Month

I met Frankie Fenton and Des Kelleher at the ThEC2010 conference in London and saw them again recently at TEAC3 in Washington, DC. They’re working on a documentary about thorium reactors called,

“The Good Reactor”

Take a look!

I had the privilege of meeting Bryony Worthington, founder of Sandbag.org, in July 2009 when she was a member of the panel that would deliver the Manchester Report, which was a part of the Manchester International Festival sponsored by the Guardian newspaper. Sandbag works to purchase and “retire” carbon credits, thus reducing the amount of CO2 emitted to the atmosphere under European carbon trading regulations.

She was a delight to meet in person, and we have kept in touch since then about her fight against climate change and my efforts to promote thorium as a clean energy source.

Recently, Bryony became a “life peer” and a member of the House of Lords, and became Baroness Worthington. Her ascension to the House of Lords has met with a great deal of interest from the media since she doesn’t ascend alone but takes her beautiful little boy Rohan Chennu with her. She tells me that he has been a real hit amongst the Lords who never miss an opportunity to smile or wave to him in an attempt to catch his attention.

Baroness Worthington gave her “maiden speech” before House of Lords on March 31, 2011 and she emphasized her work in fighting climate change and gave particular attention to the role thorium might play in our future use of nuclear energy. I greatly appreciate that in such a brief and notable speech she took the time to highlight the value of thorium, and so greatly appreciate her desire to be a leader on this issue. She will be in the House of Lords for the rest of her life, if she so desires, and so she will be able to continue her efforts for many years to come.

Baroness Worthington’s House of Lords maiden speech from Sandbag Climate Campaign on Vimeo.

She also writes regularly for the Guardian…

Please follow her efforts on Twitter!

Thank you Baroness Worthington!

In late March 2010, I started a Facebook “fan page” for this blog, which in fairly short order became probably the most active part of the discussion about energy from thorium. There were a lot of things going for it–many of us were already using Facebook, and it was fairly quick and easy to post links and articles and make comments.

Well, we hit a great milestone today–3000 fans of the EfT Facebook page!

Things have been accelerating on the Facebook page–starting with its beginning on March 5, 2010, it reached:

500 fans on March 27, 2010
1000 fans on September 5, 2010
1500 fans on February 10, 2011
2000 fans on March 18, 2011
2500 fans on April 16, 2011

I really appreciate everyone who participates in the discussion there and keeps the ideas moving forward–thank you!

Before an overflow crowd at the Top of the Hill conference center, steps from the nation’s capitol, the Thorium Energy Alliance held its third national conference on May 12. Featuring some familiar figures from the thorium-power community plus some new figures – including at least three international documentary film crews – the conference, known as TEAC3, reflected both the accelerating momentum behind the effort to produce commercial energy from thorium-based reactors and the still-formidable challenges ahead.

While some of the presentations, such as Robert Hargraves’ “Aim High,” a forceful argument that thorium-based nuclear power can ward off global climate change and supply an effectively endless supply of cheap energy – had been seen at previous conferences, TEAC3 included several pieces of news. The most significant was the announcement by Kirk Sorensen, founder of this blog, that he has left his job as chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown to found a company, Flibe Energy, dedicated to building commercial liquid-fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs).

Referring to the tsunami and earthquake that heavily damaged the reactors at the Fukushima, Japan nuclear power station and that have caused many to once again question the safety of nuclear power, Sorensen declared, “A lot of people are thinking that we’ve seen the end of nuclear power. I’ve bet my own future and my family’s future that we are at the beginning of a new thorium age.”

Kirk has not disclosed details of funding for Flibe Energy (which is named for the mixture of lithium fluoride (LiF) and beryllium fluoride (BeF2) that is proposed, in molten-salt form as a coolant for LFTRs), but a Teledyne Brown executive attending the conference said that they are “fully supportive of Flibe Energy” in introductory remarks. Kirk also pointed out that, in addition to (and likely preceding) the product of commercial power, LFTRs offer several other revenue streams: in particular supply radioisotopes for medical applications. The only reactor producing medical radioisotopes in North America is due to shut down in the next three years.

While previous conferences have focused on the theory of thorium power, and on educating a skeptical or ignorant public on the possibilities of a nuclear power industry based around cheap, safe and abundant thorium, this one was focused more on practice: on solving the actual challenges ahead for building thorium power plants.

In that spirit Joe Bonometti, a nuclear engineer, veteran NASA program leader and academic with deep experience running innovative R&D projects in both the public and private sectors, gave a presentation entitled “LFTR Development: Lessons Learned.” The intent was not to lay out a single optimum technology or roadmap, Bonometti said, but to present some guidelines that apply to any effort to develop and build new technologies.

“LFTR is like an architecture class, not a specific design,” Bonometti said.

Following the theory-into-practice theme, Charles S. “Rusty” Holden, founder of Thorenco LLC, did offer a specific design: a 40MW pilot plant that he called “a little LFTR.” Using fissile uranium-235 as a source of ignition neutrons and a mix of thorium tetrafluoride in a beryllium fluoride molten salt, Thorenco’s design includes a deep salt pool with a honeycomb geometry that offers “a superior way to clean and condition the fuel during operations,” Holden said.

Also presenting was Col. Paul Roege, U.S. Army, who delivered the event’s other piece of important news. The Pentagon, Roege said, could be able and willing to offer licensing capability for companies building LFTRs or other forms of innovative nuclear power reactors. Most thorium advocates agree that the NRC is unlikely in the near term to license alternative reactor designs – even ones, like LFTRs, that have been thoroughly proven out in operation. Given the military’s need for clean, modular, transportable energy sources for forward operating bases, the swiftest routes to a license could be through the Army, which has the regulatory authority to approve new reactors for military bases without NRC involvement.

In the traditional licensing process, Roege said, “Innovative reactors are at the end of the line. That obstacle could potentially could be overcome if we pursue military applications.”

That, of course, remains a speculative prospect in itself. As TEAC3 demonstrated, however, thorium power has gained a degree of momentum that could not have been foreseen less than two years ago, when TEAC1 attracted an audience of less than three dozen people.

“When I look back at the first thorium conference, 17 months ago, it’s unbelievable to see how far we’ve come,” commented TEAC founder John Kutsch. “This is happening because it makes good business sense, because it’s important to national security and because it’s the right thing to do for our children.”

I would tend to agree with Mr. Gates:

“In a conversation with Wired Editor in Chief Chris Anderson today at the magazine’s third annual Business Conference, Gates said that one of the best aspects of nuclear power at the moment is its lack of innovation thus far, which leaves it ripe for disruption in the coming years.”

Full article at VentureBeat.

LFTR can be that disruptive technology that he seeks, and it will be much simpler to engineer and operate than the travelling wave reactor, because its thermal-neutron spectrum requires 10-15 times less fissile fuel per unit of electrical output than the fast-neutron spectrum of the travelling-wave reactor or the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR).

Great visual depiction of the magnitudes of radiation exposure from Scientific American.