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Originally Posted by kach22i
Cute.
Adorable.
Let's be serious, they are inseparable.
A couple of years ago CBC Television out of Canada broadcast a what I recall as a three to five part series. It was on the history of oil, started with whaling ended with the North Sea.
The post WWII part with Britain and Iran, and the US with the House of Saud was mind blowing.
The way these coexisting partnerships were orchestrated to rule the world disrupted much of what I thought I knew about geopolitics.
If you are a Canadian resident you can probably view it on line, wish I could remember the name of the series. I have a roof top TV antenna and watched it live.
My point is, the more you know about the history of oil, the more you understand economics, politics and the world today.
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However, innovation needs freedom from some of this burdensome politics to allow movement.
During the 80s, I worked on Star Wars Accelerators. The imposition of federal and local regulation would have made the work improbable if not impossible. We were given a "black box" dictum - they would regulate only what comes out of our black box. Of course, we were out in a desert local in sealed, underground concrete bunkers. Nothing but our air needed to be regulated and checked. This sort of careful hands off attitude is what is needed to make nuclear power innovations possible. A few billion in investment isn't needed if your oversight doesn't bury every step in a mountain of paperwork and regulation because of fear.
Molten salt reactors have been made and run, the biggest hurdle is materials. Much of this is currently being explored by graduate departments in various universities here and abroad. A few hundred million more in granting would see a greater increase in this particular research. The involved and somewhat messy operation of liquid nuclear fuel refining can be done in a "black box" situation with several hundred million more in incentives. Go all in once a technological path comes to fruition. Now you can build modular molten salt reactors by bidding it out. These would only need a few acres to house the reactor and power generators as well as on site waste processing. Security teams would not need to be as vigilant as only when the need to move certain nuclear material after processing is there a window for terrorism.
Once you have a safe nuclear alternative, renewables truly become an option for a growing society.
Now, couple this with chemical storage of renewable electrical energy...