How did this happen? What did Sylvania do with thorium?
Thorium is highly flammable if it is finely powdered, or in small turnings. Maybe that’s what happened.
Thorium was a fuel used in some early commercial reactors:
Sylvania was involved in developing commercial-scale thorium fuel.
Richard Nixon made the call to focus on development of Uranium 235 for Nuclear power because a byproduct of the reaction is Plutonium 239 which can be used to make bombs. The Uranium design uses boiling water under pressure for cooling. The Thorium design uses a molten salt.