Posted on 04/18/2010 12:55:27 PM PDT by Titus-Maximus
The thick hardbound volume was sitting on a shelf in a colleague’s office when Kirk Sorensen spotted it. A rookie NASA engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Sorensen was researching nuclear-powered propulsion, and the book’s title — Fluid Fuel Reactors — jumped out at him. He picked it up and thumbed through it. Hours later, he was still reading, enchanted by the ideas but struggling with the arcane writing. “I took it home that night, but I didn’t understand all the nuclear terminology,” Sorensen says. He pored over it in the coming months, ultimately deciding that he held in his hands the key to the world’s energy future.
Published in 1958 under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission as part of its Atoms for Peace program, Fluid Fuel Reactors is a book only an engineer could love: a dense, 978-page account of research conducted at Oak Ridge National Lab, most of it under former director Alvin Weinberg. What caught Sorensen’s eye was the description of Weinberg’s experiments producing nuclear power with an element called thorium.
At the time, in 2000, Sorensen was just 25, engaged to be married and thrilled to be employed at his first serious job as a real aerospace engineer. A devout Mormon with a linebacker’s build and a marine’s crew cut, Sorensen made an unlikely iconoclast. But the book inspired him to pursue an intense study of nuclear energy over the next few years, during which he became convinced that thorium could solve the nuclear power industry’s most intractable problems. After it has been used as fuel for power plants, the element leaves behind minuscule amounts of waste. And that waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts.
(Excerpt) Read more at geni.org ...
Australia and India hold about half of the world’s reserves.
I love it. A 25 year old aerospace guy picks up a book written in 1958 and duh, he is an expert. I guess I should have dropped out of nuclear engineering when I read that 1958 book and saved myself thousands of dollars and opened up my own website. Oops. They didn’t have websites in 1975 ...
Is the article wrong in its assertion?
Oh! My Friend! Please don’t underestimate Harry! He knows that under Obama and the Dems, clean energy can make someone - correction: Harry - VERY wealthy! It’s Perfect! It’s clean, cheap, abundant, and Harry somehow has his hands in it is my bet.....
Yes.
Thanks
bflr
Just to clarify, Thorium is a vital path, it is just not the pie-in-the-sky story that the guy is telling. If fact, the Chinese have rejected the technology that he is promoting.
Did you read GENI’s mission? Also go to their page of endorsements and find the real story.
“GENI’s mission is to conduct research and to educate world leaders and the public about the critical viability of the interconnection of electric power networks between nations and continents, with an emphasis on tapping abundant renewable energy resources, what we call ‘the GENI Initiative.’ Our research shows that linking renewables between all nations will mollify conflicts, grow economies and increase the quality of life and health for all. This is a strategy rooted in the highest priority of the World Game simulation developed by Dr. Buckminster Fuller three decades ago.”
Well said....
Titus, did you see what your GENI org is really about? Do you really think they are promoting nuclear power? Q/A from their site.
How do we provide sufficient electricity for everyone in an ecologically sustainable way?
A: First, understand that there is no energy scarcity. The renewable energies (wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, tidal and biomass) are abundant far beyond our needs — and several are now cost competitive. So, tap renewable resources in remote sites (where they are usually found), and move the power via high-voltage transmission lines, which now can reach 7000 kilometers, connecting nations and continents.
Thank you. I did some more research into the GENI site. they are just another one-world, renewable energy site endorsed by the U.N.
Just asking.
I have to apologize. Any site endorsed by Walter Cronkite and Boutros Boutros-Ghali passes the FR smell test ....
Thank you. This is the field I make my $100 an hour in.
This site posted an article from Wired which cannot be posted on FR.
See other comments for technical issues regarding thorium reactors.
Uh-oh. That sounds like what Ozymandias said he was going to do in the Watchmen. And we all know how that turned out.
But you posted an article from wired.com ...
See other comments for technical issues regarding thorium reactors.
Which comments?
Big if. We need to be reprocessing the "spent" fuel. We would get much more energy and much less waste.
Developing a thorium-based fuel cycle
Despite the thorium fuel cycle having a number of attractive features, development has always run into difficulties.
The main attractive features are:
The possibility of utilising a very abundant resource which has hitherto been of so little interest that it has never been quantified properly.
The production of power with few long-lived transuranic elements in the waste.
Reduced radioactive wastes generally.
The problems include:
The high cost of fuel fabrication, due partly to the high radioactivity of U-233 chemically separated from the irradiated thorium fuel. Separated U-233 is always contaminated with traces of U-232 (69 year half-life but whose daughter products such as thallium-208 are strong gamma emitters with very short half-lives). Although this confers proliferation resistance to the fuel cycle, it results in increased costs.
The similar problems in recycling thorium itself due to highly radioactive Th-228 (an alpha emitter with two-year half life) present.
Some concern over weapons proliferation risk of U-233 (if it could be separated on its own), although many designs such as the Radkowsky Thorium Reactor address this concern.
The technical problems (not yet satisfactorily solved) in reprocessing solid fuels. However, with some designs, in particular the molten salt reactor (MSR), these problems are likely to largely disappear.
Much development work is still required before the thorium fuel cycle can be commercialised, and the effort required seems unlikely while (or where) abundant uranium is available. In this respect, recent international moves to bring India into the ambit of international trade might result in the country ceasing to persist with the thorium cycle, as it now has ready access to traded uranium and conventional reactor designs.
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