Thorium has tremendous promise as a future source of nuclear energy. It is the only material whose fissile product (uranium-233) produces sufficient neutrons in thermal fission to sustain its own consumption. The important implication is that a properly-designed thorium-fueled reactor, once started with fissile material, can continue to produce energy without additional fissile material. Inherent […]
(guest post by Jon Morrow) From time to time there appear in the public domain stories and advertisements about revolutionary consumer products and their technical underpinnings. These communications make outlandish, but very exciting, claims. Many of these involve promises of huge dollar savings to the consumer. These opportunistic authors use the interesting technique of attaching […]
I flew to Seoul, South Korea for a workshop at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) on the subject of thorium molten-salt reactors. I arrived Monday night and took a taxi from Gimhae International Airport in Busan to the Lotte Hotel in Ulsan, and being incredibly jet-lagged I pretty much collapsed into […]
Not really. Not if you’ve been paying attention to this field for years. But the thing that excites me is that the issue is beginning to percolate into the public consciousness a bit more than before. Could it be a bit of a backlash against the fear/uncertainty/doubt that the media drove upon us after the […]
Frequently Asked Questions Q: What is thorium and what makes it special? A: Thorium is a naturally-occuring mineral that holds large amounts of releasable nuclear energy, similar to uranium. This nuclear energy can be released in a special nuclear reactor designed to use thorium. Thorium is special because it is easier to extract this energy […]
We were visiting Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) yesterday and during a lunchtime discussion, the topic of the most recent reactor at ORNL came up. A little discussion ensued and we realized that, with its first criticality in June of 1965, the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) was the second-youngest reactor (in terms of first criticality) […]
Several weeks ago Baroness Bryony Worthington of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom came to visit Flibe Energy in Huntsville, and as we in Huntsville are wont to do, we took her to the US Space and Rocket Center, where I gave her a guided tour of America’s race to the Moon. I […]
Over the last several weeks we at Flibe Energy have spent a fair amount of time supporting the progress of Gordon McDowell’s “Thorium Remix 2012” effort, and one of the activities has been interviewing some of the people who actually worked on the Molten-Salt Reactor Program at Oak Ridge back in the 1960s and 1970s. […]
This newspaper article was published on February 13, 1973 in a local Oak Ridge newspaper, and it was recently recovered from the personal archives of one of the key persons on the Molten-Salt Reactor Program. Molten Salt: 500 Worked For 25 Years By CAROLYN KRAUSE The recent termination of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Molten Salt […]
For several years, the United Kingdom has been planning for the deployment of up to 12 new nuclear reactors to replace the advanced gas-cooled reactors that will be shut down over the next 12 years. To that end, eight sites were identified around England and Wales that would be permitted to host new nuclear plants. […]