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June
20
2017

Kirk Sorensen: The Future Of Energy?
Adam Taggart

Imagine a form of nuclear energy with greater output and virtually no safety issues.

Such is the promise of liquid flouride thorium reactors (LFTRs), and we've had several past interviews with thorium expert Kirk Sorensen to discuss their potential:

• Much safer - No risk of environmental radiation contamination or plant explosion (e.g., Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island)
  
  
• Much more efficient at producing energy - Over 90% of the input fuel would be tapped for energy, vs. <1% in today's reactors
  
  
• Less waste-generating - Most of the radioactive by-products would take days/weeks to degrade to safe levels, vs. decades/centuries
  
  
• Much cheaper - Reactor footprints and infrastructure would be much smaller and could be constructed in modular fashion
  
  
• More plentiful - LFTR reactors do not need to be located next to large water supplies, as current plants do
  
  
• Less controversial - The byproducts of the thorium reaction are pretty useless for weaponization
  
  
• Longer-lived - Thorium is much more plentiful than uranium and is treated as valueless today. There is virtually no danger of running out of it given LFTR plant efficiency

Kirk returns to the podcast this week to update us on the current state of thorium power. The bad news is that it still remains a theoretical concept; no operational reactor has been deployed yet -- even as a prototype. But, as Kirk details, we have good "line of sight" on the science to build one -- so, at this point, the limiting factor is mostly funding. In a world of privately-funded space travel, such a gating obstacle shouldn't remain for long.

This is one of the "bright spots" in the technology universe that offers real promise for addressing many of the challenges presented by our global addiction to depleting, pollutive fossil fuels.

Of course, perhaps humanity gaining access to an abundant source of cheap, hi-yielding energy may not be the best thing at this point -- as it will enable us to extract and consume the rest of the world's depleting resources (key minerals, water supplies, developable land, etc) at a much faster rate...

Click the play button below to listen to Chris' interview with Kirk Sorensen (47m:15s).

 

Adam is the President and Co-Founder of Peak Prosperity. He wears many hats, but his basic job is to handle the business side of things so that his fellow co-founder, Chris Martenson, is free to think and write.

Adam is an experienced Silicon Valley internet executive and Stanford MBA. Prior to partnering with Chris (Adam was General Manager of our earlier site, ChrisMartenson.com), he was a Vice President at Yahoo!, a company he served for nine years. Before that, he did the 'startup thing' (mySimon.com, sold to CNET in 2001). As a fresh-faced graduate from Brown University in the early 1990s, Adam got a first-hand look at all that was broken with Wall Street as an investment banking analyst for Merrill Lynch.

Most importantly, he's a devoted husband and dad.

 

www.peakprosperity.com