Interestingly,much of the Thorium is apparently in existing mine tailings. Reprocessing those tailings to extract the Thorium could provide an avenue to clean up that mess in addition to providing clean energy. Perhaps even the non-insane segment of Greenies might warm up to the idea of Thorium nuclear reactors?
"… The study has claimed that thorium resources in the country’s mining waste ‘remain totally untouched’ and if properly extracted could be large enough to end the worldwide dependence on fossil fuels.
Researchers further allege that five years’ worth of mining waste from an iron ore site in Inner Mongolia contains enough thorium to meet American energy demands for over 1,000 years. …"
Of course, this assumes the zeal of such ‘activists’ is aimed at actually solving problems. My sense is, rather, if this really turned out to be a solution to the energy crisis (is there one?, or is it, too, mandmade?) they would slither on to the next ‘crisis’ necessitating the rest of us to get on board their shiny new bandwagon.
I have the same comment about liquid fluoride thorium reactors more effectively exploited by the Chinese communists (or should I say fascists) than the West, as I did in the 1980s regarding Soviet orbital launch vehicle economy compared to the shuttle.
The West should not try to beat the communists or the fascists (as the case may be) at their own game.
Their game?
For communists it is centralizing control in the public sector. For fascists it is centralizing control first in the private sector via monopolies and then controlling those monopolies whether by government or by oligarchy. There’s no clear line of distinction here. It is a spectrum.
The US has been playing the fascist end of the spectrum in the wake of the recentralization of the internet with social network effects in Silicon Valley. I suspect the Indians think that they can play that game better than our indigenous elites. They are probably right. But that won’t be enough to beat China. They really shouldn’t have gotten rid of guys who built Silicon Valley to make way for their upper caste, keeping around a few tokens of the old days.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the US lost the plot somewhere in the 1970s/80s. US research into thorium reactors was shelved; the space effort was put on the back burner; the SuperConducting SuperCollider was abandoned. As Adam Smith observed long ago – there is a lot of ruin in a nation. However, not an infinite amount, as we are learning.
Chalk it up (approximately) to what Peter Thiel almost gets right in this interview:
Where he goes wrong is failing to recognize that the Manhattan Project generated no new science. It applied existing science toward a utilitarian objective. The misidentification of the Manhattan Project with “science”, as opposed to what it was, technology aka engineering, is what got people thinking “Big Science” wasn’t an oxymoron. That, in turn, was what destroyed science. The same thing happened at a different level of abstraction with the Apollo Program which didn’t so much destroy science as it did technology/engineering as evidenced by the Shuttle suppressing progress in access to space for several decades.
War harvests and consumes more than it produces – and the Apollo Program was of a piece with war. Communism and fascism are both war machines – collectivization of the true “fountainhead” of creativity:
Individuality.
When Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon, we won the “space race” against the Soviets and entered two decades of diminished expectations.
The Apollo program elicited something deep within Americans. Something almost primal. Apollo was President Kennedy’s “New Frontier.” But when Americans found it was terminated as nothing more than a Cold War contest, we felt betrayed in ways we are still unable to articulate – betrayed right down to our pioneering souls. The result is that Americans will never again truly believe in government space programs and plans.
And just to be clear, my reference to “fountainhead” is not to lavish praise on Ayn Rand who appropriated individuality for an oligarchic version of fascism that we’re now seeing emerge with Trump’s Pirate Ship’s failure to recognize that property rights are founded on the flesh blood and bone of individual masculine heroism – a failure that equates “skin in the game” with something other than skin.
