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:
Category: blog
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 […]
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 […]
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) […]
Baroness Worthington at the US Space and Rocket Center
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 […]
Interview with Paul Haubenreich, June 13, 2012
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. […]