A devout Mormon with a linebacker's build and a marine's crew cut, Sorensen made an unlikely iconoclast. What caught Sorensen's eye was the description of Weinberg's experiments producing nuclear power with an element called thorium.ДЄt the time, in 2000, Sorensen was just 25, engaged to be married and thrilled to be employed at his first serious job as a real aerospace engineer. Published in 1958 under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission as part of its Atoms for Peace program, Fluid Fuel Reactors is a book only an engineer could love: a dense, 978-page account of research conducted at Oak Ridge National Lab, most of it under former director Alvin Weinberg. He pored over it in the coming months, ultimately deciding that he held in his hands the key to the world's energy future. 'I took it home that night, but I didn't understand all the nuclear terminology,' Sorensen says. Hours later, he was still reading, enchanted by the ideas but struggling with the arcane writing. A rookie NASA engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Sorensen was researching nuclear-powered propulsion, and the book's title - Fluid Fuel Reactors - jumped out at him. The thick hardbound volume was sitting on a shelf in a colleague's office when Kirk Sorensen spotted it.

Space engineers finding uranium