08-04-2012, 11:20 AM
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NASA Engineer: Virtually Unlimited, Cheap And Clean Nuclear Power Can Be Had Now With Thorium
Quote:
Kirk Sorensen, NASA-trained engineer, is a man on a mission to open minds to the tremendous promise that thorium, a near-valueless element in today's marketplace, may offer in meeting future world energy demand.
Compared to Uranium-238-based nuclear reactors currently in use today, a liquid flouride thorium reactor (LTFR) would be:
Much safer - no risk of environmental radiation contamination or plant explosion (e.g. Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three-Mile Island)
Much more efficient at producing energy - over 90% of the input fuel would be tapped for energy; vs <1% in today's reactors
Less waste-generating - most of the radioactive by-products would take days/weeks to degrade to safe levels, vs centuries
Much cheaper - reactor footprints and infrastructure would be much smaller, and could be constructed in modular fashion
More plentiful - LFTR reactors do not need to be located next to large water supplies, as current plants do
Less controversial - the byproducts of the thorium reaction are pretty useless for weaponization
Longer-lived - thorium is much more plentiful than uranium and treated as valueless today. There is virtually no danger of running out of it given LFTR plant efficiency
Most of the know-how and technology to build and maintain LFTR reactors exists today. If made a priority, the US could have its first fully-operational LFTR plant running at commercial scale in under a decade.
But no such LFTR plants are in development. In fact, the US shut down its work on thorium-based energy production decades ago. And has not invested materially in related research since.
Staring at the looming energy cliff ahead created by Peak Oil, it begs the question - why not?
As best Kirk can tell, we are not pursuing thorium's potential today because we are choosing not to - we are too wedded to the U-238 path we've been investing in for decades. Indeed, the grants that funded the government's thorium research in the 50s and 60s were primarily focused on weapons development; not new energy sources. Once our attention turned to nuclear energy, we simply applied the uranium-based know-how we developed from our atomic bomb program rather than asking: is there a better way?
This is an excellent and thought-provoking interview. I highly recommend you also visit Kirk's website http://energyfromthorium.com/plan/and its FAQs to familiarize yourself with the thorium cycle, as I predict we will be revisiting the thorium story again in the future.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/kirk-s...-energy-source
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