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Lookinging at the Blog (link above) I see reference to LFTR...more:

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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.

The LFTR Answers RMI's Objections to Nuclear Power

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The Rocky Mountain Institute has identified a number of problems with the system of providing nuclear power through the use of Light Water Reactors. I agree in whole or in part with their assessment of LWRs. However, the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor brilliantly all of the problems that the RMI points to. The RMI states:

It's too expensive. Nuclear power has proved much more costly than projected — and more to the point, more costly than most other ways of generating or saving electricity. If utilities and governments are serious about markets, rather than propping up pet technologies at the expense of ratepayers, they should pursue the best buys first.

Not only are LWRs but also renewable generating facilities are extremely expensive. The LFTR creates multiple potentials for cost breakthroughs:

1. Factory construction of small reactors, rather than onsite construction of large reactors.

2. Innovative approaches to reactor siting including reuse of old power plant sites, underground reactor placement, and underwater reactor placement.

3. Labor savings in reactor manufacture and operation.

4. Decreased interest carrying cost by greatly shortening manufacturing time.

5. Decreased facility building requirements.

6. An innovative approach to nuclear fuel that eliminates fuel enrichment and fabrication costs.

7. Eliminating the need for 95% of nuclear waste storage facilities.

8. Low cost inherent and passive reactor safety features, that rely on the laws of nature prevent
safety problems, rather than expensive engineered safety work around for safety issues.

The RMI states:

Nuclear power plants are not only expensive, they're also financially extremely risky because of their long lead times, cost overruns, and open-ended liabilities.

By building reactors in factories, and taking advantage of the many cost lowering features of the LFTR, the financial risks associated with the construction of nuclear power plants can be avoided. Factory built LFTR can be delivered, set up and be running within a few months of the initial order. Factory production methods assure price. The order price is the price electrical utilities will pay. Because of the inherent and passive safety features LFTR, the threat of nuclear accidents will no longer have the potential to create large open-ended liabilities.

The RMI states:

Contrary to an argument nuclear apologists have recently taken to making, nuclear power isn't a good way to curb climate change. True, nukes don't produce carbon dioxide — but the power they produce is so expensive that the same money invested in efficiency or even natural-gas-fired power plants would offset much more climate change.

The LFTR will dramatically lower not only nuclear construction costs, but cost less to build than renewable electrical generating facilities with similar 24 hour a day electrical generating capacities. Thus the LFTR will be the lowest cost path to reduction of CO2 emissions, and and thus to fighting climate change.