Dr Kiki’s Science Hour 84 (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors) Abridged 3/3 I’ve tried to leave the core points and edit out all the fluff as most people do not have the attention span to make it through the entire hour. The key points are: * We built and ran prototype Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR) a form of molten salt reactor during the 60’s. We have built LFTRs before. * Alvin Weinberg the man who invented and held the patents for our existing light water reactors (LWR) spent the rest of his career advocating the use of LFTR technology for it’s safety and other advantages over LWR technology. Eventually he was fired for this advocacy even though he invented the LWR. * Once the development of a full scale LFTR design is completed and mass production started we expect a LFTR would be much cheaper to produce than a Light Water Reactor (LWR) we use today. The fuel to run a LFTR would be much more abundant and vastly cheaper than the uranium fuel used in today’s light water reactors. * There is 4 times as much thorium as uranium on the planet, and we have thousands of years worth of thorium fuel available just in the USA. It is a waste product from neodymium rare earth mining. Some mines produce enough thorium as waste to meet the power demands of the entire earth for a year, in just one year of mining for neodymium. * Existing LWRs use less than 1% of the mined uranium as fuel, what can’t be used for fuel is depleted uranium or radioactive waste. In an existing …
