Thorium

Thorium in pure form is a rather normal looking silver metal, and can be rolled and stamped just like aluminum or steel. However Thorium is radioactive, and most likely you'll run into it in the form of Thorium Dioxide, a grey powder, which is used because it can withstand extremely high heat.

Thorium's atomic name is Th, and is atomic number 90, the most common isotope is Th-232 (With a half life of over 14 billion years) which occurs naturally, almost as commonly as Uranium (which is actually quite common, relatively speaking).

Thorium is commonly found mixed in with Uranium ores, but is not currently used for much commercially, so there is lots of Thorium in the world as a by-product of Uranium purifying. Because of this abundance, some scientists have recently thought up a way to use it as a nuclear fuel, possibly replacing Uranium in this respect, but few nuclear power plants actually employ Thorium today.

Thorium was widely used before the 1950's or so, sometimes it was used simply as a metal with no regard to it's radioactivity in an alloy with magnesium called Mag-Thor, which was used in some missiles for it's light weight and strength.

Another common use was in old gas lamp mantles, which where coated in Thorium dioxide to make them glow more intensely with the heat of a flame, but since the 1960's it's been replaced with Yttrium oxide. Yet another use was mixing it with glass, this glass was then used to make expensive high-grade camera lenses due to superior optical qualities of "Thoriated" glass, however it has not been used for this since well before 1980.

Today one of the only sources I could find was in an electrode for "TIG" welding, these electrodes consist of a rod of Tungsten about 7 inches long and 1/16th in diameter, and if you search for long enough, you can find Thoriated electrodes with up to 4% thorium content. I bought a few of these electrodes, and proceeded to try to dissolve the Tungsten to leave just the Thorium Dioxide, the result was a dirty green crumbly layer, probably not very pure Thorium Dioxide.. But it is still radioactive, meaning in a way, my experiment worked. Both this green product and the original Thoriated-Tungsten electrodes are shown below (The dime is just for scale, dimes have 0% Thorium content.)

This concludes my Thorium post, thanks for reading.

~Ben