Nearly everyone in the world is in some shape or form part of a community. Whether l
arge or small, every community has similar needs. They need light during darkness, heat when it’s cold, and air conditioning when it’s hot. People can’t function properly during extreme temperatures, and their food must be grown or provided, distributed and stored safely. Waste products must be collected, removed and processed. Transport must transfer members quickly and safely. To fulfill all of these needs, and achieve a desired high standard of living, is a secure supply of electricity. Energy in the form of electricity provides light, and air conditioning. In the form of heat, energy keeps us warm, and in chemical form, energy provides fertilizers, drives our farm machines, and transportation vehicles.
For communities to thrive and develop, large amounts of energy are needed for members to fulfill their needs. Nuclear Power, fuelled by nuclear fission from Uranium provides such a source. However, Uranium fuelled nuclear power uses water as coolant, while providing advantages there are many disadvantages. To generate a communities needed electricity, they must get the water inside a nuclear reactor a lot hotter than they normally could. At normal pressures, water will boil 
at 100 degrees Celsius. This isn’t nearly hot enough to generate electricity effectively, so in water cooled reactors they must run at much higher pressures than atmospheric. Some water cooled reactors run at 70 atmospheres of pressure, and some have to run as high as 150 atmospheres of pressure. There’s no getting around this, it’s simply what you have to do if you want to generate electricity using a water cooled reactor. This means you have to build a water cooled reactor as a pressure vessel with steel walls that are over 20cm thick. If you think that sounds heavy its because it is. Things get a lot worse if you have an accident where you loose pressure inside the reactor. If you have liquid water at over 300 degrees Celsius, and then suddenly depressurize it, it doesn’t stay liquid for very long, as it flashes into steam. So water cooled reactors are built inside big thick containment buildings, which are meant to hold all the steam that would come out of the reactor if you had an accident, or if you lost pressure. Steam takes up around 1000 times more volume than liquid water, so the containment building tends to be very large relative to the small size of the reactor. Another bad thing happens is if you loose pressure and your water flashes to steam. If you don’t get emergency coolant to the fuel in the reactor in time it can overheat and melt. Now, the reactors we have today use Uranium Oxide as a fuel. It’s a ceramic 
material that is similar in performance to the ceramics that we use to make coffee cups, cookware, or bricks used in the lining of fireplaces. They’re chemically stable but their not very good at transferring heat. If you loose pressure you loose your water, and soon your fuel will melt down and release the radioactive fission products within it. To make solid nuclear fuel is a complicated and expensive process, and we extract less than 1% of the energy of the nuclear fuel before it can no longer remain in the reactor. Additionally, water cooled reactors have another challenge; they need to be near large bodies of water, where the steam they generate can be cooled and condensed otherwise they can’t generate electrical power.
Another form of nuclear fuel doesn’t have these problems for a very simple reason – it’s not based on water cooling, and it doesn’t use solid fuel. Surprisingly, it’s based on salt. The reasons why it doesn’t have the problems of a water cooled reactors is pretty neat. It uses a mixture of Fluoride Salts as the nuclear fuel; specifically the fluorides of Lithium, 
Beryllium, and Thorium. Fluoride salts are remarkably chemically stable – they do not react with air and water. You have to heat them up to 400 degrees Celsius to get them to melt, but that’s actually perfect to generate power in a nuclear reactor. Here’s the real magic, they don’t have to operate at high pressure, which makes the biggest difference of all. They don’t have to be in big strong pressure vessels, and also don’t use water for coolant, so there’s nothing in the reactor that will make a big change in density like water can. This allows the containment building around the reactor to be much smaller and close fitting. Unlike the solid fuels that can meltdown if you stop cooling them, these liquid fluoride fuels are already melted at a much lower temperature. In
normal operation you have a plug at the bottom of the reactor vessel that you’ve kept frozen by blowing cold gas over the outside. If there’s an emergency and you loose all the power to your nuclear power plant, the little blower stops blowing, the frozen salts melt, and the liquid fluoride fuel inside the reactor drains out of the vessel through the line and into another tank called the ‘Drain Tank’ through gravity. Inside the drain tank, it’s all configured to maximise the transfer of heat, so to keep the salts passively cooled as its heat load drops overtime. In water cooled reactors, you generally have to provide power to the plant, to keep the water circulating and prevent a melt down as we saw in Japan. But in this reactor, if you loose the power to the reactor it shuts itself down all by itself without human intervention, putting itself in a safe and controlled configuration.
Thorium, the fuel for this type of nuclear power plant, is a naturally occurring, and is four times more common in the earth’s crust than uranium. It can be used in Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR) to produce electoral energy, heat, and other valuable products. It’s so energy dense, that you can hold a lifetime’s supply of thorium energy in the palm of your hand. With the energy generated from LFTR, we could recycle all the air, water, and waste products within a local community.
LFTR encourages future communities that are self sustaining and energy independent. The same energy generation and recycling techniques have a powerful impact on communities to survive climate change. Right now we’re burning fossil fuels because they’re easy to find and because we can. Using fossil fuels entangles us in un-stable conflicts around the world that costs money and lives. Things could be very different if we were using thorium. You see in a LFTR, we can burn thorium about 200 times more efficiently than we’re using uranium now. And because the LFTR is capable of almost 
completely releasing the energy in thorium, this reduces the waste generated over uranium in factors of hundreds, and factors of millions over fossil fuels. We’re still going to use liquid fuels for vehicles and machinery, but we can generate these liquid fuels from the Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere and from water, much like nature does. We could generate Hydrogen by splitting water and combine it with carbon harvested from Co2 in the atmosphere. Making fuels like Methanol, Ammonia, and Dimethyl Either which could be a direct replacement for diesel fuels. Imagine carbon neutral gasoline and diesel, sustainable, and self produced.
Do we have enough Thorium? Yes we do. Thorium is not a rare substance, where there are many sites all over the world. Using LFTR, we could move away from expensive and 
difficult aspects of current water cooled solid fuel uranium nuclear power. We wouldn’t need large high pressure nuclear reactors, and big containment vessels they go in, or large low-efficiency steam turbines. We wouldn’t need to have as many long distance power transmittion infrastructure because thorium is a very portable energy source as it can be located near where it is needed. A LFTR would be a compact facility, very energy efficient and safe, that would produce the energy we need day and night and without respect to weather conditions. Worldwide in 2007, we used 5.3 billion tonnes of coal, 3.1 billion barrels of oil, 2.92 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, and 65,000 tonnes of uranium to meet the world’s energy needs. With thorium, we could’ve done the same with only 6600 tonnes, which would’ve been mined from one single site alone.
If all of this sounds interesting to you I invite you to read through my website and report, to understand how New Zealand can generate a clean, safe, and sustainable future based off the energy of thorium.