Egregoros

@fluffy @p Ha ha, actually I do believe nuclear plants are a large part of the short term solution but one particular type of nuclear reactor, a molten salt fast-flux breeder reactor. The reason being a combination of inherent safety by the very physics of the plant, it's relative efficiency, it's lack of need for water, it's lower physical land requirements relative to other plant types, and it's ability to use long term actinide waste from existing plants as fuel, recover more than 20x as much energy from the waste as the original plant did from the fuel, produce waste that isn't bomb grade or readily made into bomb grade material, do reprocessing on site so little opportunity for terrorists to intercept transport, among other things.

As for outlawing JavaScript, I would extend that to any language using garbage collection for memory management and any interpretive language that didn't use at least a just in time compiler with caching.

@nanook @fluffy

> The Chinese pattern has always been build one, prove it works, built a thousand so I am confident that they will.

That is how scale works, yes. That's not the Chinese method, that's everyone's method.

"It works" and "It works at scale" and "We can build the scale" are all different questions and they did the first one. If they do the rest, sure, that's great. I'm interested in cheap nuclear energy. As far as the likelihood that they do or do not do this, a nuclear power plant is not like building a cell phone. Maybe unforeseen problems occur. Maybe they don't.

Right now, though, no one has built thorium salt reactors at scale. That's it. I understand you would like them to be real and viable and I would like them to be real and viable but that has yet to be demonstrated so I am waiting. I am not building nuclear power plants at present so I have no influence on the outcome.

@nanook @fluffy I have heard you say that you think it is going to be easy. If it were easy, they'd already have a thousand plants. Unless Kirk Sorensen stood up a thousand plants, it's all unproven.

Making one of something is very different from making a hundred of it. I will believe that they can make a hundred when they make a hundred. Right now, it seems possible, it may even seem plausible, but it is not *done*. Telling me that they can is not going to affect my belief in whether or not they will do it, and there is no reason to convince me, since neither of us can affect the outcome.

There is also no reason: if you are reasonably convinced, then I will agree with you in a couple of years. There's no reason to hurry, is there? Do I need to have a positive belief in the practicality of scaling up thorium reactors *before* the thorium reactors are scaled up?

I'm fairly convinced that the reason we don't have cheap power is more or less entirely a political matter.

If you try to build one in a 1st world country, there's so much regulation that it's just not going to happen.

If you try to build one in a non-1st world country, you're gonna get bombed because "muh nuclear proliferation".

China is working on it, but they're probably facing quiet international backlash because once the cat's out of the bag, everyone is going to want one...

It's basically like Free Energy suppression, except it actually happens.