Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors
Frequent commenter and all-around smart guy Frank Eggers points out that there has been no discussion of liquid fluoride thorium reactors here at 2GreenEnergy. He’s absolutely right, and I propose we attempt to rectify this.
Personally, I don’t know what to make of thorium. The brilliantly made two-hour-long video linked above is quite compelling, in that the main presenter, Kirk Sorensen is a super-articulate spokesperson for the technology. Of course, I can find articulate spokespeople for all types of yo-yo stuff. Having said that, I learned a great deal from the video, and again, I invite conversation.
From the several sources from which I have obtained information, it looks to me as though using thorium for energy in the LFTR (liquid fluoride thorium reactor) would circumvent most of the objections and problems associated with out present uranium technology. Also, it could easily be integrated into the grid whereas diffuse sources of energy would require extensive and expensive modifications to the grid.
Generating electricity form solar power has already resulted in environmental objections. For example, California senator Feinstein objected to a solar installation in the Mojave desert for environmental reasons. And, the intermittent nature of solar generated electricity would require massive over-capacity and massive storage to make it reliable unless it is backed up by steady sources of energy, such as fossil-fueled plants or nuclear plants. Obviously that duplication of power sources would add even more to the costs and probably be politically impossible. Except for situations where connecting to the grid would not be practical, pushing hard for solar generated electricity is likely to delay the implementation of advanced and safer forms of nuclear energy until lack of power becomes a crisis and panic-stricken people demand power as quickly as possible regardless of how high the environmental costs are.
I suggest putting more effort into implementing solar heating and cooling; the costs would be more reasonable and it would be more practical. Solar cooling could be done with the lithium bromide absorption system; it is a proven technology and could be adapted to be powered by hot water from solar panels. It would also help to make energy efficient houses more economically justifiable. I recently had a new house built and would, for energy efficiency reasons, used insulated concrete forms, but could not justify the costs. The interest on the investment would have been greater than the savings in energy costs and when the house is eventually sold, the investment would not be recoverable since energy efficiency is rarely considered by house buyers even though it should be.
Reducing the use of fossil fuels simply by taxing them more heavily probably would be politically impossible. However, instead of simply raising taxes on fossil fuels, it might be politically possible to shift part of the tax burden from the income tax to a tax on fossil fuels if it were phased in over a period of perhaps five years.
LFTRs indeed seem to be a very promising technology. We should definitely research this, given the potential huge benefits. And the obstacles seems to be relatively solvable engineering problems, contrary to hydrogen fusion, which already received billions and is always “40 years in the future”.
LFTR wikipedia page summarises it nicely:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor
Thanks for the link to the Wiki article; it was very interesting.
It’s obvious that significant work needs to be done before the LFTR could be ready for prime time, but it looks so promising that it would be unfortunate to ignore it. The Chinese are already working on it.