integral fast reactor (ifr)

Photo by Pete Souza/The White House.

When it comes to nuclear energy, Dr. Burton Richter is Mr. Credible. Winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for discovering a new sub-atomic particle, Richter has advised presidents and policymakers for almost 40 years. We interviewed Richter recently to get his opinion on next generation nuclear reactors, and why so many of them are being developed abroad and not by the Department of Energy in the United States.[read more]

I’m currently in Dubai at the 2012 World Energy Forum, as part of a delegation from the Science Council for Global Initiatives. Tomorrow (24 Oct) we will run symposium on “New Nuclear”, which will be chaired by Tom Blees and feature talks from Dr Eric Loewen (GE), Dr Alexander Bychkov (IAEA), Dr Evgeny Velikhov (Kurchatov Institute) and...[read more]

Guest Post by Tom Blees. Tom Blees is the author of Prescription for the Planet – The Painless Remedy for Our Energy & Environmental Crises. Tom is also the president of the Science Council for Global Initiatives and a board member of the UN-affiliated World Energy Forum [wef21.org]. Many of the goals of SCGI, and the methods to...[read more]

Adam Curry interviewed Curt Stager, the author of Deep Future: The Next 100 Years of Life on Earth for his Big Book Show. During the interview, Curry and Stager spent several minutes discussing the potential for “green nukes” to be an important climate change mitigation tool.Aside: Adam Curry interviewed me four years ago about Adams...[read more]

I intend to offer a series of posts designed to explain the sometimes bewildering complexity of Molten Salt Reactor Technology. This first post explains two nuclear fuel breeding cycles.Rather than offering a single potential reactor design, the Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) idea offers a large number of design options, each of which would...[read more]

A fair amount of material has now available regarding nuclear energy and the possible ‘proliferation’ implications of commercial nuclear power. Yet despite having abundant factual information on proliferation risks and realities available to them, anti-nuclear ‘activists’ continue to badly misunderstand or deliberately misrepresent...[read more]

The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR), developed at U.S. national laboratories in the latter years of the last century, can economically and cleanly supply all the energy the world needs without any further mining or enrichment of uranium. Instead of utilizing a mere 0.6% of the potential energy in uranium, IFRs capture all of it. Capable of utilizing troublesome waste products already at hand, IFRs can solve the thorny spent fuel problem while powering the planet with carbon-free energy for nearly a millennium before any more uranium mining would even have to be considered.[read more]