We had success in Colorado last night! House Bill 25-1040 (“Adding Nuclear Energy as a Clean Energy Resource.”) passed through the Senate Transportation & Energy Committee with a vote of six in favor and three against.

I was one of nearly a hundred people who offered a statement to the committee. I’d estimate more than half were in favor of the bill. There was great passion on both sides. A recording of the entire proceeding is available from the committee’s website. My testimony started at 3:34:21 and went for two minutes:

Good afternoon, my name is Kirk Sorensen and I am the president and chief technologist of Flibe Energy, and we are developing molten-salt reactors that can be built and deployed as modular units. I speak today in support of House Bill 1040.

We are excited about Colorado because our technology can address the persistent concerns of safety, waste, economy, and water consumption. Molten-salt reactor technology is very different from the reactor technology commonly used today. It lets us operate a reactor at high temperatures while still operating at low pressure, and low pressure makes everything smaller, simpler, and safer. We can build these reactors in factories and ship them out by rail and large trucks, and we hope that one of these factories will be here in Colorado. The entire facility would easily fit into the volume of the Senate Minority office where I spent the afternoon, probably with room to spare, and would generate about fifty megawatts of reliable power.

Our reactors would use thorium as their fuel, which is a common byproduct of many of today’s mining practices. Thorium is about three times more common than uranium and our approach can extract nearly all of its energy, leading to very little waste. Thirty years worth of thorium fuel could easily be stored on site in a volume the size of a coat closet. And thorium only converts to a form that releases nuclear energy once it is inside the reactor, and only at a rate controlled by the reactor’s operation. It is impossible to release all the energy of that thorium at one time.

In the 1960s the key technologies that support this reactor were demonstrated at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Meltdown was impossible in this reactor design. The operations team could walk away from the reactor and it would put itself into a safe shutdown configuration with no action at all. No one has seen anything like this before or since. All of these incredible features were made possible by its use of a liquid fuel rather than solid fuel.

Not only will this reactor produce reliable energy at incredible efficiency, but it will also produce materials that have medical benefits. Working with electric cooperatives in rural communities, we plan to demonstrate this capability in the next few years in Colorado. Communities will benefit from reliable power, generated locally, that will spur industrial growth and new jobs. Thank you.

There were questions at the end of our panel’s testimony, starting at 3:45:48. Sen. Simpson asked if I could dig a little deeper into the question of nuclear costs. We wondered if there was a different path forward for nuclear.

About a week ago, I toured the old Bellefonte nuclear power plant in northern Alabama. It was built by TVA and stopped construction in the 80s. It was fascinating; I got to go in the bowels of the plant and I got to see things most people don’t get to see, and I’ve got to tell you: an enormous amount of the cost to build nuclear today is driven by high pressure. We have high-pressure reactors. If we had low-pressure reactors, it would be a very very different story, because probably 80% of what I saw at that plant wouldn’t even be there in the first place, with low-pressure reactors. Molten-salt reactors are low-pressure reactors. There’s some other opportunities as well, but low-pressure overwhelmingly changes the cost basis of nuclear. Were we to implement low-pressure reactors, I’m confident that we would see an enormous reduction in the capital cost of building a nuclear plant.

Sen. Catlin followed up by asking me why haven’t we built reactors like these in the past.

One of the biggest reasons, sir, is that in the earliest days of our nuclear endeavour, things were driven by application to the weapons program. In fact, an enormous amount of decision-making was built around what was applicable to weapons. And thorium simply wasn’t. It didn’t have the the pathway to weapons application that uranium and plutonium did, either uranium enrichment or plutonium extraction. I know Colorado has disproportionately participated in this over the years. It was a huge reason why the titanic flows of resources that went into nuclear managed to avoid thorium, not just in this country but in many others. This was recognized even as early as 1944, that were we to focus on nuclear energy predominantly for making energy, we would take the thorium path. And it’s been eighty years now, and I think we should still be turning that direction. I feel very strongly that that’s the right way to go.

Senator Liston had recently written a piece in the Colorado (Springs) Gazette:

Perspective: Colorado needs nuclear now

Support for the bill was bipartisan:

Is Colorado open to embracing nuclear energy? A former anti-nuclear Democrat is asking colleagues to reconsider the energy source