A resource-rich survey of a country that understands how to achieve a low carbon economy:
For most of the past thirty years, there has been little incentive to develop nuclear energy systems that release more than a tiny portion of the potential energy found in uranium. The same lack of market incentive has nearly completely kept thorium out of the energy supply market. The perception was that we were doing just fine with the available fossil fuels and were using nuclear energy so sparingly that it was considered okay to use only the 0.7% of natural uranium that was most easily fissioned.
There was a vast quantity of uranium discovered during a brief period of exploration during the Cold War, and the rate of new plant construction and operation was much lower than envisioned by some early planners. For decades, there was enough uranium available on the world market to keep the price at levels that encouraged the wasteful behavior of setting aside used fuel bundles after only a few percent of the potential energy had been extracted. Many businessmen and political leaders just could not be bothered to invest the money required to improve the systems when it seemed like the low fuel prices would last forever.
That situation is changing slowly, partially driven by a Chinese nuclear construction program that will soon exceed the build rate that was achieved in the US during the first Atomic Age. Just a few years ago, the goal in China was to increase nuclear plant capacity from about 9 GWe to 40 GWe by 2020. The current plan will achieve that goal within the next five years and could hit a number closer to 80-120 GWe by 2020. The reactor construction and manufacturing enterprise will not suddenly stop at that level. As the construction continues, China could be operating 300-400 GWe of nuclear plant capacity by 2030. If history is any guide, that capacity should be operating at a capacity factor of 75-90%, displacing a tremendous quantity of fossil fuel consumption.=
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