I've heard mention of new sorts of nuclear reactors which will be so much better and save the world, but always been rather skeptical about such claims. We all know nuclear reactors are scary, dangerous things.
But last night I watched this video:
http://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=P9M__yYbsZ4which gives you a quick overview of the 'Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor' tech in 5 minutes, then goes into quite a lot of detail over nearly 2 hours, with a generally very balanced presentation that many here will appreciate, answering most of the obvious questions you'd ask about this technology and its relation to other low-carbon technologies.
I'd highly recommend it, at least the 5-minute version so you know what it's about, and I found myself unable to go to bed until I'd watched the whole 2hr thing - it really is interesting and well-done. I now have lot of respect for the main speaker Kirk Sorenson, who originally learned about this tech from his work at NASA on how to make totally self-contained facilities (i.e. a moon base) and decided it is so important, but so little known-about that someone neeed to stand up and get the word out.
The main advantage is that it's all low-pressure operation so you get away from the huge expensive pressure-vessel and all the backup systems that you need to be sure you can cool it, and the bad things that happen if any of that goes wrong. It's almost trivial to make the thing self-extinguishing if the power goes off. And it uses a very plentiful fuel, with efficiency 10s of times higher than solid-fuel reactor, as well as being able to burn up all that problematic nuclear waste we don't know what to do with. And it doesn't make nuclear-weapon materials, but can make useful medical and satellite materials.
It really does have a lot going for it as a concept if you can get past the whole 'No, nuclear is just bad and dangerous' way of thinking we've all got rather used to. There are many ways of doing nuclear reactions, and they have _hugely_ different characteristics. LFTR is _completely_ different from PWR/AGR/CANDU etc, so assessing it on what you know of existing AGR and PWR reactors is not sensible.
After watching it I'd be surprised if you didn't think that at the very least someone ought to build a pilot plant to see how it goes. Even those of you are very anti-nuclear should at least take a look to understand the differences. I don't expect you to suddenly become huge fans, but I hope you'd understand that it is a very interesting technology.
There are a few minor critisisms of the video I could make, and of course the fellow has a bias, but it's very clear that he is thoughtful and sensible and accepts the disadvantages too. Perhaps the biggest problem with this tech is that if it works as well as suggested and is widely implemented (the Chinese have a program to build a reactor underway), we could be back in the age of cheap energy for the forseeable future, and that presents other problems with our general limits to growth, which don't go away just because we have plenty of energy...
If you prefer reading to watching video, then the info comes from here:
http://energyfromthorium.com/
