Download torrent Thorium: The NASA Story

First, it establishes the role that energy plays in space travel and exploration by recalling a series of groundbreaking NASA missions including Voyager 1, New Horizons, and the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. The victories and shortfalls of each of these missions can be traced back to their utilization of power. The further we travel beyond the sun, the more incompetent our solar and battery-powered energy sources become. As a result, many of NASA's loftiest ambitions - including their desire to explore beneath the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa - remain stalled in the conceptual phase.

The film uses the example of the hugely popular book and films The Martian as an illustration of its argument.

And that is where those prospects have mostly stayed. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission NRC , which oversees nuclear power plants and materials, has not issued a construction permit for a new commercial plant in more than 30 years, since The Westinghouse Electric Co. Most experts agree that for many years major nuclear engineering firms invested little in the kind of research and development that propels technology forward. Aside from a few physics courses at Brandeis, about as close as Grae had come to the nuclear industry before getting involved with thorium was as a law student working pro bono for refusenik Soviet scientists.

In , when he first met Radkowsky, Grae was a bored associate at a Manhattan law firm, spending his days on a grab bag of international business clients ranging from video game startups to cement companies. But he never lost his passionate interest in thorium. His old mentor, Edward Teller, had reignited it in Radkowsky and Teller had stayed in touch since they first met at GWU.

It was Teller who had seen the potential in his quiet, awkward young master's candidate, urging him to continue for his PhD. When Radkowsky emerged from Catholic University with his doctorate during the Depression, Teller helped him find a job troubleshooting for the Singer Sewing Machine Co. Rickover, who was barreling ahead with a controversial new program to power submarines and carriers with nuclear reactors, and was looking for an out-of-the-box thinker.

Radkowsky-designed naval reactors have never suffered an accident. But late in life, Teller became convinced that surplus plutonium from old nukes or spent fuel posed a grave threat of falling into the wrong hands and triggering a nuclear catastrophe. When he contacted Radkowsky in , he urged him to revisit his early work with thorium and come up with a new fuel design that wouldn't produce weapons-usable materials in its spent fuel -- and that, in fact, might be used to start getting rid of bulging stockpiles of nukes in the United States and Russia.

Radkowsky himself also envisioned a new nuclear fuel that would allow even unfriendly governments -- Cuba's and North Korea's topped the list in those days -- energy-generating capacity without creating weapons-usable materials. Eight years after his meeting with Teller, he was ready to start applying for patents and getting on the road to commercialization.

Radkowsky was no businessman; he had no idea how to go about locating the expertise he needed. But he did have a wide network of friends and acquaintances. One was an Israeli investor who knew a New York real estate developer who knew Grae and had done business with his father, Joel, a high-tech entrepreneur and developer. Word got back to Radkowsky about Seth Grae, whose cases dealing with international law, high-technology companies and Russian refusenik physicists seemed to intersect in a relevant way.

Radkowsky's thorium project just didn't sound that promising -- a mix of has-been and pie-in-the-sky. It definitely didn't sound like billable hours. Grae turned him down. But Radkowsky persisted. Gradually, the two fell into step. Grae asked Radkowsky to recommend the best nuclear physics texts, which he read one by one at night after work.

In , Radkowsky Thorium Power Corp. It moved to Northern Virginia in Joel Grae, Seth's father, became its first president; Seth started as outside counsel; the family's friends were its board of directors. Back in Israel, Radkowsky spent long days in his lab and paced the floor into the night when he got home, trying to work out his fuel design. In New York, Seth Grae's fax machine periodically spat out Radkowsky's latest thoughts, rendered in multipage single-space type.

Back at his day job for the time being, Grae began looking for a nuclear research lab to partner with. Representatives of the Kurchatov Institute -- the Russian Los Alamos -- were in the United States actively seeking just such partnerships. Grae decided to check it out. What he found was not just an opportunity but also a lucky break.

Kurchatov had dozens of highly respected nuclear scientists; relationships with other good research facilities around Russia and in the United States; and support from the U.

In , Seth Grae quit his law firm job, met his future wife, went on two dates with her, and then left to spend a frigid winter in Moscow. There, he rented an apartment just outside Kurchatov's gates and went to work every day for two months with Alexei Morozov, chief scientist of the new thorium project.

When Radkowsky visited, the two would take long midwinter walks and make the rounds of Moscow's concert halls and restaurants. Grae loved being at Kurchatov, and he enjoyed Moscow. But back at home, things didn't seem quite as rosy. The film highlights the advantages that this element would bring in case of the need for space colonization and after what practical applications could be made with its help on Earth.

The film facilitates the understanding of complex aspects of the world of science. First of all, the role of energy in space exploration is highlighted, recalling some NASA projects: Voyager 1, New Horizons, and the exploration of the planet Mars. These missions, through their successes and failures, make us better understand what we can achieve as humanity through technological advances or must remain at a temporary conceptual level. The documentary uses the film Martian as an example to argue what it presents.

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