>>mountaintop mining - the controversial coal extraction technique that is literally changing the landscape in the west virginia. >>as far as i know there's no way you can blow up a mountain and put it back. there's no way they'll actually ever gonna get this back to its original contour. it's impossible. >>starting a change reaction, could thorium become the nuclear fuel of the future? >>a chunk of the stuff about this size could provide electricity for one individuals lifetime. >>reporter: hello and welcome. i'm raya abirached and this is world business, your weekly insight into the global business trends shaping our lives.

by 2050 the global population will have risen from just under 7billion today to over 9 billion, putting greater pressure on the planet's already stressed resources. it's a challenge china has been dealing with for decades, with a one child policy that managed tocurb its rate of population growth. but has this radical measure brought with it a new set of challenges? >>reporter: china's most powerful asset is its people. they fill the bustling cities; manufacturing for the world; making china its second largest economy. their sheer numbers helped power an economic boom that has seen living standards rocket for people like cui minggui (tsway - meeng gway). >>minggui: now, it's much better, it's much better. so when i had my first children there were no vegetables toeat - we didn't even have rice. and now for example, we have

chicken and duck, even more than we can eat. >>reporter: but with the population spiralling, in the 1970s the government limited most couples to just one child. though rural families can have two if the first born is a girl. it worked - if they hadn't therewould be 400 million more chinese today. >>at the same time the party encouraged villagers to leave the land and find work in the booming cities. >>luxian: now, you know it's all like this - no young people stay in the village. i have young children and old parents. if i stay at home doing farming, the income is really small. here, i do house cleaning and my husband usually works on city construction sites. >>reporter: cui minggui's daughter li luxian, earns 250 dollars a month cleaning houses, 4 times what most ruralworkers bring in, so she can support her children and her mother.

>>but there is a price. she has to share a cramped apartment with 2 other families. there is no roomfor her children and as she works 7 days a week, no-one to look after them. they have to stay with her mother in the countryside. >>luxian: it's not ideal. i think it would be better if they stayed with me. but our conditions don't allow this. >>reporter: it's a practical solution to an increasingly common problem; couples live and work in the city for higher wages, while rural relatives look after their child. like college lecturer li ren who lives with his parents in chongqinq, while his daughter stays with his wife's family a thousand kilometres away. >>ren: they support us very, very strongly. and we need that support. because they know jobs now for us aremore important than looking after your own child. annot support

the whole family. port the whole - to look after the child - and even to look after our parents. >>reporter: looking after the elderly will soon be a huge challenge for china as a whole. life expectancy has rocketed and within two decades a quarter of the population will be over 60 - twice today's number; >>40 million will be over 80. >>china faces another problem; the one child policy has been so effective in curbing population growth that the workforce is now shrinking. >>deng: china's current economic success has been built upon cheap labour and if the cheap labour - that variable - is taken away

from the economy the success story will probably be ended. >>reporter: with fewer workers, wage costs are rising, making china less competitive with its neighbours. it hasto move away from being simply the factory of the world, churning out cheaply made goods. >>the future must be "developed in china" with chinese designs and chinese patents - or its companies will struggle to compete. >>deng: the option for china is to actually try very hard in terms of improving the quality of the human capital - meaning better education, better paid, more technology - so moving up to the value chain in the global commodity trade and production chain. this is the only way out for china. >>reporter: the government is addressing this. 5 years ago this hi-tech

zone was just farmland. by 2015 the government hopes it will be the world's leading laptop production centre. >>the authorities moved many local colleges here and encouraged tech giants to help design courses -so graduates can make a seamless transition to the world of work. >>hongyuan: our college has co-operation projects with companies. students can work there on internships. i think it's good because when students go on work experience, it broadens our horizons and we can learn alot. >>reporter: the government too has learnt a lot. it's clear the one child policy, although successful, has serious flaws. so much so the party is now looking to relax it. but if it does it will simply create even more young dependents until this new generation can work. by then, after 20 more years of urbanisation, china will have a new problem - an empty and aging countryside; where

will the food come from? >>deng: it's a very, very tough challenge for china in the next 10, 20 or 30 years. now if you look at chinese food production, in fact the cost of food production in china is higher than the world average. this is the reason why so many chinese decide not to produce food - it's not worth it. >>reporter: today, china imports food - like soya, meat, even rice. and its appetite is increasing as it gets richer. if the country's numbers as well as its wealth continue to rise, it may be a pressure the planet simply cannot handle. >>reporter: west virginia is the second largest coal producer in the us. it mines around 160 million tonnes eachyear, roughly a third of it by mountaintop mining,

a practice that pulls coal from shallow seams onridges and peaks. environmentalists say it is destroying the appalachian mountains, and the health of all those who live in them. the coal industry, however, says it's completely safe, and here to stay. >>reporter: it isn't easy to get to a mountaintop mining site in west virginia...in our case, it requires the help of a four wheel drive and a keen conservationist... >>webb: lets get out and venture off. what we're going to do, we're going to walk down this road and go round the corner here and you're going to be blown away. really. yes. >>reporter: ben webb is right...it is an awesome sight....and not one he likes... >>jong: how do you feel when you see something like this? >>webb: i feel horrible. it's horrible what they're doing here. i think this site's roughly 21 miles. it's pretty bad. >>reporter: mountaintop mining accounts

for about 40% of all the coal mining in west virginia. it's a form of surface mining that accesses shallow coal seams. one the coal industry sees as essential... >>raney: we're able to recover the full coal seams in the top of the hills because you can't underground minethem. they're too thin. you can't hold a top, you can't have a bottom. you can't have a safe environment for an underground mine in these upper coal seams. >>reporter: but activists say mountaintop mining is creating anything but a safe environment. i meet bo webb beside an elementary school that lies directly beneath an active surface mine...one he's convinced is poisoning the area with dangerous coal dust and chemicals... >>webb: the american school board journal came in here and did a story and their investigation showed that 10 people, students, staff teachers had died from cancer that attended this school in the previous 6 years of their report.. >>reporter: however coal industry supporters say surface mines

are both legal and safe. and while they admit active sites aren't pretty, they point out that companies are required by law to eventually restore mountains to either their approximate original contour, or, in a state where naturally flat land is rare...levelled off to encourage development, like at this former site... >>jong: so any kind of flat area that you can create in your opinion is valuable obviously economically. >>horton: absolutely it is. absolutely. it allows us to keep our children at home and employ them here and they don't have to leave home. >>webb: of all the land that's been flattened in west virginia, only about 3% has had any reclamation. it's not being used for anything. they're ing >>reporter: in fact, environmentalists say mountaintop mining is nothing more than a cheap way to access coal...by blowing the tops off mountains, and filling in adjoining valleys with leftover waste that chokes off streams, pollutes rivers and tarnishes water supplies.... >>raney: first of all it's not waste. it's the natural rock and dirt that is out in the ground above the coal. it's not waste

at all and i take offence to people using that term because it's completely inaccurate. >>sebok: it turns everything orange, like rust. the only thing i could clean it off with my bathtub and commodes and things was an acid cleaner, an acid based cleaner.. >>raney: every drop of water that leaves the site has to be treated in a system of some sort to be sure that we meet water quality standards. >>webb: for them to say they're putting out clean water is just a ridiculous statement. >>reporter: whatever effect it's having on the environment, signs of support for a coal industry that still accounts for around 15% of west virginia's $46.3b gdp aren't hard to find. largely because in what is america's second poorest state, for generations it's provided jobs for the locals... >>cline: i've worked in the mines 27 years. my grandfather worked in the mines. my dad worked in the mines. all my uncles worked in the mines.

>>reporter: in nearby logan county, some see those coal jobs as crucial to the local economy... >>kirkendoll: it probably touches directly 80 percent of the people in some fashion to a spinoff job or whatever, so it's critical to us. >>reporter: most coal miners earn over $60000 dollars a year, more than double the state's average salary... >>webb: these guys in order to make 60000 dollars a year, they're working an awful lot of overtime. >>reporter: surface mining in west virginia directly provides around 6000 jobs. it only accounts for about 6% ofthe 1.2b tonnes of coal mined in the usa each year, so environmentalists say it's not essential...more importantly, they believe it simply can't be done in a way that isn't hugely harmful to the environment... >>webb: well, as i know there's no way you can blow up a mountain and put it back. there's no way they're ever going to get this back to its original contour. it's impossible. >>reporter: others, however, believe the restored sites are just as good as the real thing...

>>horton: i'll just drive up here by myself or with a couple of my buddies or maybe my wife and we'll just sitaround and enjoy the quiet and peaceful afternoon. >>jong: couple of beers? >>horton: yeah we'll have a couple of beers. yeah. that's a fact. have a grill. sometimes we pitch a little shoes. have a good time. >>reporter: those opposed to mountaintop mining claim it's already ruined over 500 mountains covering 1.5 million acres, and is slowly but surely destroying the appalachians..... >>webb: looks like afghanistan. you know, it's supposed to look like rich thick forest. >>cline: if they do away with mining and coal. west virginia is going down. it can't survive. >>raney: they don't offer any alternative to it. they say do it underground. you can't mine that coal underground. so they give you easy answers and they walk away. >>reporter: still to come on world business... >>can nuclear power be clean

and green? we look at an alternative to uranium that may help... thorium. >>and cold water but classic waves, we go surfing in scotland. >>some very cool moves... and the rest in just a moment on world business... >>the world's nuclear industry runs almost entirely on uranium. it's a well known and well established fuel. what's not so well known is that uranium only became widely used, as it was vital to the nuclear arms race, electricity generation was simply a by-product. but in a different world where climate change and a growing hunger for energy are the new global challenges, other fuels could now become more popular, and one is thorium.

>>reporter: the small norwegian town of halden has a secret. >>deep inside a mountain is the country's only nuclear reactor, where scientists are investigating anew kind of nuclear fuel. >>it's called thorium, after the norse god of thunder - a radioactive metal which could be a safe and green alternative to uranium. >>norvik: today we use uranium as a fuel. that has a limited amount. for that reason, thorium will be an interesting resource to use in the future reactors. >>asphjell: there is advantages to thorium; both on the resource feed stock side, on the safety and operational side,

on the proliferation dimension and on the waste handling side. in total - more sustainability. >>reporter: norway's thor energy is part of scatech, a group of companies researching and commercialising "climate neutral energy technology". it believes that nuclear must be part of the energy mix alongside other solutions like wind and solar. but it has to be nuclear, clean and green. >>asphjell: 95 percent of what we put into a reactor is uranium 238 which is a totally unusable metal. it just produces long-lived waste. when you load thorium 232, you do not generate these long-lived actinides for long periods of time. so the waste will be a lot less and needs to be handled in a few hundred years as opposed to a few million years. >>reporter: and while it produces less waste than uranium, there is a lot more of it. thorium is as common as lead, five times more abundant than uranium. and 1 tonne of mined thorium

produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium. >>larsmon: thorium enthusiasts, and there are plenty of them around the world, will tell you that a chunk aboutthis size can provide enough electricity for one individuals lifetime. well there may be an elementof hype to that, but scientists will confirm that in order to generate one gigawatt of electrical power for a year, it takes 2 million tons of oil, 2 and a half million tons of coal. and only 700 kilos of thorium. >>reporter: the fuel's potential that hasn't been lost on china, already the largest power consumer, its biggestpolluter, and forecast to triple its electricity needs by 2030. the chinese academy of sciences recently announced a massive project to develop a thorium based reactor within 5 years. india, with around 25percent of global reserves has similar aspirations. >>as an added bonus, it's almost impossible to make nuclear weapons from thorium, which was the primary driver

for the adoption of uranium the nuclear industry. >>cywinski: in the early days of nuclear power there was a suggestion that we should go down the thorium route, and there is also the suggestion that we didn't because the military - particularly in the american military - needed plutonium to make their bombs. so the thorium route was discouraged and in fact the americans had several projects based on the go based on thorium reactors and they were stopped because they weren't producing plutonium. >>reporter: ironic, considering thorium reactors can in fact be used to dispose of dangerous materials, especially plutonium, from other nuclear programmes. >>bj÷rk: the waste product you get most of is plutonium, and this can be mixed with thorium. this is the kindof fuel we are investigating at thor energy. and when you put the thorium plutonium fuel in the reactor and the plutonium is consumed. >>reporter: that said, there are those that believe the element might work better as a sole fuel. this is emma, a compact

electron accelerator which is been built in england to create a new kind of nuclear reactor known as an adsr. it will use thorium like its competitors elsewhere in the world but in a very different way. >>cywinski: what thor energy are doing are mixing thorium with uranium and plutonium. in fact this is the route the indians are going down as well...they're mixing uranium and plutonium into the thorium and then using that mix as their fuel. what we are trying to do is build an adsr using pure thorium, so the idea is that if you have this really remarkable clean nuclear fuel - why mix it with something dirty like plutonium in order to drive it... see if we can actually run a reactor purely on thorium and nothing else... >>reporter: yet despite thorium's apparent benefits, uranium remains a strong competitor, not least because of the huge cost in changing or building new reactors. uranium also has

a solid track record within the industry. >>wiesenack: it's a fact that we have a product that is working for these reactors - >>uranium. >>uranium fuel, so you have to establish a new fuel in competition with the other one... >>reporter: developing a new nuclear fuel and new types of reactors also takes a long time. private investment is unlikely to emerge unless there are strong policy commitments from governments. >>asphjell: by saying that we need to introduce something new, you're saying that something wrong with what we have. and that's a very sensitive message to the industry and a lot of politicians and to the utilities. because....nuclear energy's existence is dependant on public opinion, and then there can't be something wrong with what you have. >>reporter: nuclear energy remains controversial, and the fukushima incident has done little to allay public suspicions and fear. >>what do you think of nuclear energy?' >>it's horrible...... >>you don't like it?

>>hate it >>it's kind of dangerous, after seeing what happened in japan >>i'm scared of it >>reporter: the fact remains however that hydrocarbons are running out and are environmentally disastrous. on the other hand, renewables are still unable to fill the gap. so if after testing, thorium proves to bea safer and more stable nuclear fuel, then its time may finally have come... >>reporter: scotland may seem like an unusual location for a surfing competition, but thurso in the country's far north is home to some spectacular waves. it is also home to a cold water surfing competition with 145-thousand dollars in total prize money that provides a tough challenge for the world's top surfers. >>reporter: spring in scotland - and the surf's up!

>>muriel: the north east coast of scotland may seem an unlikely place to hold an international surfing competition - but conditions here are amongst the best in the world rivaling anything hawaii or even australia has to offer. >>howse: it's world class waves here in thurso east - not many people would know of scotland as being a surf destination ... i just love it, although you're rugged up and the water's really cold there's some novelty about coming to a place like scotland that makes it way more memorable. >>reporter: those world class conditions in evidence with one surfer scoring a 10 point wave - the maximum that can be achieved in competition. >>lester: yeah really happy with that - it's kinda rare to get something like that in the contest this big. yeah, so something to remember. >>reporter: but to compete here takes real courage. the waves may be

classic, but they are seriously cold... barely above freezing... >>sullivan: it's one of the coldest surfing venues there is i mean it's 40 degree water out there. so i came from 80 degree water last week - i came just a little bit early just to prepare myself and get ready and get my body used to wearing the wetsuits and all the rubber. the water's a little bit more condensed because of how cold it is so you tend to need a little bit thicker boards out there so you floata little bit better because of the weight of the wet suit. >>reporter: it's that careful preparation and attention to detail that has propelled 24-year old kevin sullivan from lahaina hawaii to 150 in the world rankings in just four years. >>sullivan: you gotta stop doing what you wanna do and start doing what you need to do - that's kinda how i think. >>reporter: but professional surfing is a sport that doesn't come cheap, as kevin's father - and chief sponsor -explains. >>sullivan: he does have sponsors that finance him but i also

contribute to that and it would probably be in theneighbourhood of 60-thousand a year where it would take him to maybe 12 to 15 events throughout theyear. it can be more if he is not doing so well on the tour he'll want to be in more events. >>reporter: finding the finance to pursue the sport takes more than just being good in the surf. >>howse: in the past you used to get sponsored if you had the ability - nowadays we look at everything from personality, whether they can hold themselves in front of the media, how they work with photographersand video guys and the relationships they have with the magazines ... so there's a lot more to it than just going out there and surfing really good, you've gotta be a sort of package these days. >>reporter: so struggling young surfers have to paddle hard to attract sponsors, but it's no easy ride for the sponsors themselves.

>>ritzer: definitely a lot of competition between the companies to get the good guy - there's a lot of surfers, a lot of athletes but only a few outstanding ones. >>reporter: winner of this leg of the competition ... australian brent dorrington, sponsored by rival oakley - who having lifted this highland sword, walked away with the title of lord - as well as a crack at thefifty-thousand dollar prize money for the overall series winner. >>ritzer: if you just buy a little piece of land in scotland you become a lord because you're a landowner so lord means nothing else than being a landowner so everybody gets about 10 square feet of land and that makes them lords. >>reporter: and these lords of the surf will undoubtedly be riding the waves again in scotland for years to come. >>reporter: that's it for this week's world business. thanks for watching. we'll see you again at the same time next week.

welcome to newsline. it's tuesday, september 20 at 9