Twenty years ago today, on the afternoon of Saturday, April 22, 2006, I started this blog and wrote the first post. I was thirty-one years old. I was working at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, as an aerospace engineer on nuclear-power concepts for deep-space missions. I was in my third year of […]
Flibe Energy’s approach to sustainable nuclear energy is a liquid-fluoride reactor that runs on the thorium fuel cycle. Our design builds upon the technologies that were demonstrated and proven during the early days of nuclear development. To better understand the validity of our approach, we will look at the history of these early nuclear programs […]
John J. Loughlin II is a former three-term Republican State Representative and former Republican Whip serving in the Rhode Island House of Representatives before running for US Congress in 2010. He served in a leadership role on the Naval Affairs Committee, and was a member of House Labor, Health Education and Welfare Committee, and House […]
This is the talk that I gave over lunchtime at the Clean Growth Leadership Network conference, held in London on September 6, 2022: We’re all glad to be here and enjoying one another’s company as we talk about these important issues, but there’s no denying that we’re meeting under a shadow. All of us are […]
Spotify: YPE Podcast with Kurt Harris Back in July, Dr. Kurt Harris of Flibe Energy spoke on the Young Professionals in Energy Podcast, an organization that aims to facilitate the advancement of young professionals in the global energy industry. We’ve summarized the podcast here for a quick look at some of the things they discussed. […]
These are notable quotes from Glenn Seaborg’s 1993 autobiography “The Atomic Energy Commission Under Nixon“. Breeder Reactor Beginnings In the United States and several other countries, decisions were made quite early that a reactor employing fast neutrons, utilizing the uranium cycle, and cooled with liquid sodium, the so-called liquid metal fast breeder reactor (LMFBR), was […]
These are notable quotes from Alvin Weinberg’s 1994 autobiography “The First Nuclear Era, the Life and Times of a Technological Fixer“. Thorium will create the Second Nuclear Era Until then I had never quite appreciated the full significance of the breeder. But now I became obsessed with the idea that humankind’s whole future depended on […]
This spring I completed a master’s thesis at the University of Tennessee on the history of thorium research during the Manhattan Project. The thesis ran 476 pages, most of which was primary-source appendices — Seaborg’s Met Lab history volumes, the MUC-LAO meeting notes from April and May 1944, the Wigner-Young paper of May 1945, and […]
We went to CERN in Switzerland! Or was it France? It’s easy to get confused…when the border between the two countries runs right through the middle of the CERN campus! Our perspective as a company is the industrial perspective. When we are talking to those who are generating electricity these are the things they’re worried […]
Dr. Ritsuo Yoshioka of the International Thorium Molten-Salt Forum has relayed some sad news to us: “This is a very sad notice. Professor Kazuo Furukawa passed away on December 14th 2011. He had a cancer surgery in last summer, and he once came back. In last October, he gave several lectures at different seminars, and […]