Energy from Thorium is on Facebook and Twitter too!

Flibe Energy Announces Board of Advisors

Published in Media/Outreach by on September 29th, 2011

NEWS RELEASE
September 26, 2011

Board of Advisors Named For Flibe Energy Inc.

Huntsville, Ala. – Flibe Energy Inc. has named six members to the Flibe Energy Board of Advisors. The board members will provide direction and guidance in the continued development and commercialization of the liquid fluoride thorium reactor or LFTR (pronounced “lifter”).

Flibe Energy Inc. is the leader in development of LFTR technology, which harnesses the energy stored in thorium, the Earth’s most abundant and dense natural energy source. A small handful of thorium can supply a lifetime’s energy needs, a small grain silo of thorium could power North America for a year and known thorium reserves could power society for thousands of years.

LFTR can produce not only safe, sustainable electricity, but lifesaving medical radioisotopes, desalinated water and ammonia for agriculture and synthesized fuels in the process. LFTR technology will have tremendous impacts in global energy, medical, agricultural and industrial sectors. Read about the board members…

Flibe Energy in the UK, part 3: Weinberg Launch

Published in Media/Outreach Strategy by on September 25th, 2011

Thursday, September 8th began with a media opportunity at the British Science Festival that was set up by the Weinberg Foundation. I participated on a panel of six speakers, including Baroness Worthington, discussing the results of a recent poll showing that public support for nuclear energy was still quite strong in the UK. Keep reading…

Financial Times: “New Life for Forgotten Fuel”

Published in Media/Outreach by on September 24th, 2011

Financial Times: “New Life for Forgotten Fuel”

I think “forgotten fuel” is probably one of the best ways I’ve heard thorium described…and I love the picture of the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment.

Holding a Fluoride Salt for the First Time

Published in Media/Outreach by on September 24th, 2011

On Friday, September 23, several of us from Flibe Energy traveled to Oak Ridge National Laboratory for a short meeting and a driving tour of some of the historical sites there.


Keep reading…

Thorium Interview with NHPR

Published in Media/Outreach by on September 22nd, 2011

I was briefly interviewed today by New Hampshire Public Radio:

NHPR: Too Good to be True?

I think most people will be very surprised to someday discover that the answer to our energy problems was hiding in plain sight since the 1960s.

Flibe Energy in the UK, part 2: Parliamentary Question

Published in Media/Outreach Strategy by on September 22nd, 2011

“Can a liability be turned into an asset?”

That was the essential character of the question that Baroness Bryony Worthington asked in the House of Lords on September 7th, 2011. I had the privilege of being in the House of Lords as she asked the question, and the response was very positive from both sides of the chamber. Keep reading…

Flibe Energy in the UK, part 1: DECC and AMR

Published in Media/Outreach Strategy by on September 21st, 2011

“Does thorium have a role to play in generating energy for the UK?”

That is the central question that brought Kirk Dorius and me to the United Kingdom as Flibe Energy to participate in the launch of the Weinberg Foundation, a new non-governmental organization (NGO) dedicated to the advancement of thorium and the fluid-fuelled reactor.

Our trip was so full that I have struggled over the last several days to try to communicate much of it to our friends, family members, investors, and other interested parties here in the US, and the series of blog posts that I intend to write will be an attempt to tell the story through words and pictures of all that happened to us there. Keep reading…

Sorensen and Hargraves TEAC3 Presentations

Published in TEAC3 by on August 5th, 2011

Thanks to the indefatigable Gordon McDowell, my presentation at TEAC3 on May 12, 2011 is now available on YouTube:

Along with that of the inspiring and enlightening Dr. Robert Hargraves:

I hope you enjoy the presentations!

“Future of Energy” Posts at Forbes, July 26-31

Published in Blog-Related Media/Outreach by on August 1st, 2011

After writing a guest post on a Forbes blog in March, I was invited to start my own blog on Forbes and have welcomed the opportunity. I called my Forbes blog “The Future of Energy” and I hope that my posts will be entertaining and informative, and will capture the thrill and excitement that I feel when looking at the possibilities of nuclear fission as our future source of energy.

July 26: BRC Set to Endorse Interim Storage

This post captures some of my thoughts relative to the release of the Blue Ribbon Commission’s draft report.

July 27: A Simplified Nuclear “Waste” Digester

July 29: A Simplified Nuclear “Waste” Digester, Part 2

A recent paper from ORNL motivated these posts, about the liquid-chloride reactor and its potential for safer fast-reactor technology than sodium-cooled, solid-fueled fast reactors.

July 30: Is Fissile Material Worth its Weight in Gold?

You might be interested in the answer.

July 31: Fissile Material has the Midas Touch

And the answer keeps getting better…

Green Energy at Fortune Brainstorm

Published in Conferences Fossil Fuels Natural Gas Oil Thorium by on July 20th, 2011

After the luncheon panel on “Green Technology: What’s Now & What’s Next” at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, in Aspen, I confronted Amory Lovins and asked him a simple question: “Is there any potential technological innovation that would cause you to reconsider your views on nuclear power?”

Lovins is the founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute and his anti-nuclear stance is well-known, as exemplified by this article entitled “Forget Nuclear.” Lovins claim is that nuclear is both unsafe and uneconomical as compared to new wind and solar capacity. His answer to my question was, essentially, “No.” When I mentioned that I am the writer of the thorium feature that ran in Wired last year he replied “Well, I recall thinking that you got the economics and the technology backward.”

I have great respect for the work of the Rocky Mountain Institute and I will not detail here the ways in which he has it wrong on thorium-based nuclear power (for that please see the book version of the thorium story, due out next spring from Macmillan Science)—other than to note that the close-mindedness epitomized by his reply is what got us into our current energy crisis in the first place. What I will do is share some of the insights from the panel, which featured futurist Peter Schwartz, co-founder of Global Business Network, and Andy Karsner, CEO of Manifest Energy. The consensus was that there’s great reason for optimism on the technology side and little reason for it on the policy and politics side.

“We’re in a remarkable period of this great storm of innovation worldwide,” said Schwartz. “The problem is in the U.S.” The problem, he added, was the inability of the government to take concrete, rational policy steps that will clear the way for green-technology innovation to reach the market and for innovative companies to succeed.

The unexpected boom in natural gas from shale deposits, said Karsner, could serve as a relatively low-carbon bridge to the renewable-energy-based economy of the future, but that the obstacles of pervasive regulation and perverse incentives could prevent that from happening.

“We’re just an anti-energy development country,” declared Karsner. “That’s where we are.”

In his new book Reinventing Fire, due out in the fall, Lovins argues that by 2050 we can build a non-fossil-fuel based energy industry that includes no nuclear, significantly less natural gas, no oil, and that essentially runs on wind and solar and other renewables, with an 80 percent decrease in carbon emissions and 180 percent growth in GDP. (I do not share that optimism.)

Schwartz—who does not share Lovins’ knee-jerk opposition to nuclear power—mentioned that we are on the verge of a “new industrial revolution” based on new energy technologies, that will transform many businesses. “Where that will lead manufacturing, energy, and other industries is an open question,” Schwartz added. “What’s unquestionable is that the range of options will continue to grow.”

Mutiplying options was another theme that each of the panelists promoted. Lovins mentioned the work of RMI spinoff FiberForge, which has led the way in developing cars made from ultralight materials, chiefly carbon fiber, that will require one-third the energy to power them. He claimed that at least three carmakers (including most visibly BMW) have adopted this strategy and four others are in process of adopting it—representing a “radically different competitive path in automaking.”

As options for energy sources, particularly in transportation, multiply, one risk is “consumer confusion,” said Schwartz. If there are cars on the market with multiple forms of power sources—plug-in hybrid, hydrogen battery, serial hybrid, diesel, biofuel, and so on—the question for buyers become “What do I want, and how amI supposed to think about that?”

Given the rapid advance of clean-energy technology, the larger question, said Karsner, is one of national competitiveness: “Will we use these new resources, including natural gas and the new technology ideas, to address our greatest problems [in the United States] or will we export the gas, deploy solar manufacturing facilities, and send our better ideas to China, to collateralize our debt to China to pay the Saudis?”

Three things to point out about this discussion:

a) It’s remarkable how many discussions of the future of energy come down to Us vs.Them, i.e., the U.S. vs. China.

b) There is broad agreement that technologies will be available to meet broad carbon-emission goals by 2050, if national policy is shifted.

c) It’s remarkable that in a discussion that centered around energy density and efficiency, nuclear power was hardly even mentioned.