Here’s Your Sputnik Moment

By | April 24, 2011
4 Comments

[ UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Glenn!

Reviewing this piece, maybe I come off as kind of single-issue where energy is concerned. In addition to one with a serious energy policy, I could also get behind a candidate who recognizes that the solutions to our health care and higher education bubbles lie in automation (although the latter seems to be taking care of itself) and that 3-D printers are about to redefine the economy.

The solutions are there; we need leadership capable of recognizing them. Ideally, we want someone who sees that it's time for the humans to take over. ]

A rare political endorsement here at the Speculist.

I don’t care what party they’re affiliated with and where they stand on virtually any other issue (within reason), in 2012 I pledge my full support to the presidential candidate who outlines the most aggressive plan for implementing thorium-based nuclear power plants. And I’ll go door-to-door for any candidate who hedges such a plan against the solar singularity.

  • https://www.blog.speculist.com secondjab

    Totally and utterly support you on this (and you know where I live Phil). The Fukushima plants in Japan are forty years old and even in a 9 mag earthquake and 10-15 meter tsunami wave, far beyond the imagined worse case scenario, they was no Chernobyl scale disaster. If anything it proves just how safe nuclear power is despite their age. Newer Thorium reactors are many many times safer than that.
    Not relying on nuclear has given us global warming and hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. The Banqiao Reservoir Dam failure for example killed 171,000 people and made 11 million homeless.
    It is also extremely likely that we will get all we need from metamaterials and solar in just a few decades. Modern nuclear technologies will see us cleanly, and safely, to this future.

    Jab

    As I write this an oil company in Ireland believes they have found a trillion euros worth of oil of the coast of ireland (my original home).

  • https://www.blog.speculist.com blwang

    So then you will be supporting the next president of China. Xi Jinping.

    http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/04/china-academy-of-science-annual-budget.html

    China has announced the development project for a Thorium molten salt reactor (Jan 2011) and this is funded via the Chinese Academy of Science which has $3 billion per year in funding and growing at increases of up to 70% per year.

  • https://www.blog.speculist.com Phil

    He sounds great! Going door-to-door might be a bit of challenge, though. ;-)

  • https://www.blog.speculist.com dwwood76

    “And I’ll go door-to-door for any candidate who hedges such a plan against the solar singularity.”

    I don’t understand why one technology must be hedged against the other, as if it were a zero sum situation. Money and political capital should be poured into both technologies, if only for the fact that both have their own unique benefits. Solar is no ‘corn ethanol’ boondoggle, as I’m sure you agree, even though it is more fashionable politically and socially than thorium molten salt reactors.

    I am also excited about the developments in nuclear energy, but lets not the vapid adoration of solar that some ‘environmentalists’ have vs. nuclear to make us turn cold on solar.

    Apologies if I read to much into that statement I quoted!