Energy from Thorium: MSRE's 50th Anniversary
Abundant, cheap, safe, clean energy, just as was promised sixty years ago. Just not in America.
by Rod D. Martin
June 1, 2015
1 out of every 7 people on Earth live without electricity. That means no sanitation, no lights, no computers, shorter lifespans, poor medicine, grinding poverty.
Energy is as essential as clean water, abundant food, and a good education. Without energy, many people will never have those other three things.
50 years ago America was serious about solving this problem. In the era of Apollo, it launched the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. MSRE involved not only a completely new kind of nuclear reactor, but a completely different fuel: thorium. The results were, and are, astonishing.
Thorium reactors are a modern miracle. They cannot melt down (cannot!). They produce just 1% of the radioactive waste current reactors do, and they can even burn up all of the radioactive waste already produced. A thorium reactors costs just 1/5 the price of current reactors. And thorium cannot (yes, cannot) be used to make a bomb.
It is insane that we aren't pursuing this amazing techn…