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The most exciting new technology we have witnessed in our lifetimes is a new means of producing safe, efficient and clean energy—a technology that has the potential of fulfilling the energy needs of the entire planet using a resource that is vastly abundant in our earth’s surface. This new technology literally promises to transform human existence, clearing the way to enormous advancements in technology and productivity.

The technology, as demonstrated in this week’s featured video, is called a Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, or LFTR (pronounced “lifter”). This type of nuclear reactor eliminates most of the safety concerns inherent with water-cooled reactors as well as the grossly inefficient technology of traditional reactors that use only a fraction of a percent of the energy potential of the fuel.

Water-cooled reactors require water to constantly circulate over solid uranium fuel rods to avoid a meltdown. The 2011 disaster in which a tsunami knocked out multiple redundant power systems at Japan’s Fukushima reactor illustrates perfectly the hazards of a water-cooled system.

The LFTR uses molten salts as the carrier for the nuclear fuel.

As aerospace engineer and nuclear technologist Kirk Sorensen explains, “You have to heat them up to about 400 degrees Celsius to get them to melt, but that’s actually perfect for trying to get them to generate power in a nuclear reactor.”

“Here’s the real magic—they don’t have to operate at high pressure. They don’t have to use water for coolant, and there’s nothing in the reactor that’s going to make a big change in density.”

“Unlike the solid fuels that can melt down if you stop cooling them, these liquid fluoride fuels are already melted. In normal operation you have a little piece of the frozen salt that you’ve kept frozen by blowing gas over the outside of your pipe. If there’s an emergency, and you lose all the power at your nuclear power plant, the little blower stops blowing, the little plug of salt melts, and the liquid fluoride fuel inside the reactor drains out of the vessel through the line and into another tank called the drain tank.”

“In water cooled reactors, you generally have to provide power to the plant to keep the water circulating and prevent a meltdown. But if you lose power to the LFTR, it shuts itself down all by itself without human intervention—a staggeringly impressive level of safety—even if there’s physical damage to the reactor.”

The thorium used to fuel the LFTR is a naturally occurring element that is four times more common in the earth’s crust than uranium, Sorensen continues—and far less wasteful.

“It’s so energy-dense that you can hold a lifetime supply of thorium energy in the palm of your hand. We could use thorium about 200 times more efficiently than we’re using uranium right now. Because the LFTR is capable of releasing almost completely the energy in thorium, this reduces the waste generated over uranium by a factor of hundreds, and by factors of millions over fossil fuels.

In 2007, worldwide energy use consumed 5 billion tons of coal, 31 billion barrels of oil, 5 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, and 65,000 tons of uranium. By contrast, the 5,000 tons of thorium typically produced by a single rare earth mine in one year would meet global energy needs for an entire year, Sorensen continues.

“Every time mankind has been able to access a new source of energy it has led to profound societal implications,” he concludes.

How do you think our world might change if energy were as safe and abundant as this new technology promises?