Thoughts on Fukushima-Daiichi
A rational look of Fukushima minus the hype and hysteria
Author: Kirk Sorensen
Kirk Sorensen is founder of Flibe Energy and is an advocate for nuclear energy based on thorium and liquid-fluoride fuels. For five years he has authored the blog “Energy from Thorium” and helped grow an online community of thousands who support a renewed effort to develop thorium as an energy source. He is a 1999 graduate of Georgia Tech in aerospace engineering and is also a graduate student in nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee. He has spoken publicly on thorium at the Manchester International Forum in 2009, at NASA’s Green Energy Forum in 2008, and in several TechTalks at Google. He has been featured in Wired magazine, Machine Design magazine, the Economist, the UK Guardian and Telegraph newspapers, and on Russia Today.
He also taught nuclear engineering at Tennessee Technological University as a guest lecturer. He is active in nonprofit advocacy organizations such as the Thorium Energy Alliance and the International Thorium Energy Organization. He is married and has four small children.
Why we need a Small Rugged Reactor…
This is why: Militants in Pakistan attacked a fuel supply convoy yesterday, killing at least four, that was bound for US military facilities inside Afghanistan. Twelve tankers were set ablaze and crews struggled throughout the night to put out the fire. What does this have to do with thorium or LFTR? A small rugged LFTR […]
Doing Our Part to Reduce the Deficit
The United States is facing a budget deficit of $1.5 trillion this year, and the new Republican-led House of Representatives (where spending originates in the US government) is looking for ways to save money. We in the thorium community have a significant idea for how the government can save $500 million dollars accelerate the development […]
China Initiates Thorium MSR Project
The People’s Republic of China has initiated a research and development project in thorium molten-salt reactor technology, it was announced in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) annual conference on Tuesday, January 25. An article in the Wenhui News followed on Wednesday (Google English translation). Chinese researchers also announced this development on the Energy from […]
Alvin Weinberg’s MSR "Protohistory"
I was very fortunate to meet Dr. Kazuo Furukawa in person several weeks ago, and he shared with me a fascinating talk that had somehow escaped my attempts to discover everything Alvin Weinberg said or thought or wrote down about the molten-salt reactor. The talk was called “The proto-history of the molten salt system” and […]
The Pea and the Beach-Ball
Nuclear physicists describe the propensity of a nuclide to absorb a neutron in terms of a very small area, called a “barn”. A barn is a trillionth of a trillionth of a square centimeter (10-24 cm2). Now imagine if we could inflate the size of a couple of nuclides, brothers actually, by a factor of […]
Public Statement before the BRC Fuel Cycle Subcommittee
After two days of meetings for the Fuel Cycle Subcommittee of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, the public had an opportunity to make statements before the commission. These public statements were meant to be less that five minutes and were allotted on a first come, first serve basis. So bright and early […]
Enrichment: Visualizing the Value Function
(1) I’m a math minor, and an equation like that is not a very appealing way to begin a blog post. But I got the unpleasant part out of the way early because the good news that this equation (the value equation) is totally central towards understanding how much separative work we need to […]
Electrical Generating Capacity Graph
For some time now, I’ve been working on a simulation of our electrical generation system, and as part of that I’ve fed in a lot of data about nuclear and coal-fired powerplants into a database. The simulation isn’t quite finished yet, but I wanted to share a very interesting observation. How many times have you […]
Enrichment, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the SWU, part 4
Sorry it’s been so long since I last posted, but since I got on this topic I’ve had to “run the numbers” a fair number of times, and each time that I do that, I remember that we have computers that are a lot better at that sort of thing than I am, so after […]