Monthly Archives: August 2010
Alvin Weinberg
Forgotten or unknown to the masses Alvin Weinberg designed the Light Water Reactor (the 104 Nuclear reactors across the US) and was one of the first to warn about Climate Change. So when things get worse there will be a push for new Nuclear Reactor designs and the reactor design that Weinberg and his team created at ORNL who had assistance from Eugene Wigner among others, and was his first choice till his death in 2003, was the Molten Salt Reactor . The “Thorium Molten Salt Reactor” is technically a French naming labeled as such in the 1990’s but the first experiment that was run successfully 30 years earlier, for over 10 years, was the “Molten Salt Reactor Experiment” (MSRE) which also used Thorium. The latest molten salt reactor design is largely based on Weinberg’s design and that is the “Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor” (LFTR) coined by Kirk Sorensen. Read more about LFTR here.
Also read Charles Barton’s
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2010/08/weinberg-on-nuclear-safety.html
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2010/08/faustian-bargains-weinberg-or-lovins.html
Kirk of Energy From Thorium quoted in UK's Telegram
Bravo Kirk Sorensen for being quoted in the UK’s Telegraph in the Article titled
Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Published: 6:55PM BST 29 Aug 2010Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal – named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor’s day or Thursday – produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.
Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. “It’s the Big One,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering.
“Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels,” he said.
Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium.
After the Manhattan Project, US physicists in the late 1940s were tempted by thorium for use in civil reactors. It has a higher neutron yield per neutron absorbed. It does not require isotope separation, a big cost saving. But by then America needed the plutonium residue from uranium to build bombs.
Kirk of Energy From Thorium quoted in UK’s Telegram
Bravo Kirk Sorensen for being quoted in the UK’s Telegraph in the Article titled
Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Published: 6:55PM BST 29 Aug 2010Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal – named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor’s day or Thursday – produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.
Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. “It’s the Big One,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering.
“Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels,” he said.
Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium.
After the Manhattan Project, US physicists in the late 1940s were tempted by thorium for use in civil reactors. It has a higher neutron yield per neutron absorbed. It does not require isotope separation, a big cost saving. But by then America needed the plutonium residue from uranium to build bombs.
Could a lot of the GHG believers be wrong about Global Warming?
Is Global Warming caused by Carbon Dioxide increasing?
I didn’t ask is technology causing global warming . That’s a more complex question.
This Video called “The Great Global Warming Swindle” gives some credible arguments suggesting that sun spots and cosmic rays both caused by the sun have a far greater affect on the earths temperature.
There is a good page at BraveNewClimate.com that debunks some of this
The biggest surprise to me was that CO2 makes up less than 1 percent of the earths atmosphere.
I’d like to know how the sun’s activity is measured because they have data going back hundreds of years.
So one fair conclusion to draw is that many people take for gospel that Global warming is caused by CO2 and one might ask “What good does it do to prove that is false?” Not a lot really. But it’s nice to know the truth. It’s also possible that if I was more vocal about this that I’d be helping the anti-nukers to delay the growth of Nuclear Energy.
Some points made in the video as fact
1. That CO2 is only about .54 % of the atmosphere (it’s more like .038 %)
2. That Margaret Thatcher offered scientists money to prove that CO2 was causing Global warming.
3. At a relatively low period of industrialization in the first few decades of the 1900’s we had a far greater increase in CO2
4. There is evidence that CO2 increase is caused by Global warming and that there is a time lag and that Al Gore’s theory did not dig deep enough to see the patterns. (Gore did get some of it wrong but what’s important is his call to action – after all CO2 is an enabler for temperature change so what came first before humans were causing it is not so relevant)
Questions unanswered and a couple of strange and unlikely facts. The ocean has a memory and temperatures are very slow to respond to influences as much as 300 years.
Also what about Ozone and if we’re not worried about CO2 then is there something we should be worried about?
If you knew nuclear like I know nuclear.
Here’s another one I wrote Last Year
For some people nuclear anything leads to nuclear danger. We are learning that some great benefits have been discovered from the knowledge of elements that are radioactive and the promises can’t be ignored. Is there any sense to equating nuclear energy research and development with nuclear bombs.
What does make sense is to have the awareness of what is good for the current state of proliferation and what is not.
R&D into nuclear energy has been held in limbo by the constant need for the government to reassure the protesters and general public fears that it has their best interests at heart.
As tempting as it is to blame some American presidents for the current state of affairs it really solves very little to finger point. The best any of us can do to allow a positive outcome is to educate our selves about what is good and what is bad about nuclear development.
Some have argued that reducing the number of nuclear weapons will help reduce risk which sounds logical. What steps would be required for such a strategy? Unfortunately the presence of nuclear material from dismanteled nuclear weapons and so-called “nuclear waste” from both the preparation for weapons material and the bi-products of creating nuclear power is an important reality to understand and solve. These substances will not vanish quickly without new technology and as long as they remain they are a potential threat by there very existence.
This is where the resurrection of the Molten Salt Reactor comes into play.
The radioactive material from dismantled bombs and the radio active material from the nuclear waste from power plants can be eliminated through the use of this technology. The success rate of the Molten Salt Reactor is a rare story indeed. It’s brief period of experimentation proved to be a major accomplishment. Because of the relative complexity of the science and that this provides the perfect cloak to hide behind. Molten Salt Reactors were banished like heretics from christianity.
Decline or Prosper? Renewables or Nuclear?
This is one of several articles by Jay Lehr on the Environment and Climate News for Heartland.org
Published In: Environment & Climate News > August 2010Publication date: 07/13/2010Publisher: The Heartland InstituteThe United States is clearly falling behind many countries in our nuclear world, but all is not lost. We still know how to operate reactors better than anyone else. Our fleet of 104 plants is operational 90 percent of the time. No other nation even comes close. France, for all its experience, is still at 80 percent. Other countries are even lower.Reasons for Concern
We still understand the technology better than anyone else in the world, but our national and state governments have placed so many obstacles in the development path we aren’t allowed to build reactors anymore. That is a serious problem.There are several reasons for concern. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), one of the Senate’s most ardent supporters of nuclear energy, reports there are three significant areas we must address:Nuclear Power for Vehicles
First, there’s energy importation. The United States already spends $300 billion per year importing two-thirds of our oil from other countries. If we continue to refrain from building new nuclear power plants, or start depending on other countries to build our reactors and supply us with fuel, we’re going to be importing even more of our energy than we do now.The best way to reduce oil imports, aside from ramping up domestic production, will be to use electricity to power cars and trucks. At first we can plug our electric vehicles in at night, when there is much unused electricity. After that, we should ramp up our nuclear production to meet the increased demand. “We can’t have Americans going to bed every night hoping the wind will blow so they can start their cars in the morning,” Alexander notes.Innovation, Weapons Proliferation
Second, there’s technological leadership. The United States produces 25 percent of all the wealth in the world. Most of that has been driven by new technologies. We were the birthplace of the telephone, the electric light, the automobile, the assembly line, radio, television, and the computer. But nuclear energy—perhaps the greatest scientific advance of the 20th century—is passing us by.The 21st century is going to run on clean, cheap, greenhouse-gas-free nuclear power. How can we criticize India and China for not reducing their carbon emissions when we refuse to adopt the best technology ourselves?Third, there’s weapons proliferation. In the 1970s we gave up on nuclear reprocessing in the hope that by not dealing with plutonium we would prevent nuclear weapons from spreading around the world. That has turned out to be an unwise decision. France, Britain, Russia, Canada, and Japan went right on reprocessing, and no one has stolen plutonium from them.Instead, rogue nations such as North Korea and Pakistan have found their own ways to develop nuclear weapons. The technology of bomb-making is no big secret anymore.By reneging on world leadership in nuclear technology we have left the field to others. Right now the Russians are building a commercial reactor for U.S.-hating Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. In addition, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal that his office has uncovered evidence Iran may be providing Venezuela with missile technology.Relying on Foreign Energy
The U.S. penchant for government impeding nuclear power risks making the nation unnecessarily dependent on foreign energy.If we move toward a nuclear-based economy and have to import 70 percent of the technology and equipment, how are any better off than when we’re importing two-thirds of our oil? We’ll just be creating jobs for steelworkers in Japan and China instead of in the United States.Also, if we don’t move toward a nuclear-powered economy but instead try to reduce power plant emissions through hopeless alternatives such as wind power, solar power, and conservation, we’ll be sending American jobs overseas as companies emigrate in search of cheaper energy.Nuclear Renaissance Possible
To ensure we have enough cheap, clean, reliable electricity in this country to create high-quality, high-tech jobs, Alexander favors having the United States double its production of nuclear power by building 100 nuclear reactors in 20 years. This nuclear strategy makes far better sense than the aforementioned hopeless alternatives, for several reasons.First, nuclear power currently provides 70 percent of our carbon-free electricity, while wind and solar provide 4 percent.Second, nuclear plants operate 90 percent of the time, while wind and solar operate about one third of the time.Third, even the Obama administration’s Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, says nuclear plants are safe and that used nuclear fuel can be safely stored on site for 40-60 years while we figure out the best way to recycle it.Fourth, millions of windmills and hundreds of thousands of square miles of land would be required to make a serious dent in our energy requirements with wind power. Producing 20 percent of our electricity from wind, as the Obama administration proposes, is a joke. As an alternative, 100 new nuclear plants could be built mostly on existing sites, preserving open spaces for nature and wildlife.Activists Preying on Fears
Opponents of nuclear power continue to prey on mythical fears of disaster. But if we want safe, reliable, cost-effective, no-carbon electricity, we can no longer ignore the wisdom of the rest of the world.The real cause for fear is this: We could wake up one cloudy, windless day when the light switch doesn’t work and discover we’ve forfeited our capacity to lead the world because we avoided using nuclear power, a problem-solving technology we invented.Jay Lehr, Ph.D.
Interview with Art Crino of Oregon (the state of Nuclear Energy in US)
This interview is an excerpt from an article written by Rebecca Terrell of the New American June 8,2010
TNA: If nuclear is the best solution, why is it not pursued in the United States? Aren’t other countries using it to their own advantage?
Crino: Nuclear technology was developed in the United States, but after many decades it only provides 20 percent of U.S. electricity, while coal provides nearly 50 percent. The nuclear number would be much larger except for the hysteria over Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.There are 104 operating commercial nuclear reactors in the United States, producing electricity 90 percent of the time. There are more than 440 commercial reactor plants, spread out over 31 countries, that supply 16 percent of the world’s electricity. France generates approximately 80 percent of its electricity by nuclear.
In 2006, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was hailed as the “Green Chancellor” for promising to rid her country of coal and nuclear power. Now she is actively supporting construction of 26 new coal-fired plants, as well as keeping nuclear plants operating. Italy has reversed its decade-long “no nuclear power” policy.
Worldwide there are 47 nuclear plants under construction plus 133 more planned for the next decade, for a total of 180. China has 14 reactors in process and has plans for 86 by 2020. Though nuclear generation of electricity was developed in the United States, plans are more modest.
TNA: Why the difference?
Crino: One explanation could be that most leaders in China are scientists, whereas the United States is led by lawyers. It’s all political. You hear, “If you elect me, I’m going to see to it we have more jobs.” If we let the rest of the world embrace nuclear power, the United States is going to be handicapped. How are you going to create new jobs when you’re letting other countries outstrip you in power generation? Electricity is crucial for advancing civilization. The Energy Information Agency projects that by 2030 the U.S. electrical demands will increase by approximately 45 percent.
TNA: Let’s talk about objections to nuclear. There are those who point out the history of cost overruns in construction of nuclear power plants. What do you say to that?
Crino: When the industry was new, cost overruns were common because there was no such thing as a standard reactor. Now reactors and reactor sites are pre-approved, which makes cost overruns a thing of the past. A selected location is approved with an Early Site Permit (ESP) from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and then the utility ordering the reactor selects a pre-certified design. The only thing left is the Combined Construction and Operating License, known as the COL. It’s true all this bureaucratic red tape makes the process take longer here than in China or Japan, where construction is usually completed in fewer than five years. But it is a more efficient process than the past. Finance charges should also be reasonable under this NRC pre-approval program.
TNA: What about environmentalist lawsuits?
Crino: Well, we’re going to have those, but the approval process makes those more spurious.TNA: There’s also the “NIMBY Syndrome” (Not-In-My-Backyard). Could that stand in the way?
Crino: During the site approval process, delays by public action do not become very costly because the reactor can be ordered after site approval. The enviable performance record, low operating costs of the existing reactors, and recognition of the carbon-free character have had a positive public impact for nuclear. Remember, we already have 104 reactors running in this country with no fatalities and no injuries over many thousands of reactor-years.The ironic thing is a coal plant can’t possibly meet the requirements for radiation of a nuclear plant because they’re much bigger emitters. The heavy metals of poisonous by-products don’t have a half-life, so they’ll stay around forever. But I don’t like to harp on that point because radioactive emissions from either coal or nuclear plants are nothing to worry about. People only worry because of lies from the environmentalist movement.
TNA: What about spent-fuel -problems?
Crino: This objection is entirely political. Russia, France, Japan, India, and Great Britain have been reprocessing their fuel since the late 1960s. There is a great economic incentive because there is more usable energy in the spent fuel than consumed while in service. Reprocessing depends on the availability of new uranium sources. For example, Canada does not reprocess because they have an abundant supply. But reprocessing reduces the volume of waste by about 80 percent.Our politicians ignore this fact. In 1972, escalating regulations shut down the West Valley, New York, reprocessing center. President Jimmy Carter dismantled the center in Barnwell, South Carolina, in 1977. President George W. Bush later authorized another center in the same state, but President Obama closed it on June 9, 2009.
TNA: Others say there is not enough available nuclear fuel.
Crino: Current reserves are sufficient for 90 years, but this number is expected to increase for quite a few reasons. Reactor designs continually demonstrate improved efficiency. All light-water reactors now have uranium enrichment in the 3 to 4.5 percent range and are non-explosive, as weapons-grade uranium must be enriched to at least 90 percent U235.France has developed a process to dilute the 90+ percent uranium bombs from Russia with uranium tailings to form 3-percent fuel for reactors — also non-explosive. Half of the fuel used in the U.S. nuclear stations is from France. The Russians have copied the process for their electric generating stations.
Ultimately breeder reactors could be employed with numerous economic advantages. The most important advantage is they multiply the existing fuel supply by a factor of at least 50 to 75 times. Few people realize that 25 to 40 percent of our power from nuclear plants comes from plutonium that is formed in the reactor during operation — and is completely free!
TNA: How do you overcome all the negative publicity so the public will embrace nuclear?
Crino: I just talk about economics now, because everybody believes the lies Al Gore has told about science. (Actually, Gore tends to ignore nuclear power instead of fighting it, which is a compliment to nuclear power.)Let me tell you about some success we’ve enjoyed recently with the Oregon state legislature. The 2009 Oregon legislature introduced Senate Bill 80 with great fanfare. It was Oregon’s version of “cap and trade” and was to be Oregon Governor Kulongoski’s legacy as he approached the end of his second and final term. I met with SB 80 joint committee members to warn them of the economic effects of reducing energy use and carbon dioxide emissions. They each got a copy of the 2008 Cascade Policy Institute paper Oregon Greenhouse Gas Reduction Policies: The Economic and Fiscal Impact Challenges. I emphasized three points during our meeting. First, a one-percent increase in energy use is associated with a one-percent increase in national income. Second, a one-percent increase in CO2 emissions is associated with a 0.71-percent increase in national income. Lastly, since SB 80 called for a 10-percent reduction in CO2 emissions below 1990 levels by 2020, passing the bill would mean an approximate 11-percent decrease in income for the state. That was the end of SB 80! I think we can have the same type of success educating legislators about the advantages of nuclear power.
TNA: What’s a realistic expectation for sources of power generation in the near future?
Crino: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has received applications for up to 28 new reactors at 18 locations. But the primary sources of U.S. electrical energy in the near future will likely be gas-fired turbines, large nuclear plants, and large coal plants.Meanwhile, the government will continue to waste taxpayers’ money on wind, solar, and other so-called renewables. Various states have enacted “renewable portfolio standards” (RPS), setting up quotas of renewable energy that utilities have to include among their sources of power generation. If renewables were so great, utilities would adopt them voluntarily to help lower their costs. RPSs are sure to keep energy prices inflated and production inefficient.
"Letter to the Legislator" explains how Nuclear has devious competitors.
Nancy J. Thorner is a blogger and posted this recently
Dear Legislator:
Recently a number of articles have been published indicating how the U.S. is sitting on the sidelines of a Global Nuclear Renaissance. One of the biggest reasons the U.S. may be sitting on the nuclear sidelines may be because Exelon, PSE&G and other power companies discourage any other nuclear providers from coming in to their markets to inject more cheap, clean nuclear power supply, which would drive down the market clearing price for power from their existing nukes.
The same is true with incumbent big coal-fired plants. Keeping cheaper, cleaner power out of the market is their mantra, so they can keep the prices for their own existing generation high. Instead the companies favor the development of all sorts of subsidized, very expensive green power such as solar and wind by others, which doesn’t drive the market clearing price down and occupies the “greenies” and the government… more
“Letter to the Legislator” explains how Nuclear has devious competitors.
Nancy J. Thorner is a blogger and posted this recently
Dear Legislator:
Recently a number of articles have been published indicating how the U.S. is sitting on the sidelines of a Global Nuclear Renaissance. One of the biggest reasons the U.S. may be sitting on the nuclear sidelines may be because Exelon, PSE&G and other power companies discourage any other nuclear providers from coming in to their markets to inject more cheap, clean nuclear power supply, which would drive down the market clearing price for power from their existing nukes.
The same is true with incumbent big coal-fired plants. Keeping cheaper, cleaner power out of the market is their mantra, so they can keep the prices for their own existing generation high. Instead the companies favor the development of all sorts of subsidized, very expensive green power such as solar and wind by others, which doesn’t drive the market clearing price down and occupies the “greenies” and the government… more
Nuclear Physics 101
The Obama team needs a primer on Nuclear Physics. And so do most people who care about the future and want to do something about the damage being done to our planet. The four generations of Nuclear Energy development and the latest rediscovered fertile to fissionable Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) design which for lack of a better word I’ll refer to as THOR. I really mean Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR). But that’s a mouthful and the catalyst is Thorium so lets call it THOR coming from the name for the God of lightning.
Since it is 60 years old in concept it’s hard to think of it as fourth generation reactor design but it is being classified as such along side of the souped up Light Water Reactors (LWR) and upgrades of the traditional reactor designs that produce so much more dangerous nuclear waste.
The nuclear industry keeps boasting about it’s safety record since Chernobyl and relatively harmless Three Mile Island incident. What is conveniently unspoken is that they still need to store significant amounts of radioactive fuel. So what else is new? Actually THOR or LFTR is what’s new to most of us and very different from the traditional view of nuclear reactors.
It’s the alchemists dream, turning iron into gold? living forever? an abundant energy source? a dream at least in terms of nuclear energy.
Nuclear Physics 101
(without gluons, quarks, leptons, fermions, hadrons, bosons and antineutrinos.)
The only naturally occurring source of nuclear fuel is Uranium. Thorium is not a fuel, technically, but later I’ll explain the Thorium Cycle which produces fuel. We’ll come back to this. Uranium is found in trace amounts and needs processing to be as pure as possible. The ability to create man made Isotopes of radioactive elements is partly what is keeping the nuclear industry alive. And although very expensive to build Nuclear Reactors are still the most efficient electricity producers ever.
Nuclear energy is not new it’s just new to humans. They started to understand it about 100 years ago. But nuclear energy was around when the first stars were born and the big bang occurred. In fact, have you ever wondered how the center of the earth stays hot and keeps molten lava flowing. It is the presence of thorium and uranium changing from one state to another perpetually releasing energy and heat that causes the melting rock.
Let’s look at it’s chemistry. Transuranic elements are the elements that are heavier than Uranium (element 93) and more unstable than the lighter elements and no longer exist naturally. Over the earths history they all decayed or converted to other substances then vanished. An unstable element is called “radioactive” however everything is radioactive to some degree. The elements that decay the fastest and have a significant level of decay are called “radioactive” and they have a short half-life and are often the most toxic.
Uranium is getting scarce and has been expensive to process. The industry has come up with some creative ways to produce fissile Uranium including breeder reactors and the dismantling of nuclear bombs to use the Uranium for fuel. Plutonium is very familiar to us and is generally man made by using nuclear fission. Because these elements are unstable they will convert to stable or unstable isotopes meaning they will have an atomic weight more or less near the natural weight plus or minus a few neutrons. For instance 238U is the normal atomic weight of Uranium but they have some 235U and 234U mixed with it. Just trace amounts can weaken Uranium’s fissile ability so Uranium is processed by chemical means either into its useful concentrated 235U or into depleted Uranium-238 which is useless for energy but used in weapons ammunition. So a fissile element is able to convert to a new element and in the process releases energy. Note:E=mC2 the famous Einstein formula which explains where the energy comes from in a nuclear reaction. What happens when observing the binding forces in order of the smallest atomic weights to the largest the atoms actually reverses their ability to bind and these atoms are described as too large. So the ideal binding elements are, no surprise, iron and nickel. But really the study of the elements properties are the key. The elements instability are caused by their size.
It’s actually the opposite in gravitational forces of large bodies. The larger the object the greater the density.
Radium (element 88) was the first synthetically recreated radioactive element back in 1936. Now various isotopes of Uranium and Plutonium are the most used in Nuclear Power plants. The atomic number indicates the number of protons in an element. Fission is dependent upon the unstable elements being able to absorb the uncharged unstable neutrons. Actinides (now called Actinoids) are all radioactive and are typically created during fission in nuclear reactions. Their order starts at a lower atomic weight (89-103) than Transuranics (93-118) however they also include some of the transuranics (93-103).
Thorium has 90 protons and is element 90. In it’s natural state it has an equal number of
protons and electrons.
Neutrons are uncharged and unstable. This unstable state therefore can be harmful but also very useful. Here’s where the clever idea came from to manipulate the isotopes.
If you think of the nucleus as a big ball of protons and neutrons and the forces that bind them together as having a limited range of say… the diameter of an iron or nickel atom… what happens when you have a really big atom like uranium where the protons at the north pole are beyond the attraction range of the protons at the south pole?
Now the electromagnetic forces with their long range can start to cancel out some of the overall binding energy since the protons hate each other electromagnetically.
Now imagine this ball like a drop of liquid, suspended in space. Then a neutron comes along and makes it wobble… wibble… and at some point, the nucleus elongates and you have enough protons outside that short range from each other. The strong nuclear force starts to isolate to binding these two future twins and the electromagnetic force between these two hemispheres is the only force remaining…. PING… fission. The smaller pieces added together require a lot less energy to stay together because more of the protons are in range of each other. The leftover energy is that ping that sent them flying away from each other. The kinetic energy (plus the lesser gamma and neutron energies) of the 2 fission fragments flying away from each other is equal to the “mass defect” between U-235 and FP1 + FP2 (Fission Product 1 + Fission Product 2). As it turns out, all the parts put together in the original uranium atom have a higher mass than the pieces after fission. The mass difference got turned into an energy of approximately 200 MeV (pronounced mega-electron volts). Of this energy, 168 MeV is the kinetic energy of the FP1 and FP2 running away from each other, an average of 2.43 neutrons are emitted with a kinetic energy of ~2 MeV each, and a ~30 MeV gamma.
This curve is one way of expressing how all the stuff of the world behaves according to the size of it’s nucleus (Uranium at 235 is really proud of it’s nucleus) and compares that nucleus size to how strong each nucleon (neutrons and protons) is glued together. When we fission a heavy nucleus, we are really just taking energy that was stored as mass from when some star went kablooey a kazillion years ago and pushed a bunch of elements together very tightly, all kinds of heavy stuff was made. Since the short range nuclear force can only hold such a big atom together, all we ever find is Uranium since it’s pretty stable. Who knows, maybe that Uranium atom was something really big at first but decayed to where it is now. If it wasn’t for the kablooey, we wouldn’t see atoms much bigger than nickel or maybe cobalt.
The Thorium Cycle
This is a process which starts as Thorium then converts to Protactinium-233 and then decays after 27 days to become Uranium 233.
Molten salt melts at a higher temperature than pressurized water and it is safer in reactors because it does not require high pressures that Light Water Reactors and CANDU reactors need just to keep the water in a liquid state. Fluoride salt has some very stable qualities. Fluoride is the salt of choice for THOR LFTR’s (undecided but I’m tempted to use THOR instead of LFTR’s but that might defeat our cause) … … to be continued
ThoriumMSR 
