On 9/15/2012 8:07 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 3:11 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I'm giving a talk Monday on why we should be building molten-salt thorium
reactors
to replace the burning of fossil fuels for electrical power.
Brent,
That sounds awesome. Where will this talk be, will the presentation be put
online?
No, but I'm using a lot of material from here:
http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com/downloads/AimHigh.pdf
and the book "Superfuel" by Richard Martin.
I think the move from fossil fuels to Thorium reactors will have a stabilizing effect on
world politics. The U.S. would have little interest in the middle east if not for its
concern over energy resources. There is 10X the energy in the Thorium contained in coal
than we get from burning it,
Of course some people think giving humans unlimited power is like giving a 7 year-old a
machine gun.
and the release of radioactive Thorium (from burning coal) leads to the deaths of untold
thousands each year.
I think if humanity can survive the next 50 years without destroying ourselves, or
setting ourselves back into a new dark age, we will be in the clear, having surpassed
what Carl Sagan called a civilizations technological adolescence. In 50 years from now,
it is likely (given current trends) that the computational power necessary to emulate a
human brain will be very cheap and very efficient (more efficient than our current
brains which require 20 watts of food energy).
Yet, if we can power brains directly with energy (bypassing the photosynthesis cycle),
we move from needing 1 acre of farmland per person, to a 6 by 6 inch square worth of
sunlight to power each human brain.
So ignorant people being 'in the dark' wouldn't just be a figure of speech!
Brent
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