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. […]
‘Petten’ has started world’s first MSR-specific thorium fuel irradiation experiments in 45 years World’s First Thorium Molten Salt Experiment in over 45 Years
(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 […]
(guest posting by Richard Martin, author of “Superfuel”) After the luncheon panel on “Green Technology: What’s Now & What’s Next” at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, in Aspen, I confronted Amory Lovins and asked him a simple question: “Is there any potential technological innovation that would cause you to reconsider your views on nuclear power?” […]
The People’s Republic of China has initiated a research and development project in thorium molten-salt reactor technology, it was announced in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) annual conference on Tuesday, January 25. An article in the Wenhui News followed on Wednesday (Google English translation). Chinese researchers also announced this development on the Energy from […]
How Much Thorium would it Take to Power the Whole World I have claimed on here that thorium, if efficiently utilized in a liquid-fluoride reactor, is an energy source of such magnitude that it is not difficult to conceive of an entire planet powered by thorium. The Calculation So let me lay out the calculations […]
Another semi-recent story concerns the use of thorium as a “fuel” in typical, light-water reactors. I put “fuel” in quotations because the only way to truly utilize the thorium resources of the world is to follow the three-step process I have outlined. First, convert the thorium to protactinium-233, isolate the protactinium until it decays to […]
This weblog is intended to be a location for discussion and education about the value of thorium as a future energy source. Despite the fact that our world is desperately searching for new sources of energy, the value of thorium is not well-understood, even in the “nuclear engineering” community. The fundamental basis for considering nuclear […]