Is Thorium The Future Of Nuclear Energy? | Kirk Sorensen

**Kirk Sorensen** (0:00)
So to be able to go and transform your nuclear endeavor from one that's operating at really low efficiency to one that's operating 200 times more efficiently, that's just an absolute quantum leap. And in a world where we are seeing in the last few years more than ever, the importance of energy for data, for AI, for industrial growth, that's absolutely not the place you want to be. You want to be moving in the direction of highest performance, highest achievement. So that's why you should care about a nearly forgotten 60-year-old technology. It was because it was pointing the way towards the future of staggering increase in energy efficiency far more than we can contemplate from any of these other directions.

**Adam Taggart** (0:48)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Taggart. Suddenly, nuclear energy has become the bell of the ball when it comes to future electrical production expectations. After decades of demonization, this energy-dense, cost-effective, always-on solution, statistically proven to be the safest in the world in terms of lives lost, is now looked at as the future of green energy and a key component to winning the AI race in the long term. It also offers the promise of even cheaper, safer, and more distributed energy as new technical solutions are being released around the world, including small modular reactors, molten salt technologies, and the use of less radioactive fuels like thorium. To help us understand what we can count on in the future from the coming nuclear energy boom, as well as what we likely can't, we're fortunate to speak today with Kirk Sorensen, President and Chief Technologist at Flibe Energy, who for decades has been a leading advocate for nuclear reactor innovation and thorium-based solutions. Kirk, thanks so much for joining us today.

**Kirk Sorensen** (1:56)
Thanks, Adam. It's great to be here with you.

**Adam Taggart** (1:58)
Hey, it's a real pleasure. Kirk, now Kirk, you and I, gosh, I feel like I've known you for almost 15 years now.

**Kirk Sorensen** (2:06)
I think you have.

**Adam Taggart** (2:07)
Yeah, and you have been one of the folks out there who has been a real proponent for, like I said, driving nuclear reactor innovation and particularly around new fuels like thorium. And you were doing that, I mean, way before. It became super popular in the past one, two years here now. So first off, thank you for all your years out there in the wilderness of doing what you do. I appreciate that. Thank you.
And I can think a few people better to kind of give this audience here at Thoughtful Money kind of an update on what's going on in the nuclear space right now, the nuclear energy space. If I can, I'd like to kind of deviate from what I normally do. I normally kind of lead the questions from a very general, broad perspective, and then we just drill down and get more and more specific. If I can, let me start with the news article that really spurred me to reach out to you, which was an update on China's basically proof of concept thorium reactor. For most of the years I knew you, Kirk, a thorium reactor was an academic concept. It was something that you strongly felt could be done and should be done, but nobody was doing it. China took the ball on this, and you can, I'm sure, provide more detail on this. I think they actually got most of their research on thorium's potential as a nuclear reactor fuel from the US., and they went back to China and they actually built one of these things. I believe, let's see here, it's in Wuwei, Gansu province. It achieved criticality in 2023 and full operation in 2024 I think the article that I just read a couple of weeks ago showed that they were able to successfully convert thorium into uranium, which is a refueling milestone that they've been working up to for several years. Basically, they got this thing working. It's been working now for several years. They keep advancing the ball on it. From my layman's perspective, it seems like they have indeed proven the concept and that we are likely to see the commercial deployment of thorium reactors in China in the not too distant future. A, am I correct with that assumption? B, can you educate this audience on why that's such a seminal and important development in the history of nuclear energy?

**Kirk Sorensen** (4:47)
Yeah, Adam, those are great questions and great insights you have. I'll preface. What I say is I have not been to China. I have not visited the TMSR in Gansu province. Everything I know is from open source just like everybody else, but I do have a lot of background with which to interpret what's going on. I also first learned about the Chinese program in 2010 It was one of the events that spurred us to start Flibe Energy in early 2011, was to mount a U.S.-based response to the Chinese initiative. Since then, I've had several opportunities to meet with various folks from China at international conferences, occasionally a chance to talk with them about their accomplishments and what they've been able to do. It does appear that their TMSR1, they call it, is very similar to the molten salt reactor experiment that was built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee in the United States. It was completed in 1965 and ran until late 1969 Their TMSR1 appears to be really similar in design to that. They brought it critical, as you mentioned, and now recently have done something that was not done in the MSRE. It was contemplated, but was not actually executed, which is to add some thorium to the salt mixture, thorium in the form of a salt itself, thorium tetrafluoride was dissolved into the molten salt utilized in the TMSR. And once that thorium was inside the reactor, once it was receiving neutrons from the fission reaction, it began its transformation, as you pointed out, from thorium into fissile uranium 233