How Detroit Edison Almost Built the Thorium Reactor
In November of 1951, a small group of engineers gathered at a private astronomical observatory on the shore of Lake Angelus, in Oakland County, Michigan. They had spent the previous year visiting nearly every nuclear facility in America that they could get into with an Atomic Energy Commission clearance — Argonne, Hanford, Oak Ridge —…
Continue Reading How Detroit Edison Almost Built the Thorium Reactor
Rebuttal to CleanTechnica plutonium article
For seventy years, the United States has been accumulating a problem. It was a problem it once had a plan to solve, but it gave up on that plan almost fifty years ago. During the Cold War, the US intentionally produced weapons-grade plutonium in quantities that were in excess of military needs — about a…
Continue Reading Rebuttal to CleanTechnica plutonium article
ANS policy statement on U-233
The American Nuclear Society — the professional organization of nuclear engineers and scientists in the United States — published Position Statement #47 in January 2026. It is titled “Management of Surplus U.S. Nuclear Material.” It calls out uranium-233 specifically. And it says, in the clearest possible professional language, that what DOE is doing to our…
Twenty years of “Energy From Thorium”
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…