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 […]
Thorium in the Manhattan Project
This spring I completed a master’s thesis at the University of Tennessee on the history of thorium research during the Manhattan Project. The thesis ran 476 pages, most of which was primary-source appendices — Seaborg’s Met Lab history volumes, the MUC-LAO meeting notes from April and May 1944, the Wigner-Young paper of May 1945, and […]
The Mythology of the Thorium Car, Thorium Plasma Batteries, and More!
Every few years, a story makes the rounds on social media claiming that a thorium-powered car is just around the corner — or already exists and is being suppressed by the oil industry. The story is irresistible: 8 grams of thorium, about the weight of a few paperclips, could power a car for a million […]
ThEC2013 presentation at CERN in Switzerland
We went to CERN in Switzerland! Or was it France? It’s easy to get confused…when the border between the two countries runs right through the middle of the CERN campus! Our perspective as a company is the industrial perspective. When we are talking to those who are generating electricity these are the things they’re worried […]
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 […]