Liquid Fluoride Reactors: A New Beginning for an Old Idea

Another thorium nut.
Folks, gez wot...there are no thorium reactors operating anywhere on THIS planet today.
Nukers are insane.
Fusion power is more likely and they actually are building a power plant in France.

For my entire life I have been promised fusion power "within the next five years".

Thorium is the future of energy!

Btw, I googled for that fusion reactor in France. It is another experimental reactor!!!

Thorium itself can not be turned into a bomb
We have a thousand years worth of it
we know how to use it
We get it when we dig up rare earth metals for all the electric motors for all the electric cars

It's really the only big way forward

I've been a lifelong skeptic of nuclear power but climate change really forces all of us to look really hard at nuclear power.

I still hate pressurized reactors and I'm not enthusiastic at all about pebble bed reactors.

This reactor, the liquid flouride thorium reactor is the only fission reactor I can see playing a big role in the future BUT at the end of the day a lot of these reactors mean a lot of dirty bombs for bad people.

That is just not true. Dirty bomb is something that you scare children with. A chemical bomb is more efficient and far easier to make so why bother with a dirty bomb?

A terrorist bothers with a dirty bomb because if it is done right it makes a lot of people sick and it tears society apart with fear which is what was accomplished on 9/11.

David LeBlanc in this talk projects a need for "thousands" of these kinds of reactors. That's a lot of targets that will need to be hardened against being hijacked and used as a dirty bomb by terrorists.

I like this solution to our energy and climate change problems but you should never discount the security concerns.

Irrational fear in the society is not really a security problem but an education problem. Radiation is not as dangerous as they tried to make us believe during the cold war (when russia was todays terrorist threat).

A power plant is basically impossible to make in to dirty bomb of any kind. And even if they steal the material it's not that easy to do it. Cars release more dangerous particles every day than any dirty bomb could.

Impossible? Then convey that conviction to the NRC which now requires all nuclear power plants to be hardened against impact from an aircraft.

The proponents of the LFTR by the way are planning to site plants underground or even underwater (like a nuke sub) to address NRC regulations.

This has been tested over and over again(as in taking a chunk of Cs-137, Pu-238 or Sr-90 and blowing it in various configurations of high explosives over a grid of detectors out in the desert to see where the dust goes).

With any kind of realistic device far fewer will die from radiation than from the explosion and few if any from accute radiation poisoning. If people were rational the 100 that die in an explosion are a bigger tragedy than the 10 that might die from cancer in 20 years.