Development of Tiny Thorium Reactors Could Wean the World Off Oil In Just Five Years

India has 32% of the world's total reserve of Thorium.

Will there be a demand for it in five years, unfortunately other people have plans for us between now and then.

o great and wise genius, will this more efficiently turn water into steam into rotational energy, into electricity into something i can use. without hurting the environment?

Piece of cake, that's why there is no thorium reactors producing power yet.

If thorium can't shit it should get off the pot.

The sheep love these techo hope stories. Too bad it's bullshit. I don't see how the thorium will make gasoline for my car.

I remember when Bush told us we would be driving hydrogen cars.

...and the cheap solar shingles on our roof would be making more power than we could use.

I'm working on a dog shit fuel cell that will drive my electric meter backwards.

i bet whole towns would bring all their dogshit

it won't "make" gas for you but if we used these thorium reactors then less petroleum products would be consumed for energy needs thus making more gasoline available to power your car.

It could power new electric plants.

If it could be made small enough, it could power our homes and commercial buildings.

Then we just need to have a way to retrofit the cars we all have with electic engines.

That would get us off fossil fuels and keep actual oil for things for which there is no substitute.

It would also mean we could tell the OPEC countries to go to hell. They would get to be as backward and repressive as they want to be and we would get to ignore them.

go for it then

thorium is in american coal too

[link to www.telegraph.co.uk]

Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium

If Barack Obama were to marshal America’s vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project, he might reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years.

Each ton of coal we burn up contains 13 times as much energy as that liberated by combustion of the carbon in said Thorium. We could thus receive the same electrical energy we gain by burning the coal through extracting the Thorium and using the nuclear energy to produce power. With the rest of the energy, the other 12/13ths, we could then extract hydrogen from seawater (which we have lots of) and convert the remaining coal to either diesel fuel or gasoline. To put a not-fine-point on this, we throw away more than 100 billion gallons of gasoline (after conversion losses) in thorium tailings alone. That is damn close to all of our existing gasoline consumption - with ZERO oil being drilled. (PS: Those are conservative estimates - mathematically, it's 200 billion gallons!)

will it supply 21 gigawatts to my delorean

Thorium was first name by a gay Scientist (forgot his name)with a lisp. He put some up his butt and it hurt for a few days, thusly he named it Thorium.

Thorium as a cheap and safe alternative to uranium or plutonium as nuclear fuel:

SELECTED EXTRACTS


Thorium offers some other important aspects, it does not require isotope separation, the process of separating the desired reactable forms of uranium and plutonium from the decayed ore, a big cost saving. Weapons made from thorium are impractical.

Another thorium reactor opportunity is thorium consumes its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer, now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering, and closely watched Internet commentator and educator says, “It’s the Big One, once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilization on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels.” He’s right; thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product when they dig up rare earth metals. The U.S. and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall in the UK. Some beaches in India are loaded with thorium. Not so much mining is needed: all thorium is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7% from uranium as much of the uranium has already decayed.

U.S. scientists knew in the late 1940s that thorium was a high potential fuel, but weapons priorities pushed uranium and plutonium to the front. Yet by the early 1970s thorium research had produced a highly workable, safe and low cost reactor design that the U.S. put on the shelf. Uranium industry competition with thorium won the struggle for research and development funding.

No other on Earth energy source exists at the volumes that thorium offers. Not uranium, oil, gas, coal or other fuel can compare. The assorted reactor designs all offer a weapon free design, some could use the spent uranium fuel on hand now and extract its energy as well as destroy the uranium’s potential as a weapon or a pollutant, safety concerns are reduced to decades instead of centuries, and the construction costs and operating expenses with a cheap fuel are intensely motivating to power producers and ratepayers.

The issue isn’t about the science, thorium reactors have already ran successfully, its people who have to become informed and apply the pressure needed to overcome the special interests in the political arena where the regulatory barrier has the potential of thorium corralled and stopped. It’s your planet, economy and family – can we all stay uninformed, silent and bleeding our financial resources for the benefit of the special interests only because we don’t know? Nope – now you know.

[link to oilprice.com]

In PDF format (3 pages): [link to oilprice.com]

and here: [link to newenergyandfuel.com]

China has already begun development of this safer alternative: [link to www.wired.com]

Download link to a one hour 22 minute Google technical talk on thorium as fuel: [link to www.youtube.com]

The presenter is Kirk Sorensen, and the introductory blurb is here: [link to inventorspot.com]

The US built a Thorium powered AIRPLANE for an experiment. Although the reactor power out put was never connected to the engines, the plane flew with the reactor operating. All they had to do was transfer the power source.

From a slide presentation given by David Archibald in Melbourne on February 5th. He covers climate issues, oil and coal, plus Thorium reactors in this presentation of 110 slides.

[link to wattsupwiththat.com]

[link to wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com]

China will be years ahead of us if we do not keep up....

Wikipedia on the molten salt Thorium cycle reactor:
[link to en.wikipedia.org]

John Deal on smaller nuclear reactors dispersed around the country: [link to www.techrockies.com]

These are small enough to be transported by flatbed truck to their final destination.

Sized to power about 20,000 homes for 8 to 10 years.

Still use uranium, but safer design.

More from Kirk Sorensen via you tube; blurb:

Presented at the 3rd Thorium Energy Alliance Conference, in Washington DC. Kirk Sorensen & Kirk Dorius announce creation of Flibe Energy, a company devoted to making energy from thorium a reality, via the Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR).

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[link to www.youtube.com]

costs of a thorium plant not bad

[link to www.thorium.tv]

Robert Hargraves : THORIUM ENERGY CHEAPER THAN FROM COAL ~ AIM HIGH!

Presented at the 3rd Thorium Energy Alliance Conference, in Washington DC.

[link to www.youtube.com]

The two videos above came from this link: [link to energyfromthorium.com]

There are more videos and discussion; go to the link: [link to energyfromthorium.com]

A much longer presentation from Kirk Sorensen (2 hours, 37 minutes)

BLURB:

[link to protospace.ca]

At PROTOSPACE, Kirk reviewed his interest in space, his work for NASA and his introduction to liquid fueled reactors. The talk itself ends with a long Q&A period, then a casual conversation about how reactor development could be crowdsourced.

This video is released by Gordon McDowell under a Creative Commons Share-Alike License.

If you are interested in LFTR, consider joining Facebook's [link to www.facebook.com]

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[link to www.youtube.com]

OIL = PRODUCTION

mayybe 10% of a barrel of oil goes towards energy. the rest is the production of things like : plastic, paint, fertilizer, medicine, rubber (7 gallons in every tire), pesticides, clothing, paper, lubricants, etc, etc...

never believe ANYONE who claims "such and such is going to get us off oil!"

we are addicted to it, it is our way of life in its entirety. there is no getting off of oil. none. end of story.