It's just that I don't take anything anyone says at this point all that seriously.
From my perspective, the only candidate we have who is probably not intellectually capable of changing his or her mind is the one who is not a Democrat. If however, that person were somehow the Democratic nominee, I would still vote for him because, as detestable as he is to me, he is nowhere near as detestable as the orange racist criminal now in the White House. However, in that case, any hope of saving the world from climate change with the effective participation would be doomed.
That guy carrying on about addressing climate change is rather analogous to Donald Trump talking about addressing racism.
I note that my second choice candidate, Ms. Warren, has expressed views on nuclear power that are extremely dangerous and if practiced, would be fatal to any effort to address climate change. What Ms. Warren has, however, is a record of changing her mind when presented with facts. She was, after all, once a Republican. You know, I despised the guy, but Richard Nixon built a career on opposing communism everywhere and at all times. Thus it may be true that he was the only person who could establish relations with that country that I grew up knowing as "Red" China, a place that was as remote as Mars in the consciousness of children when I was a child.
Let me clarify something about thorium though. I am not opposed to the use of thorium. Thorium is a fine nuclear fuel with much to recommend it, particularly because it can be a breeder fuel in certain kinds of existing reactors, notably heavy water moderated reactors like the CANDU and Indian reactors based on the same technology.
These however, are thermal reactors, and thermal reactors are incapable, under any circumstances, of consuming the world supply of uranium that is already mined and, in fact, already chemically isolated. This is the famous or infamous "depleted uranium." This fuel is available immediately and there is enough of it to provide all of the world's energy needs for centuries without operating a single type of energy mine anywhere on the planet, no coal, no oil, no gas, fracked, unfracked, mined as sands or by mountaintop removal, none of it. In fact, it would be unnecessary to operate uranium mines if this depleted uranium were put to use. We would need less (or potentially no) coal to make steel for wind turbine towers, no furnaces to refine silicon for solar cells, fewer lanthanide mines, no nightmares of rapidly accumulating electronic waste, less copper, less aluminum.
Therefore while I do not object to thorium, I do object to the dubious claim that it is the best nuclear fuel. Thorium does offer certain advantages, particularly, over the long term, for the production of neptunium, for example, although the desired product of neptunium resources, plutonium-238, is accessible from americium-241, albeit not in an isotopically pure form. It is, I think, desirable to have uranium-232 from thorium for the denaturing of purified uranium, although anyone who is really interested in making nuclear weapons can do so with access to seawater; it is impossible to deplete all the world's uranium.
Nevertheless, thorium does not offer the same kinds of neutron fluxes that plutonium can and does. As there is now less and less time to act because we have focused on dreamy reactionary stuff that didn't and isn't and won't work, so called "renewable energy" and because the rate of deterioration of the atmosphere is accelerating, the plutonium uranium cycle can be scaled much, much, much faster.
To fully utilize the world's uranium resources, we need to operate on the fast neutron cycle. The currently developing various "breed and burn" reactors all allow for fast neutron spectra, Terrapower, NuScale, etc, etc. I don't think that these types of designs are fully optimized, and there are many features of them which I find less than ideal, but they are the right idea, to be sure.
I have convinced myself that the world inventory of plutonium in used nuclear fuels offers enough critical masses, along with inventories of americium and neptunium, that in a rational world committed to saving itself, it may be possible to scale nuclear energy at a fast enough pace to actually matter. One can show, that the uranium in American used nuclear fuel alone can power the entire world for decades, and do so, while providing a healthy dollop of neptunium. I am less confident that a thorium cycle can do this.
These things said, thanks for your comments. I certainly appreciate them and your insights.
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