The following is a partial transcript of Jim's interview with Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA scientist and current advocate for the use of thorium in meeting America's energy needs. In it, he tells the story of why uranium was originally chosen over thorium and how both China and India are already leading the way in this new technology. (Click here to listen to the audio interview)
Jim Puplava: Joining me on the program is Kirk Sorensen. He is the founder of Flibe energy. He also started a blog, “energyfromthorium.com.” He's a former NASA engineer. He was also the chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering. Kirk, I want to talk about something that I think a lot of us following the energy world believe: that we’re on the edge of an energy crisis. Whether you want to talk about it from a climate change point of view, a peak oil point of view, or if you want to talk about it from conflicts going on in the Middle East that control our energy supply. But we’re on the edge of a crisis and we’re coming to, I believe, a limit in terms of how we power our society. Let’s talk about that for a minute.
Kirk Sorensen: (0:52) Jim, I feel the same way. We definitely are at the crisis point in our energy supply and the fossil fuels that we’ve relied on for so long. The amount of those that are remaining is always a question and you get a wide variety of answers, but certainly the conflict that we find ourselves bound up within in the pursuit of those fuels is certainly enough reason for us to question whether or not that’s a prudent way to go forward. And the excitement that we feel at Flibe Energy is by exploiting the energy of thorium, we have the potential to tap an energy source a million times more energy dense than the fossil fuels.
Jim: (1:33) Kirk, correct me if I’m wrong, but around 1939 we discovered some new elements that created power. And these two elements, one of them was uranium 238 and the other was thorium. But given the fact that we were at war during that period time, we went with uranium as a source of power because we could also make weapons, and of course we had the cold war. Talk about that discovery and some of the driving factors that change sort of the, we were at the beginning of a new the technology and we took the left road instead of the right road, but we went with uranium and what are the consequences.
Kirk: (2:14) Yeah, I’d be happy to talk about that, and forgive me for maybe getting into a little bit of history, I love history, but it helps to understand why these things happened. You know, thorium and uranium were both discovered as elements in the late 1800s. And nobody really thought there was anything special out them until Marie Curie discovered that they were radioactive. And again, nobody understood what that meant. But in 1939, as you mentioned, the process of nuclear fission was first discovered by a chemist named Otto Hahn in Germany. And it was a totally new idea that you could actually split an atom release all this energy. And because this was discovered right at the beginning of World War II the obvious question was, can we use this to make an explosive? And that was the origin of the Manhattan project. They looked at uranium and uranium has two isotopes. One of which is uranium 235 and that is naturally fissile, you don’t have to do anything to it to make it fission. So that was the beginning of one kind of effort in the Manhattan project to manufacture a weapon. And then uranium 238, which was much more common, they found that they could bombarded it with neutrons and create a new element, plutonium, that was also fissile, and you could potentially use it for a nuclear explosive. So that was another line that was taken. And then they looked to thorium and said well could we try the same technique with thorium, and found that, yes, you could bombard thorium with a neutron and create uranium 233 and it was also fissile and could potentially form explosives. But there were certain severe drawbacks in the practicality of trying to use uranium 233 as a weapon. And so the attention focused overwhelmingly on separating the uranium isotopes and on converting some of that uranium into plutonium. Those were two directions that were taken during the Manhattan Project. And they resulted in the Hiroshima bomb, which was a uranium 235 bomb and the Nagasaki bomb, which was a plutonium bomb. After the war was over, the overwhelming concern of the US Atomic Energy Commission was to replenish our stockpile of nuclear weapons, which after Nagasaki, was depleted. We didn't have any more weapons, and that was one of the biggest security secrets in the United States at that time. We had to replenish that supply and so all the effort was put into creating materials intended for weapons. And because uranium and plutonium had shown themselves to be more amenable to that type of work than thorium, the work on thorium was neglected. It was only as we moved into the ‘50s that the idea of making electrical power from nuclear energy began to take prominence, and so because the uranium plutonium technologies were more understood, and considered a safer bet, that was where the bulk of the effort in the earlier atomic power program went, was to uranium and plutonium. Although at that time there was a small and beginning effort to investigate thorium, which as in turns out, has some very superior properties when your goal is to make nuclear power rather than to make nuclear weapons.
Jim: (5:23) You know, unfortunately Kirk, we still live on a planet where, if you look around us today, our industrial society is still powered mainly by fossil fuels. But even more troubling, you have a situation, when you mention nuclear power, you know, people would think of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and now they think of Fukushima. And they're not aware of the other things that are going on. For example, thorium. How many people really know that we could do this, make nuclear power more efficient, get rid of the waste problems, get rid of some of these things about meltdowns, weapons, all the stuff that everybody's afraid of today?
Kirk: (6:02) It is so funny that you ask that question Jim, because as I have told this story to many people, I’ve had a lot of different responses. But one of the most powerful examples of that just has happened last night. I was speaking with a retired gentleman who lives in Australia, over Skype like this, and he talked about how he worked in the United Kingdom back in the ‘70s on their most important nuclear power program. And he told me that he had had absolutely no exposure during that program to learning about the thorium technologies or about liquid fluoride thorium reactor. And he only discovered it last year after he retired and he began, as he said, snooping around on the Internet trying to find out what was going on with nuclear. And I realized that the overwhelming majority of people in the world don't know at all about the potential that thorium offers. And even more surprising, the overwhelming majority of trained nuclear engineers do not know anything about this. It’s not taught in school or in the classroom. The potential of thorium is incredibly under appreciated. And as you pointed out in the beginning with your question, in today's world that is still overwhelmingly powered by fossil fuels, how can we continue to let an oversight like that go by. We need to train our attention on this possibility and and really find out if it has a reality.
Jim: (7:21) You know, when you talk about nuclear power, there is an anti-nuclear element in this country and I am always amazed at this because we've been running aircraft carriers and nuclear powered submarines for half a century. And I don’t recall the Navy ever telling us about sailors, sailors dying. But if you take a lot of the anti-nuclear sentiment in this country, it centers around a couple things. Nuclear waste, you've got stuff that's good take a gazillion years to erode in terms of its radioactivity. It cost a heck of a lot of money to build a nuclear power plant, not to mention it'll take what, at least in this country, 7 to 10 years. And not to mention given our tax laws, you've got a very powerful energy lobby coming from the fossil fuel sector.
