@davidgmillsatty

I've come to understand that centralized power equals centralized control. There's a reason we go to war for oil more than anything else. In my utopian energy future generation would be much more distributed. Ideally it'd be at the household level but I could live with town by town. Such a system would not have the distribution issues our system has nor the loss. But most importantly, there would not be a tiny handful of companies (ie: plutocrats) controlling all of the energy for everyone.

I am the guy Alligator Ed is referring to, though probably not nearly as learned as he implies. I have lurked here for a long time, but am not a frequent poster or commenter.

I had begged him on another website to watch a video, which I have included at the bottom of this post, and to my amazement, he did. It is about a different kind of nuclear power we actually developed at one of our national labs in the 1960's and 70's, but never commercialized. Being the bright guy he is, he immediately got the implications of what this kind of nuclear power meant for us all. So he asked me to post the video here with a bit of an introduction to it since I have been trying to learn all I could about it for the last six years or so.

I used to hate the idea of nuclear power, but I despaired at the notion that renewables would be adequate to satisfy the world energy demand once fossil fuels run out or the world decides to quit using them, whichever comes first.

My outright rejection of nuclear power had existed for a long time until the day I heard of this radically different form of nuclear power. We secretly developed this technology at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the 60s and 70's in the middle of the cold war. It unfortunately remained hidden from the world because of a political and military decision not to commercialize it. For all practical purposes, it's technology was essentially "lost." It remained "lost" until its recent rediscovery about fifteen years ago by a NASA engineer, who began to make this technology public on the internet.

As it turns out, the nuclear reactor we developed at Oak Ridge is the nuclear power we were promised and never got. It never made it to commercial production because we went with the reactors we could make bombs with, in the mistaken belief that these plants would also work well for power generation. As we have all known now for thirty or forty years, the nuclear plants we developed had major issues that turned the world against nuclear power. And most of those issues still exist with the few nuclear plants we are making today. The stigma of nuclear power certainly will not go away simply by upgrading existing reactor designs.

Sadly, by the time we figured out that the nuclear power we chose did not live up to expectations, the project at Oak Ridge had been cancelled for many years and most of the people who had worked on it had died, retired or had been reassigned. And it was a very small group of people. Almost nobody knew it even existed even though some of the giants in the field of nuclear energy worked on it and championed it. The major difference between these reactor designs is based on the coolant the reactors use: the ones in use today use water as a coolant, and the one designed at Oak Ridge used molten salt as a coolant. The Oak Ridge reactor design was/is so vastly different from the reactors we use now, it is likely that there are no interchangeable parts between one design and the other.

My contention is that now that this vastly different technology has been rediscovered, we need to re-examine our attitudes about nuclear power. Here is why.

First, the issue of safety. Molten salt as a coolant eliminates the primary problem in every nuclear accident there has been -- the failure of water to adequately cool the reactor when there is trouble. In a molten salt reactor, the fuel and the salt are already in a molten state. They can't melt down when things go wrong; they can only freeze up. When things go bad, the molten salt and the nuclear fuel drain into a drain tank where the molten salt and fuel freeze up and where any further nuclear reaction is immediately stopped. It is walk away safe. And all the radioactive contents stay frozen in the salt in the drain tank. It is totally impossible to have anything like the meltdowns of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukushima.

Second, cost. Molten salt as a coolant, which stays liquid for 1,000C, means the reactor does not need to be pressurized -- the one thing that makes water cooled reactors ridiculously expensive and very large. Without the need for pressurization, these molten salt cooled reactors can actually be made on an assembly line, because they have far fewer parts than an airplane and can even be smaller. They are much smaller that an average sized oil tanker. Here is a schematic of one compared with a Suez canal sized tanker, showing the size of a reactor that puts out 1 gigawatt of electricity:

A gigawatt put out by this reactor is equivalent to about what 666 average windmills (1.5 megawatts) put out if the wind blows all the time. Given that most windmills are lucky if they can run 40% of the time, this one Oak Ridge reactor is more comparable to 1500 windmills since the wind doesn't cooperate 60% of the time. Some critics of wind power contend that they really only run about 15% of the time, not forty. And of course, solar has the same problem with only being able to run when the sun is shinning. So in terms of cost, this reactor actually beats wind and solar on a vast scale due to its full time power production, far fewer parts and materials, far less land cost, and far less transmission line cost.

That reactor, which is installed underground, looks like this and looks nothing like the reactors we see today which are all above ground:

This particular reactor design is from a company called Thorcon, and it is a scale up of the Oak Ridge reactor. Thorcon's parent company is a shipbuilder. Thorcon believes that it is quite possible to build these in a naval yard at the rate of 100 per year (easy to do with ships of greater complexity and much more material). Thorcon is convinced it's assembly line production of molten salt reactors can produce electricity cheaper than coal, the gold standard of cheap energy. (Solar and wind are nowhere nearly as cheap as coal). http://thorconpower.com/

Third, nuclear proliferation. Molten salt reactors usually use a different element for nuclear fuel than uranium. They are designed to use the element thorium. Thorium actually works much better than uranium does in molten salt reactors. So the incentive will be to use thorium and not uranium. Thorium is lousy for making bombs and that was the primary reason thorium based reactors were never developed. Funding went to the uranium reactors since uranium is much better for nuclear weapons.

Fourth, thorium is extremely plentiful. Thorium is far more common than uranium and thorium will always be a much cheaper fuel than uranium. Using thorium in a molten salt reactor, there is enough thorium to power all of the world's energy needs as well as use it to explore the entire solar system for thousands of years. The moon has lots of thorium and it is likely that other moons and asteroids have it in abundance as well. We might run out of uranium as a nuclear fuel, but it is highly unlikely we would ever run out of thorium.

Fifth, almost zero long term nuclear waste. It is extremely rare to make any long term waste out of thorium, but easy with uranium. In fact thorium molten salt reactors can actually burn up nuclear waste and use them as fuel. A company called Copenhagen Atomics intends to do just that with it's wasteburners. http://www.copenhagenatomics.com/

Sixth, molten salt thorium reactors are highly efficient, while water cooled uranium reactors are highly inefficient.

People have a hard time comprehending how much more powerful nuclear power is than fossil fuels. Nuclear power is a million times as energy dense as fossil fuels are. But what does that really mean in a practical sense? It means this. All the power you will ever use in your lifetime exists in a ball of thorium that fits like this in the palm of your hand.

Think what this means for the planet. Think of how little destruction will we cause the planet if this is all we consume for a lifetime supply of energy. Moreover, thorium makes the CO2 issue moot (no nuclear power plants ever produce CO2). If we ramp up the production of these reactors it will put carbon based fossil fuels out of business, easily before 2040. Thorium is so ubiquitous, it means no more wars for energy.

These reactors are what my generation should have grown up with. They are what I want for my grandkids. Nothing else will do.

Please watch this video featuring Kirk Sorensen, the NASA engineer who "rediscovered" the lost technology we developed at Oak Ridge. Give this video five minutes of your time. If you watch the whole thing, you will learn a lot about the history of nuclear power, a bit of nuclear physics, and about the nuclear power we should have had and never got. If you don't care to watch it for yourself, watch it for your grandkids.

@davidgmillsatty You should re-post this "comment" as an independent essay/diary.
Thanks to you and ed for this info.

I am the guy Alligator Ed is referring to, though probably not nearly as learned as he implies. I have lurked here for a long time, but am not a frequent poster or commenter.

I had begged him on another website to watch a video, which I have included at the bottom of this post, and to my amazement, he did. It is about a different kind of nuclear power we actually developed at one of our national labs in the 1960's and 70's, but never commercialized. Being the bright guy he is, he immediately got the implications of what this kind of nuclear power meant for us all. So he asked me to post the video here with a bit of an introduction to it since I have been trying to learn all I could about it for the last six years or so.

I used to hate the idea of nuclear power, but I despaired at the notion that renewables would be adequate to satisfy the world energy demand once fossil fuels run out or the world decides to quit using them, whichever comes first.

My outright rejection of nuclear power had existed for a long time until the day I heard of this radically different form of nuclear power. We secretly developed this technology at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the 60s and 70's in the middle of the cold war. It unfortunately remained hidden from the world because of a political and military decision not to commercialize it. For all practical purposes, it's technology was essentially "lost." It remained "lost" until its recent rediscovery about fifteen years ago by a NASA engineer, who began to make this technology public on the internet.

As it turns out, the nuclear reactor we developed at Oak Ridge is the nuclear power we were promised and never got. It never made it to commercial production because we went with the reactors we could make bombs with, in the mistaken belief that these plants would also work well for power generation. As we have all known now for thirty or forty years, the nuclear plants we developed had major issues that turned the world against nuclear power. And most of those issues still exist with the few nuclear plants we are making today. The stigma of nuclear power certainly will not go away simply by upgrading existing reactor designs.

Sadly, by the time we figured out that the nuclear power we chose did not live up to expectations, the project at Oak Ridge had been cancelled for many years and most of the people who had worked on it had died, retired or had been reassigned. And it was a very small group of people. Almost nobody knew it even existed even though some of the giants in the field of nuclear energy worked on it and championed it. The major difference between these reactor designs is based on the coolant the reactors use: the ones in use today use water as a coolant, and the one designed at Oak Ridge used molten salt as a coolant. The Oak Ridge reactor design was/is so vastly different from the reactors we use now, it is likely that there are no interchangeable parts between one design and the other.

My contention is that now that this vastly different technology has been rediscovered, we need to re-examine our attitudes about nuclear power. Here is why.

First, the issue of safety. Molten salt as a coolant eliminates the primary problem in every nuclear accident there has been -- the failure of water to adequately cool the reactor when there is trouble. In a molten salt reactor, the fuel and the salt are already in a molten state. They can't melt down when things go wrong; they can only freeze up. When things go bad, the molten salt and the nuclear fuel drain into a drain tank where the molten salt and fuel freeze up and where any further nuclear reaction is immediately stopped. It is walk away safe. And all the radioactive contents stay frozen in the salt in the drain tank. It is totally impossible to have anything like the meltdowns of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukushima.

Second, cost. Molten salt as a coolant, which stays liquid for 1,000C, means the reactor does not need to be pressurized -- the one thing that makes water cooled reactors ridiculously expensive and very large. Without the need for pressurization, these molten salt cooled reactors can actually be made on an assembly line, because they have far fewer parts than an airplane and can even be smaller. They are much smaller that an average sized oil tanker. Here is a schematic of one compared with a Suez canal sized tanker, showing the size of a reactor that puts out 1 gigawatt of electricity:

A gigawatt put out by this reactor is equivalent to about what 666 average windmills (1.5 megawatts) put out if the wind blows all the time. Given that most windmills are lucky if they can run 40% of the time, this one Oak Ridge reactor is more comparable to 1500 windmills since the wind doesn't cooperate 60% of the time. Some critics of wind power contend that they really only run about 15% of the time, not forty. And of course, solar has the same problem with only being able to run when the sun is shinning. So in terms of cost, this reactor actually beats wind and solar on a vast scale due to its full time power production, far fewer parts and materials, far less land cost, and far less transmission line cost.

That reactor, which is installed underground, looks like this and looks nothing like the reactors we see today which are all above ground:

This particular reactor design is from a company called Thorcon, and it is a scale up of the Oak Ridge reactor. Thorcon's parent company is a shipbuilder. Thorcon believes that it is quite possible to build these in a naval yard at the rate of 100 per year (easy to do with ships of greater complexity and much more material). Thorcon is convinced it's assembly line production of molten salt reactors can produce electricity cheaper than coal, the gold standard of cheap energy. (Solar and wind are nowhere nearly as cheap as coal). http://thorconpower.com/

Third, nuclear proliferation. Molten salt reactors usually use a different element for nuclear fuel than uranium. They are designed to use the element thorium. Thorium actually works much better than uranium does in molten salt reactors. So the incentive will be to use thorium and not uranium. Thorium is lousy for making bombs and that was the primary reason thorium based reactors were never developed. Funding went to the uranium reactors since uranium is much better for nuclear weapons.

Fourth, thorium is extremely plentiful. Thorium is far more common than uranium and thorium will always be a much cheaper fuel than uranium. Using thorium in a molten salt reactor, there is enough thorium to power all of the world's energy needs as well as use it to explore the entire solar system for thousands of years. The moon has lots of thorium and it is likely that other moons and asteroids have it in abundance as well. We might run out of uranium as a nuclear fuel, but it is highly unlikely we would ever run out of thorium.

Fifth, almost zero long term nuclear waste. It is extremely rare to make any long term waste out of thorium, but easy with uranium. In fact thorium molten salt reactors can actually burn up nuclear waste and use them as fuel. A company called Copenhagen Atomics intends to do just that with it's wasteburners. http://www.copenhagenatomics.com/

Sixth, molten salt thorium reactors are highly efficient, while water cooled uranium reactors are highly inefficient.

People have a hard time comprehending how much more powerful nuclear power is than fossil fuels. Nuclear power is a million times as energy dense as fossil fuels are. But what does that really mean in a practical sense? It means this. All the power you will ever use in your lifetime exists in a ball of thorium that fits like this in the palm of your hand.

Think what this means for the planet. Think of how little destruction will we cause the planet if this is all we consume for a lifetime supply of energy. Moreover, thorium makes the CO2 issue moot (no nuclear power plants ever produce CO2). If we ramp up the production of these reactors it will put carbon based fossil fuels out of business, easily before 2040. Thorium is so ubiquitous, it means no more wars for energy.

These reactors are what my generation should have grown up with. They are what I want for my grandkids. Nothing else will do.

Please watch this video featuring Kirk Sorensen, the NASA engineer who "rediscovered" the lost technology we developed at Oak Ridge. Give this video five minutes of your time. If you watch the whole thing, you will learn a lot about the history of nuclear power, a bit of nuclear physics, and about the nuclear power we should have had and never got. If you don't care to watch it for yourself, watch it for your grandkids.

To: @Ellen North

...that I thought might interest you. It is actually a Reader's comment attached to Caitlin Johnstone's recent brainwashing essay. It was on my clipboard and there you were, hence this post.

https://medium.com/@gbossa_25/as-a-retired-therapist-i-can-say-without-reservation-that-it-is-very-difficult-for-the-vast-6d1208bf2fa6

Thanks! Like most of the rest, I'd prefer to avoid anything that produces eternally (by our standards) hazardous waste, but that's a yuuuuuuuuuuuuge improvement over nuclear, waste-wise as well as otherwise.

And I hope that people aren't going to get bumped off for pushing anything that reduces the ability/excuse to continue fracking, mountain-top coal mining, fossil fuel air/soil/water polluting, invading of other people's oil-rich countries, drain the public purse for fossil fuel industry subsidies, make more freaking nuke bombs...

And that's only some of the problems that, it seems, could be reduced...

@Pluto's Republic Actually China is very much into this. There is a man by the name of Hargraves, who wrote a book called Energy Cheaper than Coal about thorium and he was invited to China's Academy of Sciences to talk about it. And here is a video of that.

I first heard about Thorium during the Fukushima accident. I recall now a couple of things I was curious about at that time. First, I assume the science behind the technology is fundamental, so I would also assume the underlying science is part of every school curriculum. The technology would then be a natural part of applied science. Thus, it should be a familiar concept can easily evolve into a common understanding, socially and culturally — much the way space travel is a familiar concept shared by people, from childhood. The science of Thorium is as compelling as, say, cold fusion or perpetual motion — for the same reasons.

But I don't think that it is as familiar and ubiquitous as those two concepts — and that seems odd.

That made me wonder about something else: Is thorium, the science and technology, freely available to all countries and all humans to develop as they see fit? If so, I would imagine that China would be deep into this, since they have a "planned" civilization that operates like a well endowed foundation, especially on beneficial projects that cannot be immediately capitalized. Such civilizations tend to be proactively involved in the build-out of reality. The exploitation of an energy technology would be irresistible to them. It is China's core competency to completely dominate an energy sector, like they have with solar power. Capitalism is not a barrier for them; it's a luxury. Is there some other barrier holding this this more promising science back from development? Thorium dovetails perfectly with China's clean energy goals for the planet, now the the US is no longer in the picture.

Above all, there is a proof of concept. So why hasn't Thorium sold itself?

Thanks again, David, for your fascinating introduction to Thorium. It's great to have someone so knowledgeable to learn from.

@Mark from Queens

I'm not versed in science, but reminds me of things I've read about the great Nikola Tesla.

Hadn't he been working on and/or discovered some kind of global wireless energy, generated from the earth's core or something?

He was working on a system of global wireless power transmission. Power would be generated in conventional ways, converted to high-voltage radio-frequency currents (RF) via very large examples of the resonant circuit that bears his name today (Tesla coil), injected into the Earth at the coil sites, and thence available anywhere on Earth by simply tuning a smaller Tesla coil to the same frequency as the coil at the injection site. The Tesla laboratory at Wardenclyffe, New York was a prototype of such an injection station. The concept fails principally because Earth's iron core and iron-heavy mantle aren't particularly friendly to transmission of radio-frequency electric currents, and RF power transmission via electromagnetic radio waves through the atmosphere suffers from the familiar inverse-square law (delivered power decreases as the square of the distance from the source), which harms power delivery far worse than it harms use of RF for delivery of information -- what we use RF for today.

Folks like me -- techies from Colorado Springs, Colorado -- are rather fond of Nikola Tesla. We think of him as the first of our kind!

about the great Nikola Tesla.

Hadn't he been working on and/or discovered some kind of global wireless energy, generated from the earth's core or something?

Very interesting piece. Thanks AE and David.

@Linda Wood What I find promising (and saddening at the same time) is that due to governmental regulations in the US, we will likely not develop these reactors here. We would have to have an entirely different set of regulations because regulations for water cooled reactors have no application. Making these for the rest of the world like we do Boeings or Cessinas would probably provide for many high tech jobs.

But it is a catch 22. We won't get regulations until one is built, and we can't build one here until we have regulations. It seems very likely that something will happen like what Thorcon is doing. Make them on an assembly line and prove the concept in a place like Indonesia. But then the American worker gets screwed once again.

for bringing up the subject of Thorium. My husband and I, both Americans, public education based college graduates, Californians, and pacifists in our seventies, had never heard of Thorium as a potential power source until fairly recently, in my case as a result of watching the Norwegian suspense series, Okkupert. In this television series, Norway decides to get off fossil fuels and to develop thorium nuclear power, whereupon Norway is invaded by Russia.

In any case, I want to say I hope you will continue to promote consideration of this subject, but I want to also say that I think the reason plutonium-based bomb-making has happened instead of peaceful energy is that war is the conduit to a black hole of funding, unaccountable, uncounted, corrupt beyond the hilt, and that war is key to the oppression of labor and the destruction of democracy. Russia and China have, and have always had in the modern era, capitalists who crush labor and democracy, and if there are now pro-labor, pro-democracy factions in Russia and China I am very happy and hopeful about such a possibility. But I think our U.S. leadership is drunk on war funding, as it underwrites all wealth and political power worldwide. The idea that cutting costs for defense contractors would be seen as a plus by these jerks goes against everything I know about them.

I agree with Pluto's Republic that our regime change in Ukraine, and I would add our atrocity in Syria, both exemplify the reaction our government has to either doing business with Putin's Russia or nationalizing oil resources for the benefit of working people. The reaction is to go on a rampage of killing. So I don't think our powers that be appear to want common sense or peaceful fuels to threaten their life-support, wealth-support systems. Still, I am hopeful about change.

At the same time, I tend to think Jim Kunstler is right, that finding ways to support our Walmartization lifestyle, air conditioning the South, driving to every possible commercial point, mass-producing everything we need, is a kind of magical thinking. I hate to think that the people who live in igloos in the far north of Siberia have the only sustainable lifestyle for humans on this planet, because I wouldn't last 2 seconds in that place, but he has a point. Humanity lasted half a million years as hunter gatherers, and when we started fucking around with nature in order to create comfort, we started building our own demise. Maybe, maybe not. Thank you for this discussion.