I traveled to Jackson to speak to the three members of the Mississippi Public Service Commission on Tuesday, October 22. They had assembled a “2024 Nuclear Summit” and were gracious enough to allow me to present our technological approach to them.

I started my talk by describing the unique economic challenge that the entire nuclear industry presently faces. The cost of uranium ore has more than tripled over the last five years, and the cost of separative work (to enrich the fuel) has quadrupled over the same period. Nuclear fuel that was once much cheaper than fossil fuel (in terms of its per megawatt-hour cost) is now more expensive that some fossil fuel options. We call this metric the “levelized-cost-of-fuel” and we are definitely not used to a nuclear industry where fuel is expensive. This is a bad place to be.

It’s now gone from a time where thorium is a compelling option to a time where thorium (used efficiently in our lithium-fluoride reactor designs) might be the only way to produce economically competitive nuclear energy.

Many thanks to Gordon McDowell and his “Thorium Remix” channel for the improved version of the video!

I knew that there was some press there at the meeting, but by the time I presented in the late afternoon the room seemed a lot less full. Nevertheless, some of them must have been taking notes or watching online, because two stories emerged in the media. The first seemed to have hit the key points I made fairly well, while the second noted our strong connection to Mississippi through a former nuclear site.

Nuclear power generation seeing a resurgence. Mississippi could benefit

Another new technology proposed for nuclear power generation involves the use of lithium fluoride reactors. Kirk Sorensen, founder and president of Flibe Energy, described to the Commission how his company is using old technology that employs a coolant comprised of liquid salt that can reach higher temperatures without boiling, meaning less pressure in nuclear power plant cooling systems.

“Salt is the only coolant we have that is going to go to very high temperatures while still operating at low pressure,” Sorensen said.

That process, combined with the use of thorium instead of uranium, can create reactors that are not only more efficient, but are designed to recycle the uranium created as a byproduct of thorium’s reaction process.

Sorens[e]n told the Mississippi Commissioners that the technology was developed in the 1950s and demonstrated back in the 1960s. It was shelved because the process did not align with the nation’s nuclear ambitions.

Mississippi’s new PSC energized by nuclear power, tepid over renewables

One speaker, Kirk Sorens[e]n of Flibe Energy, talked about the prospects of opening a new nuclear plant in Tishomingo County at the Yellow Creek site. The Tennessee Valley Authority started, and later abandoned, work on a nuclear plant there in the 1970s. Sorens[e]n said Flibe has been leasing the site for the last five years and has spent a quarter of a billion dollars on improvements, although it’s unclear what the timeline for a Yellow Creek nuclear plant would be (getting approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission can take up to five years, although Congress recently passed a bill to speed up the review process).

I didn’t say “quarter-of-a-billion”. My goodness, you’d be hearing a lot more from me if we had spent a quarter-of-a-billion dollars on anything. I said “quarter-of-a-million”, which is still a non-trivial sum. We have had portions of the old Yellow Creek Nuclear Plant site under lease from the county since 2019 and have made improvements to the site, but there is still a lot of work to do.

I am disappointed that there must be some sort of “style guide” out there amongst mainstream media outlets that wind and solar is always the right answer for our energy future, and any failure to recognize this constitutes some sort of deficiency on the part of the disagreer. Mr. Hunnewell of TVA made a very strong argument that wind and solar power were not going to be able to meet the energy needs of the Tennessee River valley (which is where I live) and I think he is absolutely right. Perhaps there are other places where their deficiencies are not so great, but here in this area they are not going to be able to keep the lights on and the factories humming. We need reliable power for that. Mr. Hunnewell correctly noted that the only two options for that to happen are natural gas and nuclear. The Tennessee River and its tributaries have already been “hydroed-out” and coal is now considered beyond consideration as an option, even though much of TVA still runs on coal power.