As populations grow, demand for energy gets higher. Traditional energy sources, including solar power, do not seem to be enough so countries continuously explore other ways of producing electricity at minimal cost.

In China, vast reserves of the radioactive metal thorium are being eyed for energy production.

A declassified report detailing the 2020 survey of thorium deposits in China indicated that it is the world’s largest, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reports.

The reserve includes thorium-rich tailings from iron ore mining in Inner Mongolia that can power American homes for 1,000 years, according to SCMP, citing the report published in the Chinese journal Geological Review in January.

Meanwhile, an estimated one million tons of thorium at the Bayan Obo mine would be enough to power China for 60,000 years, scientists have claimed, according to SCMP.

Thorium can generate 200 times more energy than uranium using mini reactors that will not melt down, require no water cooling, or produce minimal long-lived radioactive waste, according to SCMP.

The downside is that processing thorium is acid and energy-intensive, with hundreds of tons of wastewater produced per gram of purified thorium.

On the other hand, American engineers and scientists at an industrial park in Boston, Massachusetts have come up with an even more ambitious energy technology that promises to produce unlimited clean power for the United States.

They are building a donut-shaped machine called a “tokamak” at Commonwealth Fusion Systems. It is a nuclear fusion reactor that produces electricity through plasma heated at 100 million degrees. The hot plasma is contained by a very powerful electromagnetic field.

This atom-merging nuclear fusion technology, the exact opposite of the atom-splitting nuclear fission process that makes nuclear power plants produce electricity, is similar to how the stars and the sun work.

The technology can generate 10 million times more than the energy produced by coal or natural gas without emitting planet-warming pollution and without leaving radioactive nuclear waste, CNN reports.

Fuel for fusion is abundant, derived from deuterium found in seawater and tritium extracted from lithium, CNN adds.