The prospects

Over the rainbow


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Stavros Saripanidis

Zero emissions, cheap, available technologies

Dear Editors,



Factories, buildings and houses can stop using fossil fuels for heating and electricity and convert to take advantage of U.K.’s huge geothermal potential. [3]



[1] Cars that can move cheaply on compressed air!

[2] Cars that can move cheaply on salt water!

[3] Widespread geothermal potential!


The authors states correctly in my view that: "What new reactors need is an advantage that will make them popular in the first place."
This is why subcritical reactors driven by proton accelerators are a viable option:


Thorium advocates in USA launched a we-the-people petition... bring Thorium Molten-Salt Technology to the attention of the Obama administration. In particular, how it is stifled by thorium regulation, and how this same regulation hinders production of (heavy) rare Earth production.

For all the effort Obama will spend on disputing China's REE monopolistic abuses, it should be noted there is NO lack of heavy REE in USA.

I would love to see Economist focus on the impact of USA's vague and almost meaningless thorium regulation.

Commentary on Obama's China REE WTO announcement, and how control over the future of energy (Thorium Molten-Salt Reactors) is being handed to China:


Our best bet for "radical innovation" at the moment comes from the 5 or 6 seriously motivated small scale fusion projects out there.

The two best bets out there:

Dense Plasma Focus by Lawrenceville Plasma Physics:

Polywell Electrostatic Inertial Confinement by Energy Matter Conversion Corp:

Neither are close enough to success to rate mention in this article series, but both are worth watching.

TUB2 in reply to

Here is some more info to soak up.

It now appears that you can trigger these LENRs in Organic Molecules. if fact in Benzine range and you can also trigger them on Furinzes (?) So that being the case, when you get these, they are called 'Aromatics' in fractions in oil in theory if this pans out it could potentially be used as a Nuclear Fuel which means We can use far less fuel because we can take part of what is now burned and burn it and release 1 to 5 Million times the energy

Lewis Larsen talking about Dr Mizuno at Hokkaido University

Then there are these guys!

George H. Miley, University of Illinois, Urbana

Excess heat generation from our gas-loading LENR power cell (Figure 1) has been verified, confirming nuclear reactions provide output energy. While there are similarities between ours and the Rossi E-Cat gas-loaded kW-MW LENR cells that have attracted international attention, there are important differences in nanoparticle composition and cell construction. Our experiment has established a remarkable proof-of-principle power unit at ca. 350W/kg under room temperature when using deuterium (D2) gas (H2 can also be employed) with Pd rich nanoparticles, producing T 1479J heat, well above the maximum exothermal energy (690J) possible from all conceivable chemical reactions (Figure 2). Neglecting unlikely chemical reaction contributions, the energy gain is virtually unlimited due to negligible power input with gas loading!

As a new visitor to this site I cannot post links.

So please Google

Dr. Joseph Zawodny NASA LENR Presentation - 09/22/2011


''Widom Larsen Theory LENRs . . . Energy Revolution? with Lewis Larsen President of Lattice Energy LLC''

''The Space Show Edmund Storms''

MIT Cold Fusion LENR

Youtube Edmund Storms on cold fusion

Game on!



Whilst this article is an incomplete summary of future prospects in Nuclear Fission, it does a nice job of expounding the difficulties, uncertainties, and timescales involved in innovation in this field. It is also more objective and evidence based than the other articles in your set, certainly the best Nuclear article of the edition IMO.


To survive in something approaching its present diversity, the biosphere needs a crash program on Thorium reactors... BTW, both India, and now China have one.
Why can't the West have one? Too busy giving money to Western bankers?


The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE), which was ¾ of what a LFTR is, was funded in 1960 and switched on in 1965; it operated for many thousands of hours at full power and was switched off in 1969. In the days of slide rules, compasses and protractors and all machining done manually, it took 5 years to design and manufacture.

We are now in the days of CAD/CAM, computer 3D modelling and planning. All it needs is the piddling £300 million investment by the UK government to get the first-of-a-kind LFTR funded and in 5 years it could be proving to fund managers and venture capatilists that investment in production line manufacture of modular LFTRs is a golden opportunity.

At £150 million for a 100 MWe modular LFTR, if you crunch the numbers, we could save £50 billion off the £110 billion committed by the DECC to meet our carbon targets, with their mish-mash of ridiculous renewables/efficiency/energy-saving.


Anyone claiming that it will take too long, it is not possible etc., needs to look at France. Job done from beginning to end in 20 years.


" If generation III reactors, well operated, prove safe, why upgrade? If they are not safe, who would trust generation IV?"

Let's build some and see, because nuclear power isn’t the problem, and never has been. The problem is with the reactors the world has been using to make it. If the reactors at Fukushima had been Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTRs) they wouldn’t have a mess on their hands.










See the Wired.Com article “Uranium Is So Last Century"

S-C in reply to skinnydog2010

You are placing all your hopes on an unproven technology based only on small-scale tests. And you seem blind to the weaknesses of the design and its operation, as well as the negative features it entails. It's teh same old promise of wonderful cheap energy without any risks that nuclear power proponents have been promising for decades.

Geo4 in reply to S-C

S-C, I wonder if people riding horses said the same thing when the combustion engine was developed?

Could you expand on your negative comments?

skinnydog2010 in reply to S-C

I am "placing all my hopes" on some of these actually being built, to determine if they, in fact, will perform as predicted. No one said this would be without risk. The greater risk is continuing to depend on fossil fuels, while disparaging any attempt to try something that, by all accounts and research, seems entirely feasible and worthwhile. I say yes, you say no. Fine, we disagree. But the way to end this argument is to simply build some LFTRs, and see if they work as predicted. If they fail, then we will have added a few tons of nuclear waste to a 75,000 ton pile in the US. If they work, it will open the door to the eradication of that same pile of long-term nuclear waste. That, to me, is a risk well worth taking.

S-C in reply to Geo4

Just look at real analysis of the pros and cons, instead of the propaganda from proponents. The history of nuclear power is littered with 'amazing designs' that never got further than the design-board or prototypes ecaus ethey simply weren't able to deliver what the imagination fancied they might do.

Geo4 in reply to S-C

Again, you add not one bit of substance or fact to your accusations.

I have looked at the pro's and con's and I personally think the pro's far out-weight the con's. The improved safety aspect of the molten salt design alone is enough for me. And than on top of this, the reactor can run at a much higher burnup than any solid fueled reactor.

The MSR design never got past the pilot plant stage, but that was at no fault to the technology. If you have actually read the Oak Ridge reports published after the end of the MSRE (I suspect you haven't) it details how successful the experiment was. For the first of its kind, it ran as well as a nuclear reactor could.

Decisions made by uninformed politicians led to the demise of the MSR, not because it had some inherent faults that rendered it unsuccessful.

It doesn't really matter what you or I think, some pretty intelligent people in China believe the MSR is technically sound and are willing to invest $100M/year in the project.

S-C in reply to Geo4

Haven't read the Oak Ridge reports, but have read more recent evaluations: there may be certain potential - and that's the key word, potential - advantages if the technology could be successfully scaled-up and run, but all in all, these are insufficiently large and too uncertain to convince me that it would be worth large-scale investment.

Kent Spielmann in reply to S-C

What evaluations have you read? I have really looked for any good reason why a privately funded research program should not be encouraged and I cannot find a single one.

Moreover, why be a naysayer? Even if the proponents are over optimistic, shouldn't all alternatives be supported? Who are you to determine what is "worth the investment." If we were truly free in this country, rather than constrained by fear and politics, these endeavors would be fully funded and undertaken by those who believe it them and those who are willing to risk their own capital in hopes of the potential rewards.

S-C in reply to Kent Spielmann

Who are you to determine that "all alternatives be supported"? I am looking at the pros and cons, and think the latter outweigh the former. I'll choose to put my money elsewhere, thank you.

guest-wssieia in reply to skinnydog2010

I am enthusiastic about the future of liquid-metal reactors, but you are taking enthusiasm too far. In particular, you are absolutely mistaken about the need for coolant. First of all is the obvious thermodyamic problem; the reactor needs a heat transfer medium with whatever it is powering. More importantly, once the fuel has been in the reactor as much as 12 hours, the spontaneous decay of fission products is responsible for ~10% of the output heat, and in an accident, this heat cannot be turned off. It will melt straight through the vessel walls and anything it touches thereafter, generating more heat as it goes. Thus the loss of coolant will be a crippling disaster for a liquid metal plant as much as for a pressurized-water one. Finally, the 'trivial' engineering problems, such as long-term corrosion of the reactor by the liquid metal, mean that these designs are far from shovel-ready. In sum, it's a better technology than the PWR, but the safety and cost issues are not fundamentally different.

Geo4 in reply to guest-wssieia

It does not require pressurized water to cool the fuel, the fuel salt is the coolant. It flows to the heat exchanger which exchanges heat with a secondary salt loop.

If you remove the fuel salt from the core in a loss of flow accident and drain it into a container designed for passive cooling, you do remove the LOCA issue. It will just take some engineering to scale up what Oak Ridge did in the 60's with their MSR experiment.

The safety characteristics are not that similar to a PWR. There is no high pressure containment necessary, the reactor runs at basically atmospheric. There is no hydrogen gas build up from breaking of water molecules or from zircaloy cladding reactions so there is nothing to explode. There is still decay heat but it will in fact be less than a PWR. Most of the fission products are removed online in an MSR, a PWR could have 6 months of fission product build up.

There is substantial engineering problems to overcome, corrosion may not be one of them, but separation techniques and core designs need more work. All of these issues are surmountable given funding, which there is none of at the current time (in NA anyway).

skinnydog2010 in reply to guest-wssieia

With respect, sir, you are incorrect on all points as regards molten salt reactors. You are probably confusing them with liquid metal fast breeder reactors, which are cooled by liquid sodium, which is indeed extremely volatile.
A molten salt reactor is not a liquid metal reactor, it is a liquid (molten) salt reactor. The molten salt serves as its own coolant, and is naturally self-regulating as to temperature, without the need of control rods. The way this occurs is simple - as fission occurs, heat is generated which expands the molten salt, moving the fuel particles away from each other, which dampens fission.
If the heat generated by the reactor isn't used to perform work, the fuel feed is cut back or stopped, and the reactor idles at a self-stabilizing temperature (see above.)
In an accident, the molten salt either "idles" or, if it does start to heat up, it melts a freeze plug. The salt then dumps by gravity into expansion tanks below the reactor, where fission stops almost at once. The tanks serve as radiators to dispel heat.
If the reactor is destroyed and the salt spills out, there is no explosion. The salt is at atmospheric pressure, and there is no chemical drivers to force the material to eject. There is no water used, and thus no steam. Rather, the spilled salt would "drool and cool." The spilled load of salt would quickly cool into an inert, solid mass, chemically locking the nuclear material to the salt. The spill would be measured in square meters, not square kilometers, and all of it can be recovered and reused in a new or repaired reactor.
The salt will not melt straight through the vessel walls. Molten salt, with a full load of nuclear fuel, self-stabilizes at about 750ºC (again, see above), which temperature is easily contained by the Hastelloy-N metal that forms the reactor vessel.
(ps - The corrosion concerns about Hastelloy-N were overblown and have since been addressed.)
Because of all the above, defense in depth is not needed, redundant safety systems are not needed, and expensive pressure equipment is not needed, nor is a containment dome, or water cooling. Thus, the costs are significantly less than a PWR.
As for safety, a molten salt reactor is truly "walk away safe." It is literally impossible for one to melt down (review all the above) even if someone deliberately tried.

J the C in reply to S-C

In the interests of intelligent debate rather then puerile insinuations, would you care to go into more details about the weaknesses of the design and the negative features you mention? You evidently care enough to argue the case against new research, so presumably you have the relevant facts to hand, or enough consideration to find and relay them?

If we supporters of Thorium technology are truly naive and blind, then why not open our eyes a bit? Because as it stands, this sounds little different than any other anti-nuclear knee-jerk response, without a hint of nuance or reason to it.

arient in reply to skinnydog2010

For the past decade I have been reading various descriptions of LFTRs and their benefits over conventional uranium fuelled power plants (with which I became involved at a high executive international level over 30 years ago), and I find your description as probably one of the best framed on the basis of the reality which is not only possible and attainable but must become "de rigueur" if global warming is to be controlled. Thank you for your well achieved effort.

arient in reply to skinnydog2010



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