Could Thorium Become Energy’s “Silver Bullet”?

Could Thorium Become Energy’s “Silver Bullet”?

I took my weimaraner for an extended walk this morning (Banjo was kind enough to oblige) so that I could take in a full segment from Jim Puplava’s weekly Financial Sense Newshour.

This week, Jim talks with energy expert and entrepreneur Kirk Sorensen, who makes the case for little-known element thorium as the potential “silver bullet” to our energy problems.  Sorensen is so bullish on thorium’s potential that he recently launched a company dedicated to building a prototype Thorium reactor.

You can listen to Puplava’s thorium-focused interview with Sorensen here.

My (very) abridged notes:

  • Fossil fuels have been so abundant, and so cheap, that they’ve set a very low bar (in the limbo/cost sense of the term) – one that Sorensen doesn’t see wind or solar being able to squeeze under (he doesn’t think you can do it cheaper than fossil fuels)
  • Uranium can provide some energy scale, but also comes with its own set of headaches
  • Thorium was discovered around the same time as uranium – the US made a political decision during World War II to pursue uranium research – as they’d also be able to build a bomb out of it
  • As a result, uranium got the attention, and thorium faded into “Bolivia” (to paraphrase Mike Tyson)
  • Sorensen started studying thorium in 2000, and became so excited about its potential that he has started the blog Energy from Thorium, and more recently, founded Flibe Energy, a company “devoted to the design, development, manufacture and operation of liquid-fluoride thorium reactors”

Further related reading:

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