Posts

Showing posts from January, 2010

Thorium reactors? Fascinating.

Image
The full text of this article is posted at wire.com. It's well worth the read. Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke * By Richard Martin Email Author * December 21, 2009 | * 10:00 am | * Wired Jan 2010 Photo: Thomas Hannich Photo: Thomas Hannich 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 a