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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
(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 […]