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I look at energy like food.

When people don’t have food, they will do things and eat things they would not have been able or willing to do when they did have food.

I see energy the same way. It runs economies. It provides heat. It lets us travel in our cars. When the cost of energy goes down, so does pretty much the cost of everything else. Costs go down, business is more lucrative, and jobs are created. And when energy becomes more expensive so does everything else, and the economy contracts, jobs disappear, and business is bad.

I can see people not clamoring for thorium reactors. All things nuclear have been so effectively demonized since the late Sixties, that anything having fission and nuclear waste is not viable in the public arena. The public would not see thorium reactors as different in any way, they would see them as...nuclear power. Period. So people would shrug their shoulders and say “Eh. Nuclear is bad. Fukishima is bad. Chernobyl is bad. Three Mile Island is bad. No...we don’t need nuclear.”

But if energy becomes so expensive that it accelerates the inevitable implosion of many of the world’s economies...if people can’t get heat or electricity for air conditioning, and they can’t buy fuel to drive or fly and jobs are invisible, then I could see it happening. Or even if we get someone in the White House who understands the energy sector, that could make it viable.

I just wish it wouldn’t take those things to make it happen.

I have always thought the concept of scalable pebble bed reactors to be a fascinating one, making them small and safe enough to provide town-sized municipalities with them, up to major cities. Design them and become a world leader in selling them and the radioactive product they need to function.

Eh. Probably never happen, but you never can tell.