whoops that above link is the wrong link to the utube of the thorim dream.this is it. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/motherboard-tv-the-thorium-dream
Interesting stuff
I wonder if his support of things like this is the real reason the hard left hates the otherwise rather leftist Gates so much?
The environmental movement often appears to me to interested not so much in the environment as it is nature worship. Any form of energy that allows people to not live in mud huts is frowned on
All the advantages for thorium-powered nuclear reactors still apply, but apparently there is a large constituency for the prevention of widespread adoption of a cheap, reliable and safe source of energy for the population at large.
Uranium-powered nuclear reactors have received the lion’s share of funding into research to make them more reliable, at the expense of funding thorium-based reactors, for what apparently is one overriding reason - it is impossible to weaponize the spent fuel from a thorium reactor into a thermonuclear bomb of some kind. It is my firm belief that the “spent” uranium rods, by-product of uranium power plants, which still contain some 97% of the potential extractable energy when removed from service, are retained for only one purpose - the production of fission and fusion thermonuclear weapons, or at least the threat to carry out such a program.
The presence of such a threat sure keeps the SANE crowd pumped up, but then, they actually have another agenda - maintaining an artificial scarcity of potential means to spread prosperity to parts of the world that do not now enjoy the benefits. With prosperity comes independence and freedom, through competition and assignment of benefits based upon individual initiative - rewarding merit.
And the possibility of that just sends some folks into fits of paranoia and jealousy.
If Gates supports it it probably reduces fertility somehow. That seems to be his and Melinda’s whole MO in the past 15 years.
Thorium powered coal to liquids. Best of both worlds!
This might be the first thing he’s done right in a couple of decades
Contributing Editor / Brooklyn, New York
Brian Merchant is a freelance writer and editor living in Brooklyn, NY. He covers politics for TreeHugger, with a focus on climate and energy issues. Brian has written for Slate, Paste, Salon, GOOD, and the Huffington Post, among many others.
Brian Merchant profile at TreeHugger.com
Yep, good old Brian looks like your Go-To guy for accurate, unbiased information & commentary on various energy sources....
/sarc
There is no excuse for any power reactor to not be “walk-away safe”. We have over 100 operating nuclear power plants in the US and because of political opposition to a national repository for spent fuel, those power plants are now forced to store spent fuel onsite. Most of those storage facilities require ongoing active cooling.
For me the issue isn’t that the cooling and safety won’t be maintained by competent and dedicated crews. The issue is: what will be the consequences when maintaining cooling is impossible due to some cause that is beyond the ability of the crews and infrastructure to recover from.
This is exactly the case at this very moment in Japan at Fukushima where a tsunami destroyed the ability of the facility to maintain cooling of the spent fuel pool.
It took many years for us to get in this mess. The sooner we start to work our way out, the sooner we won’t have the risk of this kind of disaster to worry about.