Open Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The Most Reverend and Right Honourable the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury
House of Lords,
London,
SW1A 0PW

Dear Archbishop Rowan,

Re: Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTRs).

I have written to you on 2 previous occasions about LFTRs, but the replies made clear that the letter contents were not appropriate for your attention. However, in September of last year, I wrote to many of the Lords Spiritual, including the Bishop of Hereford,  and in May of this year was most gratified to see in Hansard, several written LFTR-questions posed by the Bishop  and written replies from Lord Marland. 

It is virtually certain that the Government's future nuclear policy and any prospects of considering thorium technology, will be 100% influenced by the NNL's report due for publication imminently (late summer). I have a letter from Professor Paul Howarth, Managing Director of NNL, which completely rules out the thorium fuel cycle for use in any form of future UK reactor.

Were you to study the Bishop of Hereford's questions and the platitudes of Lord Marsland's replies, you might conclude, as I did and the Bishop probably does, that the NNL is locked into the existing uranium-fuel lobby and therefore lacks independance. The Government will accept their recommendations and thorium technology could be in stasis for decades.

There should be a Christian perspective on the lack of independance of a commercial operation as influential as the NNL. "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark" "Heaven will direct it".

Would you please have your energy advisors get under the political skin of this unsavoury situation?

Yours sincerely,

Colin Megson.

Dear Prime Minister

                                                                                                           21 May 2011.

10 Downing Street,
London,
SW1A 2AA,

For the attention of the Rt. Hon. David Cameron.

Dear Prime Minister

“I want us to be the greenest government ever”.

A year ago at the DECC, these were your very words and to do this, you are taking a predictable route of giving everybody in the mix a little bit, but inordinately pouring money into the populist option of renewables. This will divert much needed investment away from the NHS and other essential services.

May I propose ‘Plan B’, to take you into realms of ‘greenness’ about which you can only dream, meet our carbon targets ahead of time, take a huge chunk out of our £14 billion or so energy trade deficit and maximize energy independence.

You will not know of the capacity of this home-based resource, but you will be able to raise a green banner behind which every environmentalist can get. Not one extra square inch of our precious land need be sacrificed in accessing this fuel which can provide all of the UK’s electricity needs for the next 50 years and, it will be free of greenhouse gas emissions.

This resource is the lifeless, environmental abomination of fly-ash, with an average thorium content of 17 parts per million. Mining 60,000 tonnes of fly-ash yields 1 tonne of thorium, which can supply 1 GWyear of electricity; this is enough for all the electrical needs of a city of 1 million people for 1 year. Preposterous as it seems, 3,200,000 tonnes of coal have to be imported (£80 million) to supply the same amount of electricity, which means that the energy from fly-ash thorium yields 50 times more energy than the original coal burned.

You will need to spend a piddling £300 million on the first-of-a-kind 100 MWe Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR), which can be available in 5 years and factory produced units rolling off production lines in 10 years. Unlike PWRs (the UK’s new-build nuclear), LFTRs have extraordinary intrinsic, passive safety characteristics, making them capable of surviving a Fukushima level incident unscathed.

Extraordinary courage is needed to do something so revolutionary and such thoughts are likely to be kept away from you. However, I do hope your ‘knowledge filterers’ let you have a look at this data, for no other reason than it being an eye-opening ‘thought for the day’.

I must see what Archbishop Rowan has to say.

Yours sincerely,

Archbishop Rowan - Just one of who knows how many insulated leaders?

From his office of Public Affairs, it is thought: "....unlikely that he will choose to seek to make the Church of England support one particular response to the technological challenges surrounding the environmental crisis.".



I accidentally stumbled across my first bit of information about LFTRs and within 24 hours, my feelings were in complete accord with Kirk Sorensen's, when he says, in his 'Google Tech Talks' video: "I really feel like this discovery of thorium and its potential has Earth shattering consequences for us. And that indeed, if we are going to have a sustainable and industrial society on this planet, that it’s going to be dependent on this technology".

It's such a pity the Archbishop is only fed the information other individuals think fit and , sadly, because LFTR articles in the general public media are a bit thin on the ground, it's unlikely he'll ever stumble and fall for LFTRs.