Glancing through the objections, the non-political ones all seem to boil down to "We don't actually know that they work at commercial scales, because we've never used them at commercial scale before." Well... yeah... but as an objections go, it's hard to imagine a much weaker one. If that's the best technical argument the detractors have, that says quite a lot about their arguing position. On the other hand, they seem to have the potential to fix some very real objections to nuclear power from the uranium cycle.
If that's the best technical argument the detractors have, that says quite a lot about their arguing position.
I'm surprised, jerf, to see this kind of comment coming from you (as I take care to follow your comments on HN). If investors are only interested in a technology after the government lavishes your tax dollars and mine on developing it, to me the technology is surely less promising than a technology that develops mostly through private investment. People spending their own money usually does better at identifying technologies with a large upside than efforts to get government backing for this or that "strategic" or "breakthrough" technology.
The current way that objections to nuclear power from the uranium cycle (the kind of power I enjoy here as I type this) are usually dealt with is try any and every technology other than nuclear power. I agree with the statements in this thread that "nuclear" by itself isn't a label that indicates that the power source is bad, but I point out that private investors seem to be seeking to invest in a lot of other kinds of power sources more than they are seeking to invest in thorium.
AFTER EDIT: I spent a while just now searching for a linkable version of the special report on the world natural gas market published in The Economist a few months ago. (I don't know what prompted the downvote that came while I was doing that.) I haven't found a link yet, but I have to recommend that special report section of the print edition of The Economist to anyone who hasn't had a chance to read it yet.
The statement from my top-level comment above that I'm being asked to defend is "I'm not aware of any part of the world where local politics would make a thorium plant more likely than another wind power plant or natural-gas-fired power plant. So maybe thorium power generation is a technical solution looking for a problem." But I'll come right back at anyone who claims that thorium power has a big future by asking, do you have a solid estimate how much it will cost to produce electricity with thorium, considering the entire technological process from mining to by-product disposal? The production of natural gas by "fracking" is revolutionizing the world energy economy
and has probably given the development of renewable energy sources two extra decades to become economically competitive. That's enough. Green energy development is a necessity around the world,
and all the other modalities will be researched and receive further commercial development. By the time thorium power could come on line, you and I and everybody will have renewable energy at competitive cost, with natural gas having bridged the transition.
AFTER SECOND EDIT: Thanks for your reply, jerf, which was posted as I was writing my first edit. Every which kind of power generation, as the references I've just added to this comment make clear, is developing in a market distorted by tax-funded subsidies. Better to let purer market forces sort out the trade-offs among different energy sources. I was just reminded that pg, our site founder, has been following this industry for a long time.
"After all, projects within big companies were always getting cancelled as a result of arbitrary decisions from higher up. My father's entire industry (breeder reactors) disappeared that way."
My comment is that any Baby Boomer who read about physics as a kid (like me) heard about thorium DECADES ago, and has heard thorium repeatedly mentioned as the energy source of the future, a future that never comes. Paul Graham's dad worked for one company in the power industry, and my late dad the industrial engineer worked for another company in the industry, manufacturing electric generators for power plants. The power sources that spin electric generators were always dinner table conversation in my home when I was growing up. I think thorium is a very interesting fissile element, but my person guess about future power development is that there will never be a thorium power plant in Japan, in Germany, in the United States, or even in nuclear-plant-friendly France.
I did limit myself to the non-political issues. Political problems need political solutions. I'm personally more interested in the foundational problem of do they even work, technically and economically. If not, that eliminates the need to consider the political case at all. And the political issue ends up sort of circular; we can't build them, because we can't build them, because we can't build them. Not interesting to me personally. YMMV (no sarcasm).
The whole private vs. public issue is really obscured by the extreme, extreme regulation surrounding the entire area. I suspect it's overkill, while at the same time I can't deny one does not want to live anywhere near an unsafe power generation facility. (I did start to say "nuclear reactor", but it's more general than that, really.)
Honestly, in this case I'd much rather trust the government (more specifically, certain sects of it) than investors in choosing and funding technologies. The government may be corrupt and unwieldy and inefficient, but it is operating on (I would argue) a better feedback loop that acts on much more data (not only scientific, but social as well) and with a much better scientific workforce.
While much of it is unfortunately directed in part towards destruction and warfare, the projects are above and beyond what investors are investing in.
Just a quick look at the Microsystems group projects:
"The Casimir Effect Enhancement (CEE) program seeks to manipulate forces very near surfaces to enable control of small-scale phenomena, including nanodevice adhesion and friction. The objectives of this single-phase DARPA program are to demonstrate unambiguous detection, neutralization, and dynamic manipulation of the Casimir force to modulate between normal and neutralized states. Some approaches to these program goals include the development of new materials, engineered nanostructures, or active elements. Recent research activities (models and experiments) have already identified manipulation of the Casimir force as an important challenge."
Edit: To clarify the feedback loop comment: I think the jury is still out on the effect of economic incentives. In my opinion, looking at the degradation of privately funded pure research over the last 30-40 years (Bell, Xerox PARC, etc), economic incentives are only effective once someone (usually academia funded by the gov't) has laid the ground work. Investors will not do that.
The post you're responding to doesn't even mention government investment; it simply says it's silly to be skeptical of a technology because you don't know that it will work at commercial scale before trying it at commercial scale, because this is true of literally every technological innovation ever, regardless of whether it's publicly or privately funded.
It would seem to me that uranium-based nuclear power itself would never have been developed or commercialized (indeed as a byproduct of the military use first being developed) without massive government investment.
I don't see this argument as a specific counterpoint to Thorium-based nuclear power. That said, I am not particularly informed as to the benefits or drawbacks of Thorium -- I'm just observing that the counter-arguments don't seem to be particularly specific to Thorium and could have easily been applied to Uranium-based nuclear power had this been 1932 instead of 2012.
You know, a lot of private investors dumped a lot of money in the dot-com boom also. Everyone has heard stories like "If you would have invested $100 in Polaroid / Apple / what have you when they first started you would be a millionaire right now". That kind of thinking drove the dot-com era, and I think it is the same kind that is driving the alternative energy market. Many sources won't make it, but some will probably make it big.
An MSR reactor investment is not at all like a dot-com investment. One can use science and math to determine the facts about what an MSR can and cannot do.
Hey Strawman! Let's not compare investment in new, non-mature businesses like dot-com businesses in 2000 for which almost none of them had any sound profit building plans, with the energy market, which is a very well known industry with clear, regular paying customers.
I'm not drawing a comparison between the business models, I'm just pointing out that often times investors will jump on something that is "the future" even if the risk is high, because the rewards for success are even higher. So how is that a strawman?
Because you are comparing two very different situations and saying "the same kind that is driving the alternative energy market". The dot-com era investment was born out of the anticipation that the Internet was somehow going to revolutionize everything and that investing now would be rewarded at a later date, even if the business did not even any idea how to make money then. The energy market is not driven by the same investors, not the same companies. Energy groups are multi-national companies generations dozens of billions of revenues, and they are the ones funding the future initiatives, and I seriously doubt anyone could kickstart their way in the energy market because of the investments required to start anything from scratch.
There is nothing that could be as remote as these two markets.
