I’m really sorry for how long it has taken me to get to the second part of a response to Peter Zeihan’s brief video about small modular reactors. The video was released on November 28, 2023, and I threw up a blog response the same day, but spooled up a bunch of thoughts as a […]
HALEU is basically 20% enriched uranium, and I have watched with disbelief as it has gone from an obscure fuel option to the central fuel form for the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Development Program (ARDP). But boy oh boy, is this stuff expensive. And other people are starting to notice and realize that […]
Targeted alpha therapy is an example of a technology that is used to kill cancer. It shows particular promise against dispersed cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma. A radioisotope that undergoes alpha decay is chemically bonded to an antibody and injected into the body. The antibody seeks out and binds to the desired cell, then […]
A recent paper by Lindsay Krall, Allison Macfarlane, and Rodney Ewing has garnered a great deal of attention: Stanford-led research finds small modular reactors will exacerbate challenges of highly radioactive nuclear waste Nuclear waste from small modular reactors The paper claims that small modular reactors (SMRs) will generate waste streams that are disproportionately large relative […]
These are notable quotes from Alvin Weinberg’s 1994 autobiography “The First Nuclear Era, the Life and Times of a Technological Fixer“. Thorium will create the Second Nuclear Era Until then I had never quite appreciated the full significance of the breeder. But now I became obsessed with the idea that humankind’s whole future depended on […]
Today our hopes for a thorium-powered future took a huge step forward as Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas introduced the “Thorium Energy Security Act” in the United States Senate. S.4242 – A bill to provide for the preservation and storage of uranium-233 to foster development of thorium molten-salt reactors […]
For many, many years now, we have endeavoured on this blog to help the public understand the value of uranium-233 and the unique advantage that the United States possesses with their U-233 inventory. But for just as long, we have lamented that the Department of Energy is bent on the destruction of this valuable material. […]
Senator Roger Marshall, M.D., of Kansas, a Republican, serves on the Energy and Natural Resources; Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry; Health, Education, Labor and Pensions; and Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committees. Will U.S. or China hold keys to the 2nd nuclear era? With Weinberg’s departure from the lab, the seed of the thorium fuel cycle, Uranium-233 […]
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 […]
For several years, the United Kingdom has been planning for the deployment of up to 12 new nuclear reactors to replace the advanced gas-cooled reactors that will be shut down over the next 12 years. To that end, eight sites were identified around England and Wales that would be permitted to host new nuclear plants. […]