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 […]
Each of the Democratic candidates in the last presidential election, as part of the Nevada primary, had an opportunity to declare their everlasting hatred for the idea that “nuclear waste” would ever be stored at a remote site of desert called Yucca Mountain. Eventually one of them was elected. And he carried through on his […]
I had an idea today–since U-233 represents something like a “catalyst” for the prolonged consumption of thorium in a LFTR, and since a LFTR can be built that has a unity conversion ratio (makes as much U-233 as it consumes), then perhaps a nation that developed a large supply of U-233 could “rent” it to […]
Since giving my talk at TEAC2 several weeks ago on my proposed plan for our nuclear future, I’ve been spending a lot more time thinking about this issue, the plan, and how to describe what I would propose to do. Sometimes it helps me to sort out thoughts by drawing a picture, but in this […]
Here’s the talk I will be giving this morning at the Thorium Energy Alliance Conference: As we have for most of human history, we stand at the edge of an energy crisis. The methods by which we have powered our society have come to a limit, and a change is necessary. Seven hundred years ago […]
The Department of Energy has an Office of Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE). They have five overall strategic goals: 1. Extend life, improve performance, and sustain health and safety of the current fleet of nuclear power plants 2. Enable new plant builds and improve the affordability of nuclear energy 3. Enable the transition away from fossil fuels […]
As I previously mentioned, I was involved in a proposal to the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) on an investigation in using liquid-halide reactors (both chloride and fluoride) along with salt-based reprocessing techniques to investigate how to address our issues surrounding spent nuclear fuel–often erroneously called “nuclear waste”. In a nutshell, we proposed to fluorinate […]
Barry Brook at BraveNewClimate.com is beating the drums for the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR). I am ambivalent for a number of reasons, and will at least point to some. The IFR is not the only potential fast neutron reactor, and one fast neutron concept, the Liquid Chloride Fast Reactor belongs to the Molten Salt Reactor […]
Readers of this blog know how to use LFTR technology to avoid making long-lived nuclear waste in the first place, but what about the waste we’ve already got? I posted this on NEI Nuclear Notes some time ago but thought I ought to post it here as well: But before you read it, this article […]
Several years ago, after reading an occasional passing mention of the possibility of a liquid-chloride reactor in a few papers, I thought myself very novel to imagine the benefits of such a reactor. Then one day, while perusing an old technical journal in the library, I came across a paper written by one “M. Taube” […]