LFTR in 5 Minutes starts with a fast-paced summary of why thorium needs to be developed as an energy resource. If you follow gadget, technology or science blogs, then you’ll likely find thorium a fascinating subject.

In a nutshell, today’s nuclear power (Pressurized Water Reactors – PWRs) are incredibly inefficient. We still use them because, as inefficient as they are, fission releases an astounding amount of energy from tiny amounts of fuel (Uranium-235). The trade-off between high energy density and PWR inefficiency is: nuclear waste. PWRs generate a lot of nuclear waste.

LFTR has the potential to not just generate less waste going-forward, but consume existing stockpiles of waste. LFTRs can be constructed less expensively than PWRs because engineered safety systems can be replaced with (less expensive) passive safety systems, large pressure vessels are no longer required, and small/inexpensive gas turbines can replace large/inefficient steam turbines.

Any & all arguments against nuclear power must be re-thought when looking at the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. In particular, anyone concerned with climate change owes it to themselves to bone-up on this subject.

In my opinion, PWRs (today’s nuclear power) have already been maligned by environmentalists as dangerous and expensive. While I do think today’s PWR technology fails to completely answer the challenge of global warming, it illustrates how concerns about greenhouse gasses are easily redirected to promote specific technologies (solar, wind, geothermal) which are expensive and cannot be rapidly deployed.

Are we talking about the same global warming here? That global warming which may (thorough its destabilizing effects) set humanity’s progress back hundreds of years? That will displace millions of people living at sea level? That the impact of cannot be reliably predicted past an uncertain “tipping point”?

Bad, scary stuff. But not as scary as nuclear power, apparently.

I have tried to engage Elizabeth May, leader of Canadian Green party (and currently the only elected Canadian Green MP) on this subject. I like her. I’ve voted for her. She is smart, and should she choose to fully engage on this topic I have no doubt her arguments would be well thought out. However it appears she’s only willing to research arguments against, and leave it at that.

I handed a 10 minute video to Elizabeth May back in November of 2009. I’ve handed an early screener of THORIUM REMIX 2011 to her, and tried my best to engage her on this subject. To the best of my knowledge, the only information Elizabeth has consumed on the subject of LFTR is anti-nuclear arguments from the Canadian Coalition

for Nuclear Responsibility which included the following:

It may be that, one day, after all the power reactors have been shut down and folks have weaned themselves off of nuclear power, some version of these concepts may be useful for waste management purposes. But not now! To do it now would just be unleashing the dogs of nuclear expansionism, leading to a mad flurry of activity that the whole world will end up regretting. - Dr. Gordon Edwards

Do I have to explain why I find it troubling this is the Green Party of Canada’s go-to-guy on matters of nuclear technology?

My proposal to Elizabeth May (now an open letter since she has not replied to my email) is this: You moderate a discussion on the subject. You pick the anti-LFTR speaker. You OK the venue (assuming I can arrange something).

This way (Elizabeth), no one is expecting you to be an expert on nuclear power. You’re not being put-on-record. You’re there to be satisfied the discussion is fair. You can direct it towards whatever avenues you find most troubling about the technology. And most important of all, you’ll be in-the-room as an intelligent conversation about LFTR takes place. Sound good to you?

I can’t imagine the workload required of a sitting MP who is also the leader of a federal Canadian political party. Elizabeth I know you’re busy. Clearly busier than me as I had time to put together the video (and that took a long time).

But we can not afford to make a mistake on this. If you overlook a high-density, non-greenhouse-gas emitting source of energy, you are gambling that a political agreement will ultimately result in lower CO2 emissions. Not lower CO2 emissions per-captia. Not improvements in energy intensity. None of that ultimately matters. We need to lower total CO2 output, and keep it low through both good economic times and bad.

How’s that been working out so far?

Kyoto wasn’t even an agreement that halts global warming, just something to get the ball rolling on lowering carbon emissions. How do you think this is going to play out once the effects of climate change impact the economies of western nations? Will cooler heads prevail? Will we all buckle down and implement more cap-and-trade and carbon-tax measures? Or is this going to turn into a scapegoat-fest the likes of Rupert Murdoch could only dream of?

What do you think is going to get blamed for an economic downturn? The ripple effects of global warming? Or those darn environmentalists and their tax-and-regulate hatred of freedom?

If politics had a useful “tipping point” on this subject, it would have reached hit long ago. (An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006.) Likely that tipping point will coincide with the planet’s: All of a sudden our choices will be extremely narrow (if we are left with any choices at all). This may be the last decade in which our choices aren’t all bad ones.

Despite my skepticism that focusing on legal agreements will help us avert disaster (and I concede it did work with acid rain), I’m still happy to help on that front. I want to see Canada meet its Kyoto obligations. I want a carbon tax (or cap-and-trade). I want the Canadian Green Party to continue to speak on this issue, as your presence in the House of Parliament allows us to do.

However, I’m not doing that at the cost of handicapping technological solutions to the climate crisis. If you can’t take a serious look at LFTR, and put a fraction the amount of energy intro addressing the points raised as I spend editing this frigging video, then your impact on global warming might not be a net-positive one.

Because if your pro-Kyoto activities fail to result in green house gas cap-and-trade/tax, all we’re left with is your anti-nuclear position. In effect, an anti-LFTR position.

How urgent do things need to get before you’ll say “Nothing is off the table?” Before you’ll take the time to learn the nuts-and-bolts of some nuclear technology and start to make informed decisions? Because the consensus among thorium advocates is the information (that we’ve seen) you receive on the subject so far has been misleading.

Here’s Bill Gate’s thoughts on nuclear. If you’ve never heard this, well then how come you’ve never heard it? I’m just some guy, but this is Bill-Fricking-Gates. If you’ve heard it and disagree, I’d love to hear why. (He’s not even talking about LFTR specifically, just why nuclear is an essential part of any climate change solution.)

2011‑06‑21 Gord wrote

Elizabeth, I’m working on a documentary about Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors… …I’d like to share the current edit with you because I’m using your arguments against nuclear as a generic “against” argument. Obviously, I’d like to change your mind on this subject and I’m eager to share the final video with you.

2011‑06‑21 Elizabeth wrote

The arguments against Thorium are very persuasive. You need plutonium in the process and that’s a deal breaker right there… …Have you reviewed the fact sheets from CCNR?

2011‑06‑24 Gord wrote

I don’t think it acknowledges benefits of using liquid fluoride and continual reprocessing… more like solid fuel and so separate facilities for fuel fabrication & reprocessing, and much lower overall efficiency. In the LFTR, plutonium and other actinides remain in the salt until fissioned, unlike today’s solid fuel reactors which must refuel long before these long-lived radiotoxic elements are consumed. No plutonium or other fissile material is ever isolated or transported to or from LFTR, except for importing spent nuclear fuel waste used to start LFTR.

Then on July 14th Elizabeth forwarded me some emails from members of CCNR arguing against thorium reactors. This appears to be the sum-total of her curiosity and engagement. I bounced these off LFTR advocates and here is a compilation of Elizabeth’s cited arguments and our counter-arguments.

Dr. Edwards wrote

Thorium is not a nuclear fuel because thorium is not a fissile material. It is only a fertile material. Required transmutation would generate fissile materials suitable for both nuclear fuel and nuclear weapons. The USA exploded an atomic bomb made from uranium-233 in 1955.

Kirk Sorensen wrote

Thorium is very much a fuel because in the steady-state operation of a LFTR, it is the only thing that is consumed to make energy. Indeed, any nuclear reactor needs fissile material to start the chain reaction, and the LFTR is no different, but the important point is that once started on fissile material, LFTR can run indefinitely on only thorium as a feed—it will not continue to consume fissile material. That is very much the characteristic of a true fuel. “Burning thorium” in this manner is possible because the LFTR uses the neutrons from the fissioning of uranium-233 to convert thorium into uranium-233 at the same rate at which it is consumed. The “inventory” of uranium-233 remains stable over the life of the reactor when production and consumption are balanced. Today’s reactors use solid-uranium oxide fuel that is covalently-bonded and sustains radiation damage during its time in the reactor. The fluoride fuel used in LFTR is ionically-bonded and impervious to radiation damage no matter what the exposure duration. LFTR can be used to consume uranium-235 or plutonium-239 recovered from nuclear weapons and “convert” it, for all intents and purposes, to uranium-233 that will enable the production of energy from thorium indefinitely. Truly this is a reactor design that can “beat swords into plowshares” in a safe and economically attractive way.

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In a fluoride reactor, all of the fuel processing equipment will be located in a containment region containing the reactor and its primary heat exchangers, under very high radiation fields, and under the high heat needed to keep the fuel liquid. Once the system is properly designed to direct uranium-233 created in the outer regions of the reactor (the “blanket”) to the central regions of the reactor (the “core”) there will be no possibility of redirection of the material flow. Such a redirection would necessitate a rebuild of the entire reactor and would be vastly beyond the capabilities of the operators.The nature of U-233 removal and transfer from blanket to core involves the operation of an electrolytic cell that will allow very precise control and accountability of the material in question. Unlike solid-fueled reactors the uranium-233 never needs to leave the secure area of the containment building or come in contact with humans in order to continue the operation of the reactor.

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Yes, a single U-233 core bomb was exploded (Test: “MET”) in 1955. However, nuclear reactions that consume uranium-233 also produce small amounts of uranium-232. U-232 has a decay sequence that includes the hard gamma-ray-emitting radioisotopes bismuth-212 and thallium-208. Indeed, the half-life of U-232 is short enough that this decay chain begins to set up within days of the purification of the uranium, and within a few months that gamma-ray flux from the material is intense. These gamma rays destroy the electronics of a nuclear weapon, compromise the chemical explosives, and clearly signal to detection systems where the fissile material is located.

Lars Jorgensen wrote

Most customers for nuclear power already have or could have nuclear weapons independent of nuclear power. Any country in Europe, Japan, China, India, Canada, US all are perfectly capable of making nuclear weapons without any assistance whatsoever from nuclear power. Indeed, nuclear power is used as a cover for nuclear weapons development but so far as I know never has it been used as a vehicle to accelerate weapons work (rather the other way around). One of the nice features of an iso-breeder is that it will eventually make enrichment services obsolete – which is the highest technical proliferation risk.

Dr. Edwards wrote

Serious financial incentives require Molten Salt Thorium to “breed” U-233 , where more fissile material is created as a byproduct than the amount of fissile material used to fuel the reactor.

Lars Jorgensen wrote

If you want to maximize breeding at the expense of all else then you do need a pretty high capacity on-line reprocessing to isolate the Plutonium. However, this is not is most prudent avenue. There isn’t such a shortage of mined uranium that we need to make LFTR a breeder. It is good enough for it to be an iso-breeder.

Carl Lumma wrote

You don’t need much enriched Uranium – 1 ton for every GW of LFTR you want to start. You only need it to start, never again. Canada consumes 3,000 GW of power currently, so that is 3,000 t of U-235 and you can shut down your enrichment plant and Uranium mines if you want. The output of the plant would be 20% U-235 to meet nonproliferation laws. It would be shipped to each LFTR you’re starting. It would probably best be shipped in frozen blocks of Flibe (LFTR salt).

Lars Jorgensen wrote

After the first units are running we should add the capability for low capacity fluorination and vacuum distillation. This will allow us to continually clean the salt. It means the Pu-238 goes into the salt seeker waste flow. This could be shipped to a central (and secure) processing area. The Pu-238 is not weapons material (explicitly so by IAEA standards). But the technology to separate Pu from fission products likely is something to guard. This provides an energy system with very low waste, high capacity, and does not introduce proliferation issues with the reprocessing. Note that it is rather foolish to treat all reprocessing the same. PUREX was developed in wartime to make the cleanest most weapons suitable plutonium possible without regard to the waste stream. We do not use PUREX and never have. To talk about the disadvantages of PUREX in an article about LFTRs is misleading at best.

Dr. Edwards wrote

Thorium reactors are not really seen as a substitute for anything else, but just one more reactor in a fleet of reactors of many different kinds that will keep the public and decision-makers at bay. … Pebble-bed reactors, molten-salt reactors, thorium reactors, have been paraded before the public with as many bells and whistles as the nuclear industry can muster, to distract people’s gaze away from the construction fiascos, the litany of broken promises from the past, the still-unsolved problems of nuclear waste and nuclear weapons proliferation, and the horror that is Fukushima.

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I have been dealing with the thorium question for over 30 years. I think it’s a sucker’s game — just another way to lull people into thinking that reprocessing is OK if it serves a larger purpose.

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It may be that, one day, after all the power reactors have been shut down and folks have weaned themselves off of nuclear power, some version of these concepts may be useful for waste management purposes. But not now! To do it now would just be unleashing the dogs of nuclear expansionism, leading to a mad flurry of activity that the whole world will end up regretting.

Gordon McDowell wrote

Looking through his website, clearly he doesn’t want fission to be used to boil water, as that is refereed to repeatedly as a “radioactive steam generator”. Let’s work with molten salt then, eliminating containment costs associated with pressurized water, and offering (as he allows in his thorium summary)… “greater efficiency in converting the heat into electricity, and the lower pressure means less likelihood of an over-pressure rupture of pipes, and less drastic consequences of such ruptures if and when they do occur.”

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Does Dr. Edwards have some efficiency and/or safety standard where he might deem it acceptable that a controlled fission reaction takes place so that it’s energy can be harvested? It appears to be a standard impossible to meet, since the concepts “may be useful for waste management purposes”, but only after he sees the last nuclear plant has ceased generating power. He would dictate when a process enhancing nuclear safety can be put to use.

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Today’s reactors are needlessly complicated and inefficient as a result of design decisions stemming from nuclear power’s bomb-making origins. Dr. Edwards’ approach helps perpetuate these mistakes.

Derek Paul wrote

The argument that thorium reactors would be safer is currently being used to fool people into believing that the radioactive waste would be safer. (Many people do not realize that the activity of nuclear high-level waste is proportional to the total electrical energy generated.)

Alex Cannara wrote

He means fission products in spent fuel – solid fuel that’s removed from the reactor. MSR/LFTR fuel & decay products remain inside, except for the noble gasses (Xe, Kr…) or Radon. Their decay heat adds to power output. As fluorides, they remain stable and trapped. Indeed, each fissioning atom adds power and fission products – that’s the whole idea!

Lars Jorgensen wrote

While his statement is correct the implicit conclusion is not. The waste from a full recycle LFTR is dramatically better than LWRs. In fact, we can use LFTRs to clean up the nasty part of waste from LWRs. If we use LFTRs to burn up the transuranics from LWRs and generate all the electricity for the US for 200 years we still will have less transuranic than we currently have.

Carl Lumma wrote

In the case of today’s reprocessing, it is not done until spent fuel has been in cooling pools for at least 5 years. The idea with LFTR is not to swap fuel every 18 months and move it to pools but instead to leave it in the reactor as long as possible. This allows decay heat to be captured and turned into energy, as opposed to costing energy as they are cooled in spent fuel pools. As FPs decay to stability, they can be chemically extracted from the salt while the reactor is operating.

Derek Paul wrote

The problem we face, however, is the next 80 years, which is the period during which the whole of civilization could most easily collapse and, if it is to survive, it will not be because of the choice of thorium, as against uranium reactors. If we are successful at saving civilization, it will be through addressing climate change; the success of renewable energy; assisting in restraining population growth by making family planning freely available worldwide wherever people want it.

Alex Cannara wrote

Climate change is precisely what Weinberg was concerned about when developing Thorium Molten Salt Reactor technology. Climate change and reactor safety.

Gordon McDowell wrote

Giving people access to electricity raises their standard of living. Higher standard of living results in fewer children per family.

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LFTR runs hot enough to desalinate seawater, reducing likely-hood of conflict over water resources.

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LFTR runs hot enough to thermo-chemically split hydrogen from water. The H2 can then be used directly as fuel, or be combined with carbon split from atmospheric CO2 to create gasoline & diesel substitutes, hopefully reducing conflicts over petroleum.

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Cheap, clean energy will stabilize society.

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The very last thing we should be doing is turning away from a low-CO2-footprint energy source projected to be so inexpensive to operate you would NOT need to INCENTIVIZE people to use it.

Dr. Edwards wrote

LFTR still poses catastrophic accident scenarios as potential targets for terrorist or military attack. What happens to a thorium reactor when a bunker buster bomb hits it?

Bram Cohen (Yes, Bram Cohen! -Gord) wrote

LFTR has the fundamental safety property that it barely has positive reactivity to begin with. It’s so difficult to get it to even get hot (normally the core must be 90% graphite or it won’t even function) that practically any type of failure will necessarily change the geometry to be sub-critical. Any spilled liquid salts would soon result in a slightly radioactive but very stable chunk of slag.

Robert Steinhaus wrote

The fissile dissolved in fuel salt is incredibly dilute. It would take dump trucks full of burning hot salt to acquire a significant quantity of U-233 (enough to make a bomb). Accident scenarios end with salt in the engineered drain tanks or in a graphite lined tray positioned below the reactor.

Dr. Edwards wrote

The Japanese are working on a… molten salt thorium breeder reactor… but the Japanese project seems to lack funding.

Gordon McDowell wrote

They are receiving funding.

Richard Martin wrote

China is moving forward, with a program is headed by Jiang Mianheng, son of the former Chinese president Jiang Zemin. Their Academy of Science has an annual budget of $3 billion (and rising).

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The Chinese Academy of Sciences announcement explicitly states that the PRC plans to develop and control intellectual property around thorium for its own benefit.

Gordon McDowell wrote

China has used lax environmental & worker safety to undercut (and shut down) USA’s rare Earth mines, capturing 97% of the market. China then levied an export tax on rare Earths, which manufacturers dependent on rare Earth materials were allowed to bypass by moving factories to mainland China. Manufacturers have done this.

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Thorium is mined with rare Earth elements, and is separated on-site. In the States, this separated thorium had to be disposed of as a nuclear waste. This put an extra cost on rare Earth mines, and made it impossible to store thorium for later use as a fuel.

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I bring up this rare Earth tangent because anyone interested in the construction of wind power turbines (neodymium), electric car batteries (lanthanum) or solar panels (indium, gallium) should note how China is handling this.

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Not only have they captured rare Earth mining, and much of the related manufacturing of “green” technologies, they’re also stockpiling the thorium as they mine.

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I don’t understand why Dr. Edwards would mention Japan, but not China. China has stated explicitly they’ll secure as much IP as possible on LFTR/MSR. Given China’s track record, they’ll be very effective in leveraging those patents to gain maximum competitive advantage.

Dr. Edwards wrote

Thorium reactors do not eliminate problems… Proponents of thorium reactors argue that all of these risks are somewhat reduced in comparison with the conventional plutonium breeder concept. Whether this is true or not, the fundamental problems associated with nuclear power have by no means been eliminated.

Gordon McDowell wrote

It does not seem practical to exclude a technology from consideration because it fails to utterly eliminate risk.

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Solar and wind risk intermittent power production, and their low power density means a lot of installation and maintenance per kWh.

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Likely, nuclear’s low death rate /kWh is due (in part) to strict government regulation. It costs a lot to build a nuclear power plant. I wouldn’t trust any energy company to be above trying to save a dime by cutting corners. And governments (in general) often fail to effectively craft and enforce safety regulations on any energy industry.

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However, I’m attracted to LFTR because it allows us to directly use technology (not just regulation) to address these risks. Specifically, risk of death. Which is hardly unique to nuclear.

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It appears to me that nuclear already offers the best risk/reward ratio. Maybe we’ll see a catastrophe one day which results in a great many deaths and those numbers will change. Fukushima’s still an evolving situation… maybe it will get much worse before it gets better. But so far, the biggest impact seems to be caused not by the meltdown itself, but by the government of Japan (and now Germany) moving from nuclear to more expensive (both in dollars and lives) energy sources.

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We (as a society) appear willing to accept a steady stream of deaths associated with fossil fuels, for fear of an unlikely nuclear catastrophe involving a very high body count.

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Dr. Edwards’ response to this is that nuclear can’t improve, unless it can leapfrog to perfection. And because it is too dangerous now, any improvements at all simply perpetuate the danger of his expected catastrophic event.

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LFTR’s improvements are not just an immediate reduction in deaths/kWh during normal operation (due to reduced mining activity). It reduces the risk of catastrophic events over PWR by employing passive safety systems, many of which are unique to Molten Salt Reactors.

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Would we be arguing against a safer oil refinery? That to try engineer our way to improved safety or efficiency in the use of petroleum products is futile, since it will only postpone adoption of a favored technology?

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Fukushima Daiichi’s construction began in 1967. Fukushima Daini (located right next to Fukushima Daiichi) began construction in 1976. Daini experienced the same earthquake and tsunami as Daiichi, with no ill effects. What was the difference? A decade of incremental improvement to the same technology. (Those same improvements would have been applied to Daiichi had TEPCO not been your typical psychopathic corporation.)

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LFTR offers much more than just incremental improvement. So to Dr. Edwards does that make it less, or more dangerous?

Dr. Edwards wrote

These guys are, with missionary zeal, trying to sell thorium just the way the original LWR’s were sold, by magnifying the advantages and minimizing the disadvantages.

Gordon McDowell wrote

One of the earliest proponents of Molten Salt Reactors was Alvin Weinberg. Weinberg was awarded the patent for Light Water Reactor design, which essentially all of our nuclear power plants are based on. Alvin protested that his own pressurized water design was inferior to the molten salt reactor:

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– Limited to low temperatures operation.

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– Heavy pressure vessel.

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– Poorly utilizes fissile resources.

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He would continue to voice concerns over the safety of PWR, until Congressman Chet Hollifeld (leader of joint congressional atomic energy committee), who told Weinberg if he was so concerned about the safety of nuclear energy, then it might be time to leave the nuclear industry. Despite Weinberg’s specific concerns about PWR (not nuclear power in general), he was shown the door.

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Serious research into MSR has been on hold for 40 years, with advanced fuel cycle research focusing on fast breeders. There is no incentive for the existing nuclear industry to move to LFTR, as this destroys their solid fuel profit center. CANDU was once a partial exception to this, with more expensive reactors and less expensive fuel, since their sale they’ve started focusing on light-water reactors.

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LFTR does not offer a competitive advantage to the current nuclear industry, and it threatens to undercut their operating costs, just as it does other sources of energy.

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One distinct advantage LFTR offers over PWR is the ability to move beyond “baseload” energy generation. LFTR’s negative co-efficiency of reactivity means it has a natural tendency to ramp up as the core is cooled, and to ramp down as the core’s heat increases. So as heat is used to generate electricity (or split hydrogen from water, or pull carbon from the atmosphere), the reactor automatically responds by accelerating fission to compensate for the cooler core.

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Wind and solar are intermittent energy sources. Fossil fuels (and hydro) with their own ability to quickly ramp up & down become an essential pieces of the energy puzzle until either a superconducting power grid provides redundancy, or utility class energy storage becomes far less expensive. Today’s PWR can not ramp up & down to meet the needs of intermittent renewables, but LFTR can.

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If both carbon dioxide and radioactive waste are taxed to eliminate externalities, free market forces will guide us to an optimal energy generation mix. It is clear LFTR would be part of a balanced approach to non-greenhouse-gas-emitting energy generation.

Again, I’m sure Elizabeth May is quite capable or either putting up a better argument against LFTR, or rethinking her position. If a strong argument can be made against LFTR, I’m happy to redirect my energies to a better global warming solution. “Being more efficient with energy use” is something I already try to do, and let me tell you the first 10% is the easiest. I’ve never spent all my energies on it because it strikes me as ineffective. “I’ll… just switch to these LED light bulbs and ask politely for a carbon tax while Alberta is developing oil sands as fast as it possibly can.” Who are we kidding?

LFTR is simply the first realistic solution I’ve seen (since learning about global warming) that I believe might actually address climate change, and help us avoid an unpleasant future.