A few weeks before the tsunami struck Fukushima's uranium reactors and shattered public faith in nuclear power, China revealed that it was launching a rival technology to build a safer, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper network of reactors based on thorium. 

This passed unnoticed - except by a small of band of thorium enthusiasts - but it may mark the passage of strategic leadership in energy policy from an inert and status-quo West to a rising technological power willing to break the mold. If China's dash for thorium power succeeds, it will vastly alter the global energy landscape and may avert a calamitous conflict over resources as Asia's industrial revolutions clash head-on with the West's entrenched consumption. China's Academy of Sciences said it had chosen a "thorium-based molten salt reactor system."   

The liquid fuel idea was pioneered by US physicists at Oak Ridge National Lab in the 1960s, but the United States has long since dropped the ball. Further evidence of Barack Obama's "Sputnik moment," you could say.

Chinese scientists claim that hazardous waste will be a thousand times less than with uranium. The system is inherently less prone to disaster.  

Thorium is a silvery metal named after the Norse god of thunder. The metal has its own "issues" but no thorium reactor could easily spin out of control in the manner of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or now Fukushima.  

Professor Robert Cywinksi from Huddersfield University said thorium must be bombarded with neutrons to drive the fission process. "There is no chain reaction. Fission dies the moment you switch off the photon beam. There are not enough neutrons for it continue of its own accord," he said.

Thorium is as common as lead. Almost all the mineral is usable as fuel, compared to 0.7pc of uranium. There is enough to power civilization for thousands of years.

US physicists in the late 1940s explored thorium fuel for power. It has a higher neutron yield than uranium, a better fission rating, longer fuel cycles, and does not require the extra cost of isotope separation.

The plans were shelved because thorium does not produce plutonium for bombs. As a happy bonus, it can burn up plutonium and toxic waste from old reactors, reducing radio-toxicity and acting as an eco-cleaner.

So the Chinese will soon lead on this thorium technology as well as molten-salts. Good luck to them. They are doing Mankind a favour.