WTF! Between this and the Polywell fusion reactor...
Apparently we've had the technology to solve our clean energy needs for half a century but they were abandoned and nearly lost because they didn't serve the right masters.

If Liquid flouride thorium reactors don't produce byproducts that can be weaponized then this should be developed as the standard for devloping nations everwhere in the world. This would prevent international concerns like we're experiencing with Iran's nucleur program right now since the technology of liquid flouride thorium fusion apparently does not share any similarities with the process of refining Uranium for weapons.

elect me and I'll make free power for everyone!

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/
http://www.petitiononline.com/ucnr233/petition.html
*quality

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by laura.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Great post. All Green-minded activists should get behind this zero emission technology. We need to get over our cold war era phobias around nuclear. It's the future.

Personally i've been hoping they develop a drill that can drill through into the earths mantle so we can take advantage of all that heat goodness that hot magma provides - but sofar it seems all these attempts have caused safety problems with earthquakes and such, so it might be a while before this is feasible =(

As for thorium reactors, get this shit done already.

From reading a bit on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Thorium_as_a_nuclear_fuel), it seems there are quite a few approaches to Thorium based reactors around the world, mainly in India, but none of them seem to take the Fluoride approach.

>> ^dag:
Great post. All Green-minded activists should get behind this zero emission technology. We need to get over our cold war era phobias around nuclear. It's the future.


First, @demon_ix - thanks for posting this. Very interesting and informative video. This summation will cause me to seek out the full talks.

@dag - I think the major issue is the lack of information; although, some people have a completely closed minds to nuclear solutions. The "zero emission" descriptor seems a little disingenuous. The issue has never been the emissions, but all the other waste products. Well Chernobyl has emission issues. But they ran with a positive temperature coefficient, had horrendous maintenance practices, and bypassed safety values for a test... and meltdown.

I'll support nukes -after- we have some place to safely store the waste for a few millennia. If several decades of need hasn't provided sufficient motivation, I see no reason to think we're going to get better in the future.

This continual desire to take the easy road and crap in our nest first, while leaving the cleanup for later is what got us into this mess.

Here's a talk by Bill Gates about nuclear power as an energy source. Not about Thorium, but still interesting... I tried to sift it, but it kept giving me an "code is incorrect" and I just don't know enough to fix it:

Boing Boing article: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/12/highlights-from-ted-2.html
TED video: http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html?awesm=on.ted.com_89Dt

excerpt from article above:
"A molecule of uranium has a million times more energy than a molecule of coal." He and Nathan "Mosquito Zapper" Myrhvold are backing a nuclear approach. It's called Terrapower, and it's different from a standard nuclear reactor. Instead of burning the 1% of uranium-235 found in natural uranium, this reactor burns the other 99%, called uranium-238. You can use all the leftover waste from today's reactors as fuel. "In terms of fuel this really solves the problem." He showed a photo of depleted waste uranium in steel cylinders at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky -- the waste at this plant could supply the US energy needs for 200 years (woah!), and filtering seawater for uranium could supply energy for much longer than that.

*promote

Invocations (promote) cannot be called by Lithic because Lithic is not privileged - sorry.

"The system makes the reactor self-regulating: When the soup gets too hot it expands and flows out of the tubes- slowing fission and eliminating the possibility of another Chernobyl."

Please read the article in Wired...it points out that most of the existing nuclear power waste is in the form of Thorium, which requires no further processing to be used as fuel for this reactor.
For another thing, this is interesing:
http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/robertsteinhaus/gGxKNV
~cheers
>> ^Stormsinger:
I'll support nukes -after- we have some place to safely store the waste for a few millennia. If several decades of need hasn't provided sufficient motivation, I see no reason to think we're going to get better in the future.
This continual desire to take the easy road and crap in our nest first, while leaving the cleanup for later is what got us into this mess.