I really enjoyed the opportunity to be a part of Jim Puplava’s “Financial Sense Newshour” recently. Jim opened the interview with almost exactly the question I wanted to talk about: what are we going to do about our staggering dependence on fossil fuel?

Before I ever knew about thorium or LFTR, I would read about a lot of different energy technologies that promised to someday be 5% or 10% of our overall energy picture. I was always left wondering–what’s the 80% answer? What’s the 90% answer? What’s the technology that’s going to shoulder the burden of the planet’s energy needs into the future.

At one point I thought it was space solar power, but I was wrong. Later I thought it would be controlled thermonuclear fusion, but more education in that area left me highly doubtful. Ocean thermal-electric conversion looked very appealing, but it looked like is was only going to be a 5-10% type answer.

When I first read “Fluid Fuel Reactors” and learned about thorium and LFTR technology, it seemed like that was the “silver bullet” as Jim Puplava put it, but my own ignorance and fear of being wrong led me to second-guess my beliefs. That’s why I started working on a nuclear engineering degree. That’s why I wanted to get the scanned ORNL documents up on the Web and why I started to blog–to answer the simple question: is this as good as it looks to me?

I’m convinced now that it is.

I hope you enjoy the interview, which you can download in a variety of different audio files or read the transcript (but I think the audio versions are better).

Jim Puplava’s Financial Sense: “Kirk Sorensen: Thorium Could Be Our Energy Silver Bullet”