[SeekAndFind]

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All that is required is for enough citizens to speak up and support investigating the truth about nuclear energy.  From the very beginning of the nuclear age, it has been known that the ultimate reactor was as simple as a tank of high-melting temperature material salted with nuclear fuel.

This material would generate heat simply by virtue of its composition, and electricity would be produced by passing it through a heat exchanger.  This design can produce tens of times more energy than conventional plants.  It requires nothing more than a tank, a pump, and a heat exchanger, and any disruption will result in the material solidifying and encapsulating the nuclear material.

This design principle has been studied many times in the form of molten salt and thorium fluoride reactors, but they were never built because the powers that be deliberately chose not to build reactors based on the best engineering principles.  They instead chose a design that was inherently and critically flawed, presumably to prevent the development of cheap nuclear energy.  The fact that the Fukushima reactors failed because of something as foreseeable as an earthquake should make it clear to everyone that conventional reactor designs are ludicrous.

If Americans truly want affordable, failsafe, green energy, they owe it to themselves to investigate these claims.  Nuclear science is well understood and available to anyone willing to investigate.  A perfect reactor can be as simple as a tank of nuclear-salted lead, and all it takes is a willingness to look at the engineering fundamentals behind such a design.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Too many lawyers is the problem...

[zek157]

There’s more thorium energy in coal fly ash than Btu’s from burning the coal.

Fischer Tropsch could give us oil and thorium for centuries. But cheap energy is freedom. Not going to happen in the western world.

[Da Coyote]

Talking real science and engineering with a Democrat politician/leftist?
Why do you think they are DemocRATs politicians/leftists?
Science 101 for studies majors would present an unclimbable mountain to them.

At the college where I taught, we always called our freshmen physics/math/engineering F students “future social studies and political science majors”.

[2aProtectsTheRest]

Thorium is a great potential source, but it’s not here quite yet. However, the CANDU line of nuclear power plants should (theoretically) be easy to convert to a thorium fuel cycle later.

The CANDU line of nuclear power plants provides a safe, extremely well tested, extremely reliable (94-96% uptime including maintenance) source of power and can be put into practice anywhere in the world. They’ve got non-proliferation built into the fuel cycle and they reprocess “waste” down to nearly nothing. The world should have been building these power plants for the past 20 years. We’d have already kicked coal fire plants to the curb and we wouldn’t be stuck with solar and wind that don’t do the job when conditions aren’t perfect.

[PGalt]

Thanks for the post; pic. Nukkular

[Yo-Yo]

There are some serious drawbacks and unknowns with LFTR reactors. It's not the slam-dunk certainty that some would have us believe.

[ckilmer]

I’m a big fan of lftr reactors but its not as simple as the author asserts. There’s a bunch of companies working on the lftr design. They have been doing so for years. There are no prototype reactors as yet except maybe in China. That’s not to say prototypes have not been done in the USA. Alvin Weinberg —the inventor of these kinds of reactors— had one prototype working in the late 1960.

[Reeses]

There are more nuclear scientists alive today than have ever lived, yet their progress per man-year spent has slowed down to almost nothing. The WW II nuclear gold vein is tapped out.

The ideal nuclear power source is mixing matter with anti-matter, but nobody has figured out how to make cheap anti-matter yet. Maybe matter can be efficiently disassembled into free energy some other way. Eventually some young nerdy Arthur will pull the sword from the rock, and will be made king.