I voted for you in previous elections but must admit I did not in the last because of differences of opinion over spending, however I am concerned about the future of our country and I think perhaps there is some common ground so I am taking this opportunity to communicate with you.

We spend too much time and resources squabbling over the size of our piece of an ever dwindling pie. Instead we need to focus on making the pie larger so that all Americans and the world at large can benefit. While there is a lot of hype about global climate change, and not to dismiss the reality of it but the more existential threat is not being a few degrees warmer but being hungry because we've exhausted all the economically recoverable fossil fuels and haven't gotten a replacement in place.

It is clear that neither solar nor wind power can scale to the degree that we require and that neither can provide base load power, and that most if not all energy storage solutions are prohibitively expensive.

In my view the most immediately available scalable technology is fast spectrum molten salt nuclear reactors. Why this technolog? Molten salt because they are safe by physics, not by intervention either automated or manual. They are automatically load following and melt down proof because the fuel is already intentionally liquid. They have very little risk of releasing radioactivity into the environment because they operate at near atmospheric pressures not several hundred atmospheres like boiling or pressurized water reactors. Because the salts have a very high boiling point, they can be operated at higher temperatures providing improved thermal dynamic efficiency. Because they have no water for cooling in the vessel, there is no separation into hydrogen and oxygen that can create a hydrogen explosion as in Fukushima, because they are fast spectrum, there is no moderator, hence no graphite fires as with Chernobyl.

Why fast spectrum? Because a fast spectrum reactor can not only breed fertile fuel like thorium and U-238 into fissile fuels, and then burn them in the reactor, but they can also take actinides from existing nuclear waste and burn that eliminating the long term component of existing nuclear waste turning a million year legacy into a 300 year manageable problem and extracting more than 100x the energy from the waste as the old reactor extracted from the fuel.

To encourage the development and deployment of these reactors, I would suggest funding the nuclear regulatory agency to develop new rules taking into account the much safer safety profile of this type of reactor. Also, to make the deployment economically feasible on a large scale, I would suggest that we move from a reactor licensing arrangement to a type approval type of licensing similar to the way the FCC type approves many consume electronic devices.

Lastly, because there is zero evidence that low levels of radiation increase cancer rates, I would suggest moving to a "low as possible" model to a "not more than 10% of background radiation" model, the former is not practically obtainable at any cost and hence the stall of the US nuclear program because even if you've got a mile of lead around the reactor you can add another mile. It makes more sense to define an attainable engineer-able and measurable goal.

Please consider doing something more positive four our country than just bickering over what the "other side" is doing.

Yours sincerely,

Robert John Dinse
nanook@eskimo.com