Lookinging at the Blog (link above) I see reference to LFTR...more:
< The LFTR Emulates Natural Systems
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The Rocky Mountain Institute advocates using the closed loop sort of materials and energy handling system found in nature:
Using nature as mentor, model, and measure often yields superior design solutions that profitably eliminate waste, loss, and harm.
Natural systems operate in closed loops. There's no waste—every output is either returned harmlessly to the ecosystem as a nutrient, like compost, or becomes an input for another process. In contrast, the standard industrial model of our age is a linear sequence of "take, make, and waste" — extract resources, use them, and throw them away — a process that erodes our stock of natural capital by depleting resources and replacing them with wastes.
Reducing the wasteful throughput of materials — indeed, eliminating the very idea of waste — can be accomplished by redesigning industrial systems on biological lines that change the nature of industrial processes and materials, enabling the constant reuse of materials in continuous closed cycles, and often the elimination of toxicity.
The LFTR had its origin in the desires of the great scientists, Eugene Wigner and Alvin Weinberg to eliminate the wastefulness of early reactors. They saw that in order to eliminate waste from nuclear systems, materials had to flow from one process to another. Most reactors use a structured core with solid fuel that is moved mechanically in and out of the reactor. Nuclear fuel is designed only to serve as fuel in a nuclear reactor. It is difficult to reprocess. Eugene Wigner was trained as a chemical engineer, and thought in terms of efficient use of materials. And of the efficient transport of chemicals dissolved in, suspended in or bonded to liquids that flowed from process to process, within a chemical plant. Alvin Weinberg was trained in biology as well as in physics. He understood the role of fluid flow in live systems, and how fluids carried materials form one biological process to another. Weinberg also understood the transport of materials between organisms in environmental systems.
Wigner and Weinberg believed that reactors could, in effect, be turned into closed loop systems in which little would really go to waste. It is impossible, according to the second law of thermodynamics, to design a system in which nothing goes to waste. But it may be possible to design more efficient systems. Wigner and Weinberg determined that Thorium was a more efficient basis for nuclear fuel than uranium. The efficiency of the thorium fuel cycle rests on something called "neutron economy", that is the efficient use of neutrons produced in a nuclear process.
Neutron are the keys to both chain reactions and the creation of nuclear fuel inside reactors.