Who Killed the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR)?

[Maslo55]

95. renewables

are simply unable to get us off of fossil fuels in just 20 years, thats just ridiculous fantasy. It socially, economically and physically impossible. They might supply some % of electricity supply in countries with abundant sunlight / wind (California, UK), but thats all. It would require billions of wind turbines and solar panels, smart grids and long-distance lines everywhere (in fact complete world electric grid overhaul), and also huge amounts of costly storage to offset the intermittency and poor capacity factors to make it. Thats with current electricity consumption, which would increase in the future, and hugely - just wide deployment of electric cars and trucks would probably double our electricity needs, developing and third world would be another source of consumption increase.

100% guarantee is never possible. But since there are no significant hard technical, physical and economic obstacles to rapid advanced nuclear deployment (LFTRs, IFRs..) as opposed to renewables, just ignorance and public/political opposition due to irrational nucleophobia, its far more probable that we will succeed to displace fossil energy sooner in higher amounts with this approach.

With moderate funding, we can have working small modular LFTR in just 5 years. 10 years to factory mass production of SMR-LFTRs (think Boeing planes), which would produce abundant electricity with half the cost of fossil power plants, 24/7, independent of weather or location, always with nameplate capacity. No need for smartgrids or any big storage investments (you will just buy a little more powerful power plant, then dump excess into resistors when its not needed, or electrolytically/thermochemically produce hydrogen).

IFR (EPR-II) was also already prorotyped and run excellently for decades. It is ready for deployment now (GE Hitachi S-PRISM), and factory mass production in 5 years, not 20 years in the future.