Berzelius reached, as several Scandinavian chemists did, into Norse rather than classical mythology, naming his new element after Thor, the hammer-wielding god of thunder, storms and strength, one of the mightiest figures of the Norse pantheon and the protector of gods and men. The choice pairs thorium with vanadium, named for the goddess Vanadis, as the periodic table's principal tributes to the old gods of the north. The naming was purely honorific, made before thorium's radioactivity or its latent nuclear energy were even suspected, yet it acquired a fitting resonance in the atomic age, when the thunder-god's element was proposed as the fuel of a safer kind of reactor. Its abundance in the Earth's crust keeps that promise alive in ongoing research.
Thorium-impregnated gas mantles, once standard in camping lanterns and gas lighting fixtures, are mildly radioactive, and although the health risk from any single mantle is small, growing regulatory caution led most manufacturers to phase out thoriated mantles in favour of yttrium-based alternatives by the late twentieth century, a quiet substitution most users of camping equipment never noticed. Older thoriated mantles are still sought by some collectors and Geiger-counter hobbyists specifically because of their easily detectable radioactivity.