While I do like the idea of thorium reactors, he does cherry pick in his arguments against uranium reactors. He ignores the pebble bed reactors which are the current state of the art (that remove most of his safety concerns), as well as breeder reactors which actually produce more fuel while running.
It is interesting to understand why we don’t have thorium reactors now. It wasn’t some conspiracy of the uranium miners or anything, it was a decision mostly by the U.S. government that we wanted a nuclear power infrastructure that supported the production of fissile material in case we needed it for making bombs.
I can certainly accept that decision in terms of national security calculations. However there’s little reason for not doing Thorium reactors now. It’s just that nuclear to the Greens is like a cross to a vampire, and I don’t see a way past that (short of a lot of people going up against a wall).
I realize the zeal for bombs was the driving force behind uranium US nuclear electric generation. It’s likely until a reactor replacement on an older carrier is requisitioned, the private sector won’t sink billions into unproven tech. The rest of the guy’s talk about retrieving atmospheric carbon to manufacture replacement fossil fuels sounds like another expensive pipe dream. Until liquid hydrocarbons become persistently more costly, why would anybody convert to more expensive fuel?