The New Nuclear Energy
Maybe I could get on board Thorium as a nuclear fuel. Maybe. The idea of creating large piles of radio active waste which does not go away for thousands of years is my idea of killing the planet. Obviously, the planet as a rock will survive, but life on the planet will struggle to even survive once the waste leaks into the environment.
Are we so naïve to believe there will never be a modern Dark Ages? Will we always be able to contain the waste? Questions which seem benign in the minds of politicians, should be asked. How do we survive as a species when the waste leaks? Can anyone guarantee it won’t– ever?
The article seems like Thorium might be the answer. Before you buy stock in a new Thorium home power generator company, remember the time frame. You and I will be dust by the time Thorium gets to the point of a common energy source.
Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke
- By Richard Martin
- December 21, 2009 |
- 10:00 am |
- Wired Jan 2010
The thick hardbound volume was sitting on a shelf in a colleague’s office when Kirk Sorensen spotted it. A rookie NASA engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Sorensen was researching nuclear-powered propulsion, and the book’s title — Fluid Fuel Reactors — jumped out at him. He picked it up and thumbed through it. Hours later, he was still reading, enchanted by the ideas but struggling with the arcane writing. “I took it home that night, but I didn’t understand all the nuclear terminology,” Sorensen says. He pored over it in the coming months, ultimately deciding that he held in his hands the key to the world’s energy future.
Published in 1958 under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission as part of its Atoms for Peace program, Fluid Fuel Reactors is a book only an engineer could love: a dense, 978-page account of research conducted at Oak Ridge National Lab, most of it under former director Alvin Weinberg. What caught Sorensen’s eye was the description of Weinberg’s experiments producing nuclear power with an element called thorium.
Photo: Thomas Hannich
