Robert Hargraves opens his 2009 class online at Dartmouth
Last year, Robert Hargraves offered his now acclaimed online class on nuclear energy over the Internet. This year he’s added new content and launched a new program called “Aim High” to accompany the class.
He’s developed material on a little known nuclear reactor concept – the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR). It is also sometimes called the “molten salt reactor” (large image).
Readers of this blog will recall that Hargraves published the well-designed and accessible blog on the Pebble Bed reactor designs for several years until he began teaching the “Rethinking nuclear power” class. He is now updating the blog with LFTR materials.
You can download the 2009 class slides in Powerpoint or PDF format and the audio portion of the class. Some of these files are quite large so get a fast connection or bring your lunch.
Not everyone is sold on LFTR but it is interesting
The commercial nuclear industry has considerable skepticism about the LFTR, but Hargraves has a vision for its future which is undeterred by such doubts.
While this blog will continue to focus on the commercial nuclear industry, it won’t ignore new technologies and ideas even if they are outside of mainstream industry market focus.
I will leave it to readers to make up their minds about the LFTR. Hargraves’ material can speak for itself. Here are the links
- Rethinking Nuclear Power 2009 – Energy policy and environmental choices, a Dartmouth ILEAD course with class materials online
- Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor – In this presentation, Hargraves claims it produces energy cheaper than from coal and can solve more crises than just global warming
- Air High – Hargraves’ book on the LFTR available on Amazon
Kirk Sorensen’s blog Energy from Thorium is an excellent resource on this technology. Charles Barton also writes about the LFTR at NuclearGreen. See Barton's comment below which clarifies some of the history of the technology.
Check it out.
# # #
3 comments:
Dan, There is an open discussion of the problems and challenges which the commercial development of the LFTR will face. There are design options, many of them quite simple that are expected to overcome the problems. The technology was advancing toward commercialization at ORNL when Nixon Era politics shut MSR research down. Considering the promising nature of MSR technology, and the relatively advanced state of research, it is in the interst of everyone for research to be restarted and the LFTR be given achance to succeed.
That technically the LFTR is very close to the ideal fission reactor is well established. The biggest issue it will face is getting approval from the various national nuclear/atomic regulators.
I cannot single out any country here, as world-wide they seem bent on hobbling the growth of nuclear energy as if this were the mandate given them by their political masters. Overhaul and rationalization of the regulatory process in general and the approval process in particular are long overdue and necessary before nuclear energy can move forward.
DV8 2XL - since money is a big driver in political decision making and since the established energy industry is a hugely wealthy enterprise, I have little doubt that the political masters of the regulatory bodies have a goal of hobbling atomic fission power plants. If nothing else, they want to restrain them to the point at which they are merely "competitive" with fossil fuels and existing nuclear plants rather than "dominant" to the point where they encourage people to abandon their addictions.
Post a Comment