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Make energy so expensive and inaccessible to most Americans, and we have - Venezuela. Sitting on a pool of oil that is the rival of some of the great producing regions of the world, and the country is awash with hyperinflation and poverty.

The politics of artificial scarcity has never made much sense at any time in history. Combine that with what are essentially draconian dictates not to make any innovations, and you have a totally immobilized economy.

If this nation does not go to nuclear power generation, then we must rely on what are called “fossil fuels”, which is a misnomer in itself. The earth’s crust is CONSTANTLY evolving new hydrocarbons by abiotic means, and with sufficient heat energy and a little ingenuity, we can MAKE a high grade of kerogen from most waste organic material.

Nuclear power need not be based on the fission of uranium alone, but by substituting thorium for uranium almost entirely, most of the supply of electrical energy can be put within close reach of virtually the entire population of the planet and at a far lower price per kilowatt, with a degree of efficiency that is way ahead of anything else now being attempted.

Solar and wind power can at best only be used in very specialized applications with any manner of cost effectiveness. They cannot supply the demands of a modern industrial economy.

I broached the topic of building a startup to do a thorium based reactor for power generation with a few of my co-workers. They are nuclear engineers who spend much of their time doing yield calculations on real detonations or modeling what the current weapons can produce. The short answer is even the thorium reactors require some fissile uranium to operate. Some of the other engineers have worked on "pebble" type reactor designs. Bottom line is that there is still some material that requires careful handling and complex regulatory activity to make it happen.

If my co-workers are going to press ahead, it needs to happen soon. I'm 65 and most of them are older.

Yes, the nuclear energy, especially Thorium based, is the best near term solution for our energy problems.
In long term, I believe, we can eventually figure out the controlled atomic fusion. I am not sure, I will live to it, but humanity eventually will do it!
In that time, people will look back on current situation in disgust!
“Are you telling me, they destroyed all that environment just in their futile attempts to reduce Co2?”