So it appears as though Minister Norbert Rottgen has today announced that Germany pledges to end all nuclear power by 2022, because of everyone’s favorite nuclear reactor plant Fukushima. “The seven oldest reactors that have been placed under a moratorium and the Kruemmel nuclear power plant won’t go back online,” Roettgen said early today after the meeting at the Chancellery. “A second group of six nuclear power plants will go offline at the end of 2021 at the latest and the three most modern power plants will go offline 2022 at the latest.” It seems that they are going to try and replace the energy they would normally be getting from reactors with solar and wind power.

Now I would like to say that I have no idea if any of this is true or not, but a while back on Gizmodo I found a commenter by the name of Dream The Endless that was talking about how much better thorium nuclear reactors would be. He asked the Giz staff to post an article on the subject and wanted to know if he wrote one, would the publish it. I asked him if I could publish it on my site. I got no answer. I take that as a yes! But I thought it was so good I bookmarked it and saved it in case I might want to post it, so all credit to him for the following article.

Thorium power generation in a molten salt reactor is safe

Thorium is abundant (estimates are that is ten times more abundant than uranium)
Thorium molten salt reactors can not blow up; there is no steam chamber at 2500 PSI like in a uranium reactor
Thorium reactors can be used to reprocess leftover uranium and plutonium into something that will lose radioactivity in – let’s say – 10 years – instead of thousands of years…

The guy who came up with the design (in the fifties) of the uranium reactors that we are basically still using today designed it for submarines. Then they took his plans and decided to scale them up and do power generation for homes. He insisted that it wouldn’t be a safe design used for that purpose and he invented the molten salt thorium reactor instead. He was eventually fired after insisting that you could have catastrophic failures if something went wrong at a uranium plant they way they were doing it.

They were actually running a small scale molten salt thorium reactor in the US for decades to prove that it could be done. It was so safe that the techs working on it would just shut it down every Friday so that they didn’t have to work the weekend.

The reactor fuel is thorium dissolved in sodium-fluoride salt. It’s (intentionally) not quite “hot” enough to sustain a chain reaction, so they surround the reactor with a blanket of uranium. The reaction can only occur if the thorium is in the reactor surrounded by the uranium. In the case of an emergency, all you have to do is drain the molten salt out of the reactor into an underground holding tank – it cools and becomes solid. There’s even a simple method to automate this simple emergency procedure:
* have a metal pipe coming from the reactor to the holding tank
* have an electric fan blowing on the outside of the pipe
* The electric fan cools off the metal pipe and causes the molten sodium fluoride salt inside to harden into a plug of solid salt.
* If you turn off the power switch to that fan or if some outside calamity causes it to lose power – it stops cooling the pipe; the salt plug inside the pipe melts; all of the reactor fuel safely drains out of the reactor and into the holding tank.

This safety procedure worked so well that this is the method the techs used every Friday so that they didn’t have to work over the weekend; they simply shut off that fan. Then, on Monday, they’d switch on the heater to warm up the holding tank and pump the molten salt back into the reactor.

You could not possibly have a reactor meltdown.

Watch for more info: [www.youtube.com]