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The Burning Soil: Thorium and the Making of a New Energy Order (excerpts)

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Book summary — The Burning Soil: Thorium and the Making of a New Energy Order, by Alexei Nikolaevich Volkov (English translation by Dr. Caroline Marsh, Verso Books, 2029). Soviet popular science / strategic history. Three excerpted chapters are summarised below; the full book includes nine chapters, a foreword, introduction, afterword, and bibliography.

Author background: Volkov (b. 1959) served as researcher and subsequently Deputy Director at the Physics and Power Engineering Institute (FEI), Obninsk, from 1984 until his retirement in 2021. Doctorate in nuclear engineering from Moscow Engineering Physics Institute; senior member of the BN-T2 commercial prototype engineering team; corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Chapter 4: The Cuba Model and Its Children (excerpt, pp. 115–138)

Volkov presents the Santa Cruz thorium plant in Cienfuegos, Cuba — the first full-scale Soviet thorium export — as a proof of concept for the Soviet technology transfer model. The defining feature of this model was its rejection of the Western installation approach (foreign-built, operator-trained black box) in favour of genuine embedded training: Cuban engineers trained at FEI Obninsk, Leningrad Thorium Station, and Kola, and participated in every phase of construction and systems testing. When Soviet personnel departed, they left behind an independent operational capability.

Volkov acknowledges that Soviet motivations were strategic rather than humanitarian. The thorium programme built influence through technical dependency without requiring military presence or coercive engagement — an approach the author describes as an improvement on earlier Soviet foreign policy methods.

Iran receives the most extended treatment among the programme’s export clients. Volkov presents the 2015 deal not as Iranian sacrifice of a weapons programme but as a rational calculation: Iran had spent an estimated $200–300 billion in sanctions and foregone development over three decades without producing a weapon. What it received in exchange — a 1,200 MWe thorium reactor at Isfahan, an implicit Soviet Union security guarantee, and the removal of the legal architecture for external pressure — represented a genuine win, a conclusion that Volkov notes Western analysts find discomforting. The Isfahan reactor achieved first criticality in 2022 and reached full rated output in 2023; Volkov visited in 2024 and describes Iranian engineers who “explained it the way people explain things they have built.”

Pakistan and Bangladesh represent the next generation of the model, deployed under more difficult political conditions including regional nervousness following accidents in India’s PHWR programme. In Pakistan, the Soviet team conducted a two-year public education programme in communities surrounding the Dera Ghazi Khan site — genuine technical engagement rather than public relations. The resulting facility was, by 2026 polling, the most publicly trusted nuclear facility in South Asia.

Volkov identifies the social technology of technology transfer as the programme’s most underappreciated achievement: the accumulated knowledge of how to introduce a frightening technology without lying or relying on the authority of outside expertise. The formula, across every case, was the same: “Show them the physics.”

Chapter 7: The West’s Beautiful Mistake (excerpt, pp. 203–239)

Volkov analyses Western energy policy decisions between approximately 1990 and 2020 as a class of error he terms the beautiful mistake — not a stupid or corrupt choice, but one made by intelligent people whose rationality was calibrated to a set of incentives that excluded the long-term cost of being wrong.

United States

The shale gas revolution (mid-2000s) transformed the US into the world’s largest hydrocarbon producer within a decade; Volkov acknowledges the genuine engineering achievement. But the cheapness of natural gas in US markets made investment in alternative baseload technologies structurally unattractive — and the external costs of hydrocarbon combustion do not appear on any private-sector balance sheet. The US had the technical capability, scientific capacity, and institutional knowledge for a thorium programme but lacked the political will to build a competitor to an already-monetised asset.

By 2020, the US generated ~40% of its electricity from natural gas, 19% from coal, and 20% from nuclear (aging fleet). Solar and wind grew substantially but are intermittent. The gap between intermittent production and continuous demand was filled, reliably and invisibly, by burning methane. Volkov concludes that the resulting system was more dependent on natural gas than it had been twenty years earlier, and fragile in ways that its public accounting did not reveal.

European Union

Europe’s renewable buildout was more ambitious and more consistent than America’s. But the baseload gap created by accelerating nuclear phase-out (Germany’s Energiewende in particular) and treating nuclear and renewables as competitors rather than complements was filled — in the short term by coal, in the medium term by liquefied natural gas imports from Qatar, the United States, and other Gulf producers.

Volkov’s diagnosis is blunt: the European energy transition was real in its ambitions and structurally incomplete. By 2025, the EU-27 spent approximately $180 billion on LNG imports to maintain baseload generation that renewables did not replace and nuclear phase-out had removed.

France, Finland, and several Eastern European members maintained or expanded nuclear capacity, with France announcing new PWR construction in 2026 (notably not thorium). The United Kingdom receives a separate treatment for its particular pathos: from building Calder Hall (world’s first full-scale nuclear power station, 1950s) to importing a French PWR design and Chinese investment for Hinkley Point C at three times cost and a decade behind schedule.

Table 7.1 — Selected energy system comparisons, circa 2025

MetricSoviet thorium programmeUS gas + renewablesEU LNG + renewables
Primary baseload fuelThorium-232 (domestic)Natural gas (domestic / imported)LNG (imported, primarily Gulf)
Fuel source geopolitical riskNegligibleLow–moderateModerate–high
CO₂ emissions, power sector (2025 vs 2015)−78%−19%−31%
Long-lived nuclear waste (per TWh)~4% of equivalent uranium fissionN/AN/A
Levelised cost, new baseload (USD/MWh)$31–3828–41 wind (excl. storage)110–140 new LNG terminal
Dispatchable baseload (% of grid, 2025)87%62%54%
Foreign exchange on primary fuel imports (2025)~$0~$12bn~$180bn

The window

To the question most frequently asked by Western audiences — is it too late? — Volkov answers: the window is not closed, but it is no longer where it was. A Western thorium programme begun in 2029 would begin thirty years behind a Soviet programme already operating twenty-two commercial stations, without the accumulated operational experience, trained workforce, supply chain, or regulatory framework. An FEI colleague of Volkov’s opens meetings with newly enthusiastic Western policymakers by asking: When did you decide we were right? The answer is always some recent year. We were right in 1990, he says. You are welcome to catch up.

Chapter 10: The Burning Soil of the Moon (complete, pp. 311–348)

The Blagov confirmation

Volkov writes in October 2029, after the Chang’e-8 sample return mission delivered south polar lunar regolith samples to Beijing containing helium-3 concentrations of 2.8 to 3.6 parts per billion by mass — confirming a 1965 theoretical estimate by V. M. Blagov, Scientific Secretary of the Interdepartmental Council for the Research and Utilisation of Outer Space. Blagov’s memorandum to Chairman Kosygin (17 March 1965) had estimated potentially recoverable helium-3 at 1.4 to 4.1 ppb, based on theoretical modelling. He was right for sixty-two years before anyone could confirm it. The Zvezda programme he argued for was shelved in 1974 after the N1 failures; the helium-3 survey instruments were not deployed until the robotic Luna-Resurs programme of the late 1990s.

The physics

The deuterium–helium-3 (D–He3) fusion reaction produces a proton and a helium-4 nucleus with no primary neutrons — meaning no structural activation, no heavy shielding requirements, and waste products of helium and hydrogen. It is, in the assessment of physicists who have modelled it, the cleanest large-scale energy source physically conceivable. The barrier to developing D–He3 fusion has never been doubt about the physics; it is that terrestrial helium-3 exists only in quantities of kilograms per year (as a tritium decay byproduct from nuclear weapons), while a commercial D–He3 programme would require tonnes per year.

The resource

Chang’e-8 figures of 2.8–3.6 ppb, applied to the south polar concentration zone identified in preliminary survey maps, yield an estimated ~1 million tonnes of recoverable helium-3 in the south polar region alone; global lunar estimates range from 2–5 million tonnes. A commercial 1,000 MWe D–He3 fusion reactor would consume approximately 100 kg of helium-3 per year. One million tonnes is ten billion kilograms. The arithmetic yields a figure indistinguishible from indefinite.

The fusion programme (2027)

The Soviet domestic fusion programme has operated continuously since the T-3 tokamak experiments of the 1960s (Artsimovich’s group at Kurchatov Institute). In 2024, the Kurchatov T-20 tokamak achieved Q > 1 for sustained periods — net energy gain from fusion reactions. Volkov notes the gap between Q > 1 in an experimental device and a working commercial power station is substantial, but smaller than the gap between Q < 1 and Q > 1, which took sixty years to close.

The MTSS dimension

The Mir-Tian Space Station (MTSS-1, Mir-Tian) — announced in 2023 following the formal merger of the Soviet Mir complex and the Chinese Tiangong station — hosts the Artsimovich Laboratory, a fusion research platform. Its fusion research benefits not from microgravity but from access to the AI accelerator cluster in the station’s semiconductor wing, running domestically fabricated Chinese chips. The RAZUM language model series (RAZUM-70B, released in open weights by the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 2024) performs plasma confinement modelling at speeds allowing real-time feedback between parameter adjustments and predicted plasma behaviour, running on Chinese accelerator hardware at MTSS. A joint Soviet-Chinese Academy paper (September 2027) suggests the path from Q > 1 to practical energy output is shorter than the consensus estimate of 2020; the classified specifics cannot be assessed by Volkov, but the expression of those who know is familiar to him — the same expression he saw on FEI engineers before BN-T1 achieved criticality in 1998.

Closing

The Chinese lunar programme did not descend from Zvezda; it was built independently. But Chang’e-8’s confirmation of Blagov’s 1965 numbers creates a through-line: a Soviet planning official in 1965 was right about where to find the resource that may power the human future. Volkov concludes by invoking Neporozhny’s 1990 memorandum — the thorium programme was also “the wrong thing to do” by every consensus of its day, expensive and speculative and requiring sustained institutional commitment. They built anyway because the arithmetic was correct. The arithmetic for helium-3 fusion is also correct. Blagov was right. It is time to build.

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