Nuclear reactors that won’t melt down
Clean, affordable, reliable energy is at the heart of economic growth. Fossil fuels have powered the ascent of civilization for centuries, but a replacement energy source is needed, and I believe that it will be nuclear energy, but not as we have known it up to this point.
Today’s approach to nuclear energy uses water for coolant and mined uranium for fuel. Thermal power is converted to electricity by giant steam turbines. Condensing that steam requires access to a lot of cooling water, and limits where we can build plants. Today’s nuclear has terrible fuel efficiency: only about one-half of one percent of the energy content of the mined uranium is extracted as useful energy. What remains ends up as nuclear waste, which has been the focus of potent political opposition. These disadvantages, together with fears about meltdowns of conventional reactors, have soured the public on the potential of nuclear as a solution to future energy needs.
But there is a better story that can still be written. Reactors don’t have to use so much water, they can be more efficient, they can be safer, and we can eliminate new nuclear waste. The solution is the liquid-fluoride thorium reactor, which we are developing at Flibe Energy. It is based on thorium, the world’s greatest source of stored energy, three times more abundant than uranium and present everywhere in the world. Our reactor uses thorium so efficiently that it could power human industrial civilization for millions of years. The salt we use is a liquid mixture of lithium and beryllium fluoride salts called flibe, which is where our company gets its funny name.
