louis-and-suburbs-888.html [nytimes.com]
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday March 15 2017, @07:51AM
The political problems are discussed at 20:40 [youtube.com]
The video does not actually use my exact wording.