Mystic Timmy And The Thorium Price
15 years later it all comes true
Us dastardly neoliberals keep insisting that prices are information. Therefore you cannot run an economy with assigned prices because you’ve not the information to assign them. Further, by assigning prices you are then destroying the information required to be able to run an economy because prices no longer interplay and tell you things. Prices do, actually, matter.
Now to put on the green turban, the costume jewellery and reveal myself as Mystic Timmy. I predicted this:
China has world’s first operational thorium nuclear reactor thanks to ‘strategic stamina’
Team working on project reportedly achieves milestone by completing fuel reloading while experimental molten salt reactor was running
No, not that it would be China, nor that it would be because of strategic stamina (snigger). Rather, that someone out there was filling a thorium reactor. So, someone was.
The other question was from a journalist on these subjects who asked, well, if thorium does work, where will it all come from? To which the answer is in the beginning at least, from the same ores we dig up to make the magnets that make the windmills work. Rare earths extraction is always polluted by thorium and what to do with that is a right pain. But those Indians doing their reactor research might solve that. For a third conversation was with one of the grand-daddies of the UK rare earths industry. Their thorium no longer gets sent off for disposal. They're stocking it until someone needs it to fill a reactor.
The thorium price was, for decades there, negative. So few used it for anything at all thathaving it around was a radioactive problem, not an asset to be sold.
Back 12 years, in a little more detail:
Lynas, which has built a new rare earths refinery in Malaysia, will have thorium as a byproduct (there's always Th in your rare earth ores). They've announced that they're getting offers to actually buy it from them: the price has turned positive.
Now, OK, that's possibly only a matter of interest to metals geeks like myself: but what it actually means is that someone, somewhere, is being serious about starting up test runs of thorium reactors. It's the only possible use for the material these days in any quantity.
If someone's buying then someone is at least considering filling up a test reactor. My best guess is that this is the Indian research programme: although it could, possibly, be the Russian one and there are rumours of a Chinese as well.
Which I take to be cheering news: for there's no particular problem with thorium reactors. The engineering's pretty well known, it can't go bang, all it really needs is someone to actually build and test at size the technology. And, as I say, if thorium has turned positive in price then I have to assume that that's exactly what someone is doing.
OK. One was a bit of gossip, a supposition by a third party. The other was a price in an annual report. From which we are - or the informed are perhaps, but that’s fine - able to conclude that someone’s getting a thorium reactor ready. Which, someone was indeed.
Prices contain information. We didn;t need to know - or as is more likely with tehse things, not know - that Russia, India or China was filling up a reactor. We just needed to look at the global price of thorium. The price itself allowed us to reach the conclusion - someone’s filling up a reactor.
And lo, it was so.
The efficient market hypothesis comes in for a lot of stick. Mostly because morons don’t know what the hypothesis is. They think it means that markets are the efficient method of organising everything which is why neoliberals keep shouting “Eat Dirt!” at honest little planners like themselves.
Which isn’t what it means at all. Rather, that all the information known about what markets prices should be is already in market prices. Markets are efficient at processing information that is. Which is why you should use market prices in your planning because that’s where the information is.
We’ve not exactly disproved it here, have we? It didn’t even, not really, require the intervention of Mystic Timmy either. If thorium’s rising in value then someone must be doing something with it. D’Oh!
But obvious or not it is also true. As is that thorium reactor.
Thorium reactors may turn out to be a bum idea. In fact it's quite likely, as if they were a good idea then everybody would already be doing it. It's not as if Chinese physicists had stolen a Long March on the rest of the world. I put forward as an example all the wonderful inventions of Nikola Tesla which have never made it into the marketplace, although the technology is well understood and public domain, simply because they don't work.