Posted on 04/18/2010 12:55:27 PM PDT by Titus-Maximus
The thick hardbound volume was sitting on a shelf in a colleague’s office when Kirk Sorensen spotted it. A rookie NASA engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Sorensen was researching nuclear-powered propulsion, and the book’s title — Fluid Fuel Reactors — jumped out at him. He picked it up and thumbed through it. Hours later, he was still reading, enchanted by the ideas but struggling with the arcane writing. “I took it home that night, but I didn’t understand all the nuclear terminology,” Sorensen says. He pored over it in the coming months, ultimately deciding that he held in his hands the key to the world’s energy future.
Published in 1958 under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission as part of its Atoms for Peace program, Fluid Fuel Reactors is a book only an engineer could love: a dense, 978-page account of research conducted at Oak Ridge National Lab, most of it under former director Alvin Weinberg. What caught Sorensen’s eye was the description of Weinberg’s experiments producing nuclear power with an element called thorium.
At the time, in 2000, Sorensen was just 25, engaged to be married and thrilled to be employed at his first serious job as a real aerospace engineer. A devout Mormon with a linebacker’s build and a marine’s crew cut, Sorensen made an unlikely iconoclast. But the book inspired him to pursue an intense study of nuclear energy over the next few years, during which he became convinced that thorium could solve the nuclear power industry’s most intractable problems. After it has been used as fuel for power plants, the element leaves behind minuscule amounts of waste. And that waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts.
(Excerpt) Read more at geni.org ...
Absolutely correct.
It is hard to say it ....damn liberals always want to be more like Europeans. Well ...France reprocesses their spent fuel, and does the same for Japan. I am quite willing to be like the French in this area!!
(Damned idiot Peanut Farmer who thought he knew something about Nuclear power ....and f..’d it up, like everything else he did!!)
The internet has fabulous resources. We just have to cull, cull, cull. The internet is full of misinformation. Full of it. Learning who is a trustworthy source of information is a big part of gaining knowledge from the internet, and not garbage.
It sounds like you are a good source for the knowledge on this thread.
Thank you. Feel free to FRmail me if you have any questions.
BUMP
Dr. Joe Bonometti is the individual that brought me to thorium.
Damn, the article sure made it sound good, thanks for your comments.
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