>>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