World's First Fast Spectrum Molten Salt Nuclear Reactor To Be Built at Idaho National Laboratory.

[NNadir]

3. I changed my mind about FLIBE; I see it as a poor choice for a number of reasons.

It's very popular of course, but it is also a thermal spectrum reactor.

Alvin Weinberg was a great and creative man, and the MSRE was innovative in many ways. But these days there are better ideas. I know Kirk Sorensen, although we haven't communicated for a number of years; he's a great guy and he's served the nuclear community well by popularizing the idea of MSRs when they were almost forgotten.

I just loaned my son my copy of Weinberg's The first nuclear era: The life and times of a technological fixer. It's fascinating about how open they were to new ideas then; inspiring, something we need to bring back to the US.

But FLIBE is so 1960's.

People forget that thorium may be more available in terrestrial ores, it is not available indefinitely. Uranium is, since a uranium cycle exists in seawater.

The thorium cycle in my view is not superior to the uranium plutonium cycle. I have nothing against thorium, and mined thorium is readily available from lanthanide ores that have been mined to make magnets for wind turbines and electric cars, but I can easily imagine it being unavailable in a few thousand years.

This said, I am advising my son to take a serious look at other 1960's technologies with a fresh eye. But I'm a plutonium/transuranium kind of guy.