2017 Platts Nuclear Energy Conference
I was asked to speak at the Platts Nuclear Energy Conference in Washington, DC, on February 10, as part of their panel on “New Approaches to Advanced Reactor Design.”
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.
Classic ORNL MSRE Film
This film was produced in 1969 by Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the United States Atomic Energy Commission to inform the public regarding the history, technology, and milestones of the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE). Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Molten Salt Reactor Experiment was designed to assess the viability of liquid fuel reactor technologies for […]
Thorium Article in Machine Design
Several years ago I had the opportunity to write an article for Machine Design magazine. Last year I was contacted again and offered another opportunity to write an article for them. They had had success with a series where questions were often asked were answered by experts. The question that they had often been asked […]
Thorium Remix 2016
Gordon McDowell has completed and released his two-hour documentary “Thorium Remix 2016” and it is a fantastic introduction to the technology of thorium molten-salt reactors and the LFTR design in particular. Flibe Energy and other MSR developers are mentioned and described. Please enjoy and consider participating in Gordon’s Patreon program!
Chloride Reactor Research Funded by DOE
The Department of Energy has issued two awards on January 15 under their Funding Opportunity Announcement of July 31, 2015. Energy Department Announces New Investments in Advanced Nuclear Power Reactors to Help Meet America’s Carbon Emission Reduction Goal In what took many of us by great surprise and delight, one of the announced winners was […]
EPRI Report on LFTR Published
For most of the past year, I have been working steadily on inputs to this report, now published by the Electric Power Research Institute. EPRI: Program on Technology Innovation: Technology Assessment of a Molten Salt Reactor Design — The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) It contains the most comprehensive description of the liquid-fluoride thorium reactor […]
Medical Isotopes from the LFTR
Radiopharmaceuticals, also called medical isotopes, are specialized forms of medicine that help to diagnose and treat many challenging medical conditions including cancer. Their central advantage over other pharmaceuticals is that they emit radiation in the form of a photon of light that can be used to diagnose or identify specific conditions, or a charged particle […]
1965 MSRE editorial from Oak Ridge
Several days after the successful start of the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment, the local paper, the “Oak Ridger”, published this editorial: THE OAK RIDGER FRIDAY, JUNE 4, 1965, page 4 Editorial: Significant Step To ‘Burning The Rocks’ Many important stews lead up to the “going critical” of a new reactor. For instance, in the case of […]
MSRE 50th anniversary
For many nuclear engineers, the moment a new reactor first achieves criticality is considered the “birth” of their creation, the moment it “comes alive”. Criticality is special, because it means that the reactor is generating new neutrons at precisely the rate at which they are consumed in fission. Unlike a rocket launch, or a ship […]