On Tuesday, January 24, I was in Denver at the state capitol, speaking in support of legislation that would define nuclear energy as a “clean” option for Colorado’s energy future.

I spoke in support of Senate Bill 24-039.

The hearing was recorded. Grace Stanke spoke first because she had to catch a flight, and she took several questions from the committee. Sen. Larry Liston introduced the bill at 4:44:00. My testimony began at 6:10:20:

Good afternoon, my name is Kirk Sorensen and I am the president and chief technologist of Flibe Energy, and we are developing advanced reactors that are safe, clean, affordable, and reliable. These same attributes are at the heart of economic growth. I speak today in support of Senate Bill 24-039, Nuclear Energy as a Clean Energy Resource.

I know that many have had concerns about nuclear waste and I want you to know that I share those concerns. We are working to develop a better approach around the thorium molten-salt reactor. Thorium is three times more abundant than uranium and present everywhere in the world. The salt we use is a liquid mixture of lithium and beryllium fluoride salts called flibe and that’s where our company gets its funny name.

Flibe salt allows operation at high temperature yet at low pressure, which allows us to reduce and potentially eliminate our need for cooling water. At Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1960s they built a small experimental nuclear reactor based on flibe salt. Meltdowns and other potential nuclear accidents were eliminated by design. Flibe is perfectly suited to drive advanced gas turbines based on carbon dioxide instead of steam to generate power.

Our designs also produce materials that can image the internals of the body and fight cancer. We are also working on variants of our designs that can permanently destroy existing nuclear waste while generating new fuel to start more thorium reactors.

We are working to deploy small modular reactors with electric cooperatives in rural communities, especially in Colorado. From there we will replace coal plants and repower communities. We’ll offer good jobs that build communities, good union jobs. Colorado will benefit tremendously.

We’ve heard a great deal today about effects from mining; and concerns about radioactive materials from mining. I want to point out that wind and solar use a lot of rare-earth materials that are associated with mining practices that will bring up radioactive materials. So if there is a concern to minimize the production of radioactive materials from mining, one must look carefully at the entire life-cycle of the specific materials used in wind and solar power plants, particularly the neodymium magnets used in wind turbines, each wind turbine uses about a metric tonne of neodymium. The thorium that would be brought up just from neodymium mining alone would produce more power than wind turbine would in its lifetime.

I also want to address the issue of cost; these reactors run at low pressure and high temperature and are highly efficient. They directly address the issues that have led to high cost overrruns on previous nuclear power plants. They were successfully demonstrated for very little money back in the 1960s and they worked perfectly. We need to continue that work and realize this energy technology to power Colorado in the future, so I ask you to please support Senate Bill 24-039 and help lead Colorado into a bright new future.

After our panel completed their statements, there were questions from the committee. At 6:18:34, Sen. Simpson wanted me to elaborate the difference in the fuel source of uranium versus thorium.

Thorium and uranium are almost next to each other on the periodic table, they’re just two notches away from one another. Thorium’s about three times more common than uranium; it’s not water-soluble so it doesn’t concentrate in mining placements quite like uranium does. It’s often found with rare-earth materials, and so right now it’s a nuisance byproduct of mining rare-earth materials. There’s a huge demand for rare-earth materials, particularly for wind turbine magnets, that kind of thing. The main difference, though, is that in thermal-spectrum reactors we can use thorium about two hundred times more efficiently than we can presently use uranium, and that’s just a huge difference that’s built into the physics, and so what that will mean is that instead of using one-half of one percent of the energy content, we’ll be able to use nearly all of it. And the materials that come from the fission of these materials will still be very very valuable and able to be partitioned into useful sources.

Sen. Simpson continued his question at 6:19:50 with a follow-up, what’s been the barrier? Why aren’t we more active in the thorium fuel source right now? Or even twenty years ago? Why the path of uranium versus thorium?

It has been something that the Department of Energy stopped working on and has really worked very assiduously to slow. So it’s really been a government decision that’s held us back.

At 6:20:30, Sen Heinrichsen asked, we’ve heard several different talks about the life-cycle of waste.

One of the speakers mentioned that today’s reactors make about 35 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel from their operation each year. And that’s a lot of material, but the deeper insight into that is 95% of that, is uranium that is no more radioactive than it was when it came out of the ground. Another 4% of that is fission products that will stabilize in decades. Really, one percent of that is the plutonium and the so-called transuranics that constitute high-level waste, they drive places like Yucca Mountain. If we wait for those to decay, we’ll be waiting tens of thousands of years, as was pointed out. The right place to handle that material is to put it in a reactor and burn it up. With our thorium design, we are working to never make it in the first place. So we’re working a two-tiered approach, to not only not make more waste, but to retroactively go back and deal with what we’ve already made.

Sen Heinrichsen followed up at 6:21:53, if that waste is buried onsite or taken to a future repository, is that in solid form? Is there a risk of that waste leaking?

It would depend on the processing technique that separated that one percent from the remaining nuclear fuel. If it remains in the form it is now, you’re throwing essentially a hundred percent of it away, and like I said, most of that is not harmful, only one percent is, but it’s dispersed within the one hundred percent. It can be converted to forms that are absolutely stable, a glass form has been talked about a great deal and has been developed by many countries including our own. But I would prefer to see that material consumed and permanently destroyed. I’m fond of saying that we can wait tens of thousands of years for it to decay or we can burn it up in an afternoon.

Sen. Liston made an impassioned final defense for the bill at 8:12:44. He pointed out that Grace Stanke had come to testify at her own expense, and I was hugely impressed by that fact. Sen. Liston specifically mentioned thorium molten-salt reactors at 8:17:04. I was so impressed with what he said, and there was spontaneous applause at the end of his remarks. At 8:36:57, Sen. Pelton moved for a vote. Senators Cutter, Exum, Priola, and Winter voted no. Senators Hinrichsen, Pelton, and Simpson voted yes. Thus the vote was four to three against. As a result of the vote, the bill essentially “died” in committee. It was a very bitter pill to all of us who supported it, but most particularly to Senator Liston, who had really poured out his heart and soul to that committee to gain passage for the bill. It was a terribly frustrating experience.

But I was still really glad that I came. How many people get to talk to Miss America about nuclear power? That was fun.