Dr. Rusty Towell presents LFTR at TEDxACU
Dr. Rusty Towell, professor of physics at Abilene Christian University, presents the benefits of LFTR technology at TEDxACU:
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.
TU Delft Symposium on Thorium MSR
At the invitation of Dr. Jan-Leen Kloosterman of the Delft University of Technology (Technische Universiteit Delft, TU Delft) I attended a symposium on thorium in molten-salt reactors held on April 17, 2015. Other participants included David LeBlanc of Terrestrial Energy and Leslie Dewan of Transatomic Power. My objective was to make the case that the […]
Response to Stephen Ashley’s Thorium Aspersions
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 […]
Touring UC-Berkeley’s CIET Facility
For many years now I have been interested in the work being done at UC-Berkeley in the modeling of molten-salt reactors using a simulant fluid. Prandtl number matching between salt and simulant fluid: (1) Dynamic viscosity is often a strong function of temperature while specific heat and thermal conductivity are generally weak functions of […]
The Mythology of the Thorium Car, Thorium Plasma Batteries, and More!
(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 […]
8th International Symposium on Targeted Alpha-Therapy Summary
I recently attended the 8th International Symposium for Targeted Alpha Therapy (TATS 2013) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The conference presenters confirmed that alpha-emitting radioisotopes derived from the thorium fuel cycle are very promising agents in the fight against cancer, HIV, and other diseases. Scores of researchers from around the world assembled to present […]
Thorium MSR Conference at UNIST, South Korea
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 […]
Recent Revelations about Radiation
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 about Molten Salt Reactors
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 […]
MSRE…that ORNL youngster…
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) […]