Clean Energy from Nuclear Waste: The Radical Economics of Thorium Reactors

Part 3 with Erik Townsend

Part I: Why This Series Matters—and What Comes Next

This three-part series with Erik Townsend began with a simple but urgent question:
How do we power a prosperous future for everyone—without wrecking the planet in the process?

The stakes are real. Economic growth has always been tethered to rising energy consumption. And as billions of people in the developing world continue their climb out of poverty—and as AI and digital infrastructure drive an explosion in electricity demand in the developed world—the question isn’t whether global energy consumption will rise. It’s by how much, and what kind of energy will meet that demand.

Let’s be clear: energy demand is always met with supply. When clean energy isn’t available, fossil fuels fill the gap.

That’s why, despite trillions invested in wind and solar, fossil fuel use continues to rise. We’re not replacing dirty energy—we’re supplementing it. And unless we fix the constraints that are preventing next-generation nuclear energy from scaling, this pattern will only worsen.

That’s why I wanted to do this series.

The Core Problem—and the Missed Opportunity

We live in a world where technological solutions exist, but political systems prevent their deployment.

Erik Townsend has laid out a compelling blueprint for how we can mass-produce safe, cheap, thorium-fueled molten salt reactors using technologies already proven in the lab. These reactors don’t just reduce emissions—they can slash the cost of energy by orders of magnitude, unlock productivity, and provide clean power to every corner of the planet. That includes regions that still struggle to keep the lights on, let alone power AI data centers.

But right now, Western regulatory regimes are functionally designed to prevent innovation in nuclear energy, not enable it. Meanwhile, China is racing ahead—already demonstrating advanced reactors and signaling a strategy to dominate global energy and technology supply chains by mid-century.

The longer we wait, the greater the cost—not just environmentally, but geopolitically.

Why This Series—and Why Now?

Some readers may notice that this third episode is the most technical of the three. I considered warning you about that upfront. But doing so might have scared people away from what is arguably the most important part of the conversation. This episode is where we move from high-level vision to engineering reality—and where Erik’s credibility as a serious voice in the nuclear debate becomes most obvious.

It’s also timely.

Just days ago, the White House issued a new Executive Order (May 24) outlining a new push for clean energy infrastructure. In theory, this could represent a step toward the kind of policy environment Erik has been calling for. In practice, the jury is still out. I’ll have more to say about that EO and how it aligns—or doesn’t—with Erik’s plan in a follow-up post shortly.

But this essay and episode were designed to do something different: to provide the technical foundation that explains why Erik’s plan isn’t just visionary—it should be achievable., though we won’t know that unless we try.

The Debate Around Erik’s Vision

Erik isn’t presenting a finished doctrine—he’s actively seeking feedback from experts in engineering, policy, and energy economics to refine his proposals. His aim isn’t to win an argument—it’s to build a better plan. So send him commentary!

In fact, there are very few detailed rebuttals to his core thesis to be found. Most people don’t deny that molten salt reactors and mass-manufactured SMRs offer enormous promise. Instead, the pushback tends to fall into these two concerns:

• Can we overcome the regulatory inertia and political headwinds—especially in the West, where nuclear licensing can cost hundreds of millions and take a decade or more?

• Can a relatively unproven technology like thorium be scaled fast enough to make a meaningful climate or economic impact by mid-century? And shouldn’t we focus on building what is already proven?

These are legitimate questions, but they’re not dealbreakers. Erik’s plan is grounded in serious, cross-disciplinary research. It’s the product of a sharp generalist doing the homework: understanding the physics, mapping the economics, and recognizing the geopolitical stakes.

Even if the vision doesn’t fully succeed, it points us toward the right problem and a high-value solution: replacing fossil fuels entirely, not just keeping pace with rising electricity demand. That alone makes it worth pursuing.

If we care about lowering costs, lifting standards of living globally, and meeting AI-driven demand without accelerating environmental collapse, this is the kind of bold solution that deserves our attention—and our action.

Part II: Inside the Engineering Vision – Erik Townsend on the Future of Nuclear Energy

In Episode 3 of our interview series, Erik walked through the mechanics, economics, and design principles of molten salt thorium reactors—and what it would take to mass-produce them at a scale that could replace fossil fuels, not just supplement them.

This episode goes deep on technical details, but what emerges is a remarkably simple point: we have the science, we have the economic model, and we have precedent for rapid scaling of new technologies. The only thing standing in the way is the political and regulatory machinery of the West.

The Real Bottleneck Isn’t Technology—It’s Permission

Erik opens the conversation with a history lesson. The first electricity from nuclear power was generated in 1951. Four years later, we had a nuclear submarine in the water—because the U.S. government made it a national priority. Today, the engineering challenge is actually easier, but the regulatory barrier is much harder.

Private companies like Copenhagen Atomics—where Erik is an investor—can design thorium-fueled molten salt reactors that operate safely, avoid meltdown risk, and cost a fraction of what today’s light water reactors require. But in the U.S., the cost just to navigate the certification process with the NRC runs into the hundreds of millions.

That’s not a technical bottleneck. That’s a structural failure.

Fuel Economics: From Scarcity to Abundance

One of the most compelling sections of the episode is Erik’s breakdown of nuclear fuel types and costs. The key insight: we’ve built an entire global nuclear industry around the rarest and most expensive fuel—U-235.

Only 0.2% of the nuclear fuel in nature is U-235. Nearly all the rest—U-238 and thorium-232—is what’s called fertile fuel, which can’t sustain a chain reaction on its own but can be “bred” into fissile fuel. That’s what a breeder reactor does.

In fact, thorium—the most promising of these fertile fuels—makes up about 75% of the nuclear fuel available on Earth. It’s abundant, non-enrichable (meaning it’s not a bomb risk in its raw form), and cheap. When paired with molten salt reactor designs, it produces less waste, no meltdown risk, and much lower fuel costs. Erik estimates that switching from fossil fuels to molten salt thorium reactors would reduce the planet’s annual fuel bill from $6.25 trillion to $312 million.

Mass Production: The Nuclear Henry Ford Moment

Building new nuclear reactors the old way—on-site, custom-designed megaprojects—costs too much and takes too long. The only viable path forward, Erik argues, is to treat reactors like cars or shipping containers: build them in factories, on robotic assembly lines, with standardized parts and automated quality control.

Copenhagen Atomics is designing reactors small enough to fit inside a 40-foot shipping container. The target cost is under $10 million per unit—less than some AI data center GPU clusters—and a tiny fraction of the cost of a coal-fired or conventional nuclear plant. These units could be built and deployed by the thousands, replacing fossil fuel infrastructure globally in a 20–30 year time frame.

The critical enabling technology? Supercritical CO₂ turbines—a smaller, cheaper, and more efficient replacement for the steam turbines used in today’s power plants. When paired with modular reactors, these turbines make it possible to hit capital cost targets of under $1,000 per kilowatt, which is the tipping point to beat fossil fuels on price.

Waste Isn’t the Problem—It’s the Solution

Erik also tackles the myth of “nuclear waste” as an unsolvable problem. In fact, 95% of spent nuclear fuel is still usable, and the remaining 5% can be managed with known, proven reprocessing methods. France has done it for decades. The U.S. stopped because of Cold War–era fears about plutonium proliferation.

But here’s the irony: that “waste” includes all the Kickstarter fuel we need to launch the next generation of thorium reactors. The U.K. alone has enough reactor-grade plutonium to start up 700 molten salt reactors—more than the current global reactor fleet.

Rather than spending billions to bury this material, we should be using it to launch a new industrial era.

What's the Holdup?

It’s not the engineering. It’s not the safety. It’s not the economics.

It’s the mindset.

Erik ends the episode with a clear-eyed diagnosis: we’ve trained ourselves to think of nuclear as scary, risky, and complicated, when in fact the opposite is true. It’s the most concentrated, scalable, and safe form of energy we’ve ever discovered. And if we build it at scale—mass-produced, modular, and built on decades of proven science—we can power global prosperity for generations.

This isn’t speculative. It’s just unrecognized.

The question isn’t whether we can do it. The question is whether we will.

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Source: Erik Townsend research at: