Energy from Thorium

What is the potential for the use of thorium as an energy resource? Jan and Kelly De La Torre travel to Huntsville Alabama to find out directly from Flibe Energy. Liquid fluoride thorium reactors or LFTR (pronounced "lifter"), have the potential to revolutionize the energy industry by providing clean, reliable, and continuous power generation while using a fuel that we have in abundance. In our interview with Flibe, we discuss how it works, the state of the technology, what needs to happen to integrate LFTR into America's energy generation portfolio and more specifically, what that might look like.

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Driving Force Radio: Energy from Thorium Our guests are Flibe Energy co-founder Kirk Sorensen, and UK thorium advocate Baroness Worthington.
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Filbe Energy Flibe Energy is an engineering and design company dedicated to developing, building, and operating liquid-fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs) to provide safe and abundant energy from natural thorium.

Guest(s) Appearing on this Episode

Kirk Sorenson Kirk Sorensen is a founder of Flibe Energy and currently serves as President and Chief Technical Officer. Kirk has been a public advocate for thorium energy and liquid-fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) technology for many years. He founded the weblog “Energy From Thorium” which has been the platform for the international grassroots effort to revive research and development of fluoride-based reactors. Prior to founding Flibe Energy, he served as Chief Nuclear Technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering and with their support has pushed advance consideration of thorium. Previous to that, Kirk worked for ten years at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center spending the last two of those years on assignment to the US Army Space and Missile Defense Command. Kirk has briefed many senior military and civilian decision makers on LFTR technology and its compelling advantages, including its potential use in portable modular reactors for the US military. Kirk graduated with a Masters of Science in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology where his research specialties included hypersonic aerothermodynamics and multidisciplinary design optimization. He also graduated with a Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Utah State University and is currently completing an advanced degree in Nuclear Engineering at the University of Tennessee under Dr. Laurence Miller. Kirk has been a prominent advocate for thorium energy with regular speaking engagements and media interviews including Google Tech Talks, Thorium Energy Alliance conferences and the recent International Thorium Energy Organization conference in London, England. Flibe Energy

Baroness Bryony Katherine Worthington She was born and grew up in Wales, and graduated in English literature at Queens' College, Cambridge, before joining Operation Raleigh as a fundraiser. In the mid 1990s, she worked for an environmental charity, and by 2000 had moved to work for Friends of the Earth as a climate change campaigner. She then worked for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, implementing public awareness campaigns and helping draft the Climate Change Bill, before becoming head of government relations for the energy company, Scottish and Southern Energy. She left to form Sandbag in 2008. She was raised to the peerage as Baroness Worthington, of Cambridge in the County of Cambridgeshire, in 2011, and sits on the Labour benches. The Baroness was once "passionately opposed to nuclear power," but came to advocate the adoption of Thorium as a nuclear fuel following the 2009 Manchester Report, an event on climate change mitigation held by The Guardian. Worthington hosted and served as a judging panel member for the Manchester Report; there she met Kirk Sorensen who presented arguments for using Thorium.Sorensen intends to develop a liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) based on the 1965-1969 Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment.