Imagine gigawatts of carbon free power all around the world at half the cost of coal, natural gas, oil, and renewables. It is 10x safer than today’s safest form of power, and each gigawatt plant is no bigger than your neighborhood CostCo. What is this amazing technology? Simply, it’s a thorium molten salt nuclear fission reactor, a.k.a. fission with thorium power plant.
Why Fission with Thorium?
Fission with thorium plants can be half the cost and 10x safer than today’s fission with uranium plants, which are already great sources of carbon free power. Fission with thorium plants use a liquid fuel like gasoline, instead of a solid fuel such as rods and pellets for the reactor. This design change allows the plant to be much more compact saving costs on construction and operations, and it makes the entire plant easier to build. Also, since the fuel is a liquid (molten-salt), the liquid can be drained to an underground bunker (fuel drain tanks) in case of an emergency. This built in safety feature (freeze plug) makes the power plant safe from accidents, natural disasters, and terrorism attacks. In addition, by using thorium as a fuel, a fission with thorium plant has 1% the waste compared to a fission with uranium plant.
Source: www.thoriumenergyalliance.com
We Already Made a Working Fission with Thorium Plant
Initially, fission with thorium plants were designed to fit in and power an airplane in the same way fission with uranium plants power submarines and aircraft carriers. It’s compact, affordable, reliable, and easy to operate. With funding from the US government, Oak Ridge National Laboratories built a working fission with thorium plant and it worked great. It worked for months on end, and operation was simple. So why did this promising technology stop here? Since this was in the 1960s, and the US was in a cold war, so the US government focused on developing only fission with uranium power plants since its by-products can be used to make nuclear weapons. Fission with thorium cannot make nuclear weapons from by-products, so the experiment was put on hold indefinitely. Now, with global warming becoming a serious problem, we can focus on fission with thorium to solve this problem.
A Fission with Thorium Plant is the Best Solution to Solve Global Warming
Not only does it produce gigawatts of carbon free power in a single plant, a fission with thorium power plant can be half the cost of cheap carbon fueled plants, 10x safer than today’s safest form of power, built almost anywhere, and manufacture 100 GWs per year at a single factory. To develop this technology, it needs government and major investments. Right now, China and India governments are investing in certain aspects of this technology, and other fission power plant companies are working on the liquid fuel technology, in which thorium can be substituted in at a later date. The fission with thorium technology needs much more support, investments, and incentives in order to manufacture enough carbon free power plants to solve global warming.
A great technical overview of Fission with Thorium by Kirk Sorensen is below:
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