Now that Texas has experienced the joys of primitive energy, perhaps some are willing to investigate the truth about nuclear energy.  The Tokaimura nuclear accident in 1999 was the result of pouring too much fuel into a tank of water and creating an undesired nuclear reactor.

But that process — pouring fuel into water to create power, except in controlled amounts — is how simple a perfect reactor can and should be.  If our electricity grid were built on perfect reactors, we would never have power outages, our electricity would be cheap, and we could achieve our non–fossil fuel goals much more quickly.

Conventional nuclear reactors not only are ridiculously expensive, but also pose an existential threat to our country as potential weapons of mass annihilation.  Should an enemy ever bomb our current reactors, they will spew thousands of nuclear weapons' worth of highly radioactive material across huge swaths of the countryside.

However, it is possible to convert these horrible reactors into perfect reactors.  Perfect reactors can be built for a fraction of conventional reactor costs, produce electricity for nearly ten times less, and never be used as a weapon against the population.

All that is required is for enough citizens to speak up and support investigating the truth about nuclear energy.  From the very beginning of the nuclear age, it has been known that the ultimate reactor was as simple as a tank of high-melting temperature material salted with nuclear fuel.

This material would generate heat simply by virtue of its composition, and electricity would be produced by passing it through a heat exchanger.  This design can produce tens of times more energy than conventional plants.  It requires nothing more than a tank, a pump, and a heat exchanger, and any disruption will result in the material solidifying and encapsulating the nuclear material.

This design principle has been studied many times in the form of molten salt and thorium fluoride reactors, but they were never built because the powers that be deliberately chose not to build reactors based on the best engineering principles.  They instead chose a design that was inherently and critically flawed, presumably to prevent the development of cheap nuclear energy.  The fact that the Fukushima reactors failed because of something as foreseeable as an earthquake should make it clear to everyone that conventional reactor designs are ludicrous.

If Americans truly want affordable, failsafe, green energy, they owe it to themselves to investigate these claims.  Nuclear science is well understood and available to anyone willing to investigate.  A perfect reactor can be as simple as a tank of nuclear-salted lead, and all it takes is a willingness to look at the engineering fundamentals behind such a design.

Image: Molten Salt Reactor by the U.S. Department of Energy Nuclear Energy Research Advisory Committee.