This is a 40 minute video discussing energy economics, specifically WRT Thorium. I started to hijack the recent solar power thread, but decided against it.

Robert Hargraves - Thorium Energy Cheaper than Coal @ ThEC12 - YouTube

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A fine bit of hijacking it was, too! OD offers opportunities for free education with remarkable frequency. I didn't know about the thorium reactor and I learned a lot from the links and further searching.

Good good. IMO molten salt reactor tech is more likely to positively influence the world's energy (and political) problems than anything else that I am aware of. Not many people like to talk about it though. I'm also glad to hear of Chinese progress on it, for a couple of reasons.

1. They must use nuclear. No other energy source comes close to meeting their projected growth in demand.
2. LWR's (current tech) are finicky, and need a lot of well trained baby-sitters. That kind of thing can't scale well.
3. We're down-wind of any probable nuclear accidents.
4. If they used coal, we'd be worse off pollution-wise than with periodic Chinese nuclear accidents.

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Remember, Safety Third!
'99 E300 Turbodiesel, '82 300TD, 1996 12V Cummins Turbo, '94 Neoplan - Detroit 6V92TA

5. Burning coal releases a fair quantity of radio-isotopes into the environment.

Coal is a thor loser?

Nice one!

Yeth. That theem to be the cathe.

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Remember, Safety Third!
'99 E300 Turbodiesel, '82 300TD, 1996 12V Cummins Turbo, '94 Neoplan - Detroit 6V92TA

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Annoy a Liberal, Read the Constitution

Great response!
Of course it does open the question of what is in your mind that you made that connection. It must be a strange place, indeed. ( Not a criticism--I still suffer from some form of attention deficient disorder--As I told my similarly affected son--its a 2-edged sword--sometimes you will lose people as you make what seem to you to be normal transitions in a conversation but others don't can't follow them., OTOH, those same sorts of leaps enable you to seem very creative.) Was that an example of what happens?

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1982 300SD " Wotan" ..On the road as of Jan 8, 2007 with Historic Tags

Damned if I know what was in my mind. I rarely know why thoughts pop in and out. Sometimes on reflection I might rationalize cause and effect, but that is perilously circular. Sometimes I get things in dreams, too. It's all okay with me as life would be incalculably boring without it.

CO2 remains a great plant growth accelerant.

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1982 300D 202K
1989 300E 125K
1992 940T

"If you dont have time to do it safely, you dont have time to do it"

"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."

That's true. I'm aware of a series of greenhouse experiments in which Spartina (a saltmarsh grass) grows more vigorously with elevated CO2 & temp.

A downside of CO2 & temp increase is lower O2/CO2 ratio in the ocean. This is bad for life. In the Triassic (IIRC) this shift led to a few million years of anoxic oceans and low O2/CO2 atmosphere in which most living creatures could not live above sea level due to lack of oxygen.

There is more that we don't know about climate than we know. Today is a good predictor of tomorrow, but not perfect.

On the a closely related topic, following is a long video of an informal presentation on so-called moving wave technology. Both this and Thorium based reactors as shown in the previous video are being investigated by B. Gates and developed in China. This video goes into far more detail than the other.
http://www.viddler.com/v/6d865d05

But of course, this technology has ZERO chance of attaining maturity without government interference and funding.

If the market place is left as the motivation to innovate, things like this will INDEED obtain maturity.

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2001 SLK 320 six speed manual
2014 Porsche Cayenne six speed manual

Annoy a Liberal, Read the Constitution

Here is the solution to our energy needs:

Rats--can't post the picture--look at yesterday, and today's "Pearls before swine" comics.

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1982 300SD " Wotan" ..On the road as of Jan 8, 2007 with Historic Tags