TEDxYYC - Kirk Sorensen - Thorium

Kirk Sorensen discuss "Thorium" at TEDxYYC 2011.

Kirk Sorensen is founder of Flibe Energy and is an advocate for nuclear energy based on thorium and liquid-fluoride fuels. For five years he has authored the blog "Energy from Thorium" and helped grow an online community of thousands who support a renewed effort to develop thorium as an energy source. He is a 1999 graduate of Georgia Tech in aerospace engineering and is also a graduate student in nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee. He has spoken publicly on thorium at the Manchester International Forum in 2009, at NASA's Green Energy Forum in 2008, and in several TechTalks at Google. He has been featured in Wired magazine, Machine Design magazine, the Economist, the UK Guardian and Telegraph newspapers, and on Russia Today.

He also taught nuclear engineering at Tennessee Technological University as a guest lecturer. He is active in nonprofit advocacy organizations such as the Thorium Energy Alliance and the International Thorium Energy Organization. He is married and has four small children.

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• Category

  Science & Technology

[Gustav Heyner]

The technology was abandoned by the US in the 60s because you caouldn't make weapons with thorium.

[Plauff Lses]

TED. You didn't have to edit out the guy's breaths.

[Giovanni Foulmouth]

In the late 80's? Well, there's your problem! Technology has advanced a lot since then.

[jackw97224]

SRI, amoungst others that we canvassed back in the late 1980's while writing our senior engineering project, clearly concluded that about 20% of total energy needs were possible from the collective of alternate sources and that at the time less than about 6% of total energy needs were being met by such alternate suppliers.

[Giovanni Foulmouth]

Hydro's growing too.

[Giovanni Foulmouth]

Who are those people that lied to you? I take my facts from Scientific American and Stanford Uni lectures. Google ''scientific american plan for sustainable future'' and watch: watch?v=VJ-YpM8bjlw

[jackw97224]

Oh, I left out hydro.

[jackw97224]

Giovanni, upon what factual basis do you base this claim? Many people have researched energy production and use and the last I heard was that collectively, solar, wind, wave, geothermal and biomass could only meet about 20% of the US needs.

[root toor]

@MrDanP1 As a bystander to this argument, my opinion is that saying "if solar works so well for Germany, how come they have to buy electricity generated by nuclear power from France?" is silly.

"how come they" ......You're over simplifying things.

Who's 'they'? Ze Germans? Who's France? the people of France or owners nuclear powerplants or energy brokers? Their finance is capitalistic just like the US. They have oil buyers and solar brokers like the US, just much more and much better.

[ChaosWolf1982]

This.  The Red Scare was bigger than their Green concerns.

[forcryingoutloud911]

Whomever dislikes this needs to be shot because they are the problem!!.

[Giovanni Foulmouth]

Solar alone CAN solve our problems, however we also have wind, geothermal, tidal and wave power and now LFTR