A Thorium-Salt Reactor Has Fired Up for the First Time in Four Decades

> Building tornado-hardened designs in tsunami zones does not pay off

The big issues are keeping our construction, engineering, and regulatory agencies active with the subject material and with industry, and allowing saner reactor technologies into commercial use.

Fukishima was not far off from surviving that catastrophe as was. More robust training for emergency response would have avoided them pumping the water the wrong way, and something as simple as raising their backup generator a few meters off the ground would have done the trick.

More vitally, pushing techs into commercial production like thorium-salt reactors (among many others!), would provide failure modes that are INSANELY better than what we get from light water reactors. It's just about the most insane thing to do with radioactive power sources... surround them with something under pressure that violently expands and tries to go right to the atmosphere...

I think the tsunami zones should be fine for reactors, we just need to start with reactor designs that will thrive in failure. Your molten salts turning into rock and keeping themselves contained during a breach or flood, for example, is something that's highly amenable to disaster planning.

More importantly: any such rebranding would ignore how we got into the current predicament to begin with...

Oil, gas, and coal companies have known about climate change for decades, and it represents a threat to untold megabillions worth of profits and business. It is no coincidence they have been pushing anti-nuclear FUD, sponsoring hack research, pushing "green" blogs, NIMBY campaigns, and such for decades. Coordinated, professional, smear campaigns masquerading as environmental issues.

Leaked presentations and marketing materials have shown those companies have triangulated the issue quite simply: They cannot win on facts. They cannot convince everyone to keep fossil fueling it up on the merits of their argument. They can, however, cause enough confusion and knee-jerking to keep the "debate" about climate change open to paralyze political action. They have also pushed pie-in-the-sky green solutions which are superficially satisfying but fundamentally entrench their interests until we're past the point of no return. Push the starting line so far forward that we just have to give up.

That the "environmentalists" on the left have spent 20+ years pushing the strategic interests of Big Coal and Big Oil using their resources and bad science is the result of willful manipulation. That manipulation is a response to the threat of atomic energy and climate change legislation in light of our global infrastructure cycles.

That is to say: if you call fission "grandmas apple pie" it will be a very short time before we're all convinced that grandmas apple pie is dangerous, impractical, too expensive, poorly thought out, not scalable, not feasible, and impossible to do right. Forget what the stats say. Do not look at Ontario. Pretend France is not real. There will be blogs. There will be glossy signs. There will be "grassroots activism", tweet campaigns, and coordinated messaging about Big Grandma and the cancerous properties of Pie. The anti-GMO people will now be anti-grandma, too.

We are playing a game against well-connected oligopolists... We only get to win if we win. They get to win if they win, or if the clock runs out. So guess what the strategy is?

There are quite a few issues which this site goes into quite well https://whatisnuclear.com/articles/thorium.html

Basically you can make reactors using it but it would probably work out more expensive than conventional ones.

Is ngate some kind of let's rain shit on hacker news kind of site? Because it looked like that.

Or people could read the articles. For most topics don't want to bother to have a discussion with someone that only knows what was in the TLDR comment. Maybe it's a little too Aristotelian for your tastes but I think taking the time to read the article is a decent barometer for genuine interest in discussion. If I wanted to read lulzy drive by comments on articles based of what was in a TLDR I would not frequent HN.