Establish a Thorium bank to allow the mining of Rare Earth Elements and Thorium.

Thorium, a valuable nuclear material, holds great promise to secure our nation's energy future. Used in a highly stable Molten Salt Reactor (MSR), thorium can power our society for thousands of years from non-fissile ores. Our country pioneered MSRs at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, in the 1960s, and Director Alvin Weinberg saw it as the basis for a Second Nuclear Era. Thorium, in the Molten Salt process results in radically smaller quantities of nuclear waste that persists only hundreds, not tens of thousands of years as with conventional Light Water Reactors. China currently is the major producer of Rare Earth Elements which occur with Thorium ores and are used in every modern electronic device. We need to maintain our ability to process these minerals, so essential in our modern era.