Liquid Flouride Thorium reactor (Score 2, Interesting)

Personally I believe a combination of nuclear and high efficiency solar is the way to go. Espeically if we use liquid salt reactor technology instead of light water reactor technology. Liquid salt has a number of advantages including the safety is in the physics not in the engineering, i.e. the reactor cannot run away or meltdown. Further if you use a Thorium/U233 fuel cycle combined with closed cycle helium gas turbines (which run about 50% efficiency at the high temps of the core... compare with about 33% efficiency with steam) you can potentially get 11 TWe-yr/MT of Thorium ore (becuase you "burn" all of the thorium in the process). To give you an idea, the present yearly output of one thorium mine in Idaho could supply the US energy needs for that same year. Additionally, because you burn it all all you get is fission by-products (no trans uranic waste) which you will need to store for only about 30 yrs (for the radioactive strontium). One other nice thing about the Th/U233 Lliquid flouride salt reactor, you cannot use it to enrich material for weapons production. If you try (ignoring the fact that the Th/U233 cycle is a very poor and inefficient way to try to make bomb material) you will make elements that have a very distinct and strong gamma signature, and you would be detected. If folks are interested there is a great resource at http://www.energyfromthroium.com/ In any case whom ever is the next president they will have to deal with our dependance on oil, and hydrocarbons in general.