![]() and China relating to rare earths (culminating, for now at least, in litigation at the World Trade Organization), one might expect that thorium would be another arena in the ongoing competition between the world’s greatest power and its rising competitor. Although not a rare earth itself, thorium is often refined as a by-product of rare earths extraction following the mining of the mineral monazite, and given the friction between the U.S. ![]() Thorium’s theoretical prospects for providing relatively low-cost and considerably safer nuclear energy are bright indeed, and significantly, both the United States and China are believed to possess substantial quantities of this element. Following calls from the nuclear science community for renewed investigation into thorium’s potential as a source of nuclear energy, a number of states, China foremost among them, have begun funding thorium research in earnest. In the world’s never-ending quest for energy resources, the radioactive chemical element thorium has become more than a curiosity. can catch up when thorium's commercial viability has been reached. ![]() appears to have given away the farm to China in terms of its previously world-leading thorium research as a part of a risky strategy to push the steep costs of further thorium development onto China in the belief that the U.S. There has been a remarkable degree of cooperation between Washington and Beijing with respect to research on the radioactive chemical element thorium, a potentially important future source of safer nuclear energy.
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