So you want a "no-carbon" electrical energy source?
Well, that's really not very smart on-balance simply because petroleum is much more than just fuel. Its literally in everything that makes for modern civilization and whether you like it or not the refining process produces a lot of usable fuel you have to do something with. Rather obviously throwing it on the ground is both polluting and dumb, as are all the other alternatives than burning it to produce usable work. This, incidentally, is the flaw in all of the people arguing that "we must" or "we should" in that regard; unless you'd like to live in a world with no IV bags, no syringes in hospitals, no other plastics (look around you for what that means you don't have; you'll rapidly discover this means even the simplest things, like weatherstripping on your windows, no longer exist) and more.
In other words civilization in the modern sense depends on petroleum so the "no more oil" position means no civilization. You might not like this fact but it is a fact......
It is the first time in the world that scientists have been able to acquire experimental data on thorium operations from inside a molten salt reactor, according to a report by Science and Technology Daily.
Nonsense; we proved it works and is feasible at Oak Ridge (ORNL) sixty years ago.
And then we walked away from it without following up and completing the engineering required to put it into civilian power production.
But if you read the link found above from 2011 that I wrote, or Leverage, you'll find that exploitation of this technology if pursued in combination with CTL not only produces electrical energy without consumption of carbon-based fuels at the same time it produces 500 years worth of diesel and gasoline making us entirely energy-independent even assuming reasonable continual population growth.
In other words it solves the entire problem, and even better it gives us a place to dispose of high level nuclear waste because the safest place for such material is inside an operating reactor where neutron bombardment will cause the heavy and highly-dangerous (e.g. actinide-series) waste products to be broken down into much lighter ones with much shorter half-lives.
In fact if the engineering is completed for online reprocessing transport risk is eliminated at the same time and the final waste stream would be roughly one percent of what we currently produce using fission energy production.
We can do this without any "pie in the sky" things that are at best dubious; this is all known technology that we have simply refused to exploit and now the Chinese are well down the road to doing so.
We must reverse this error on an expedient basis.
