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Comments by "" (@rstevewarmorycom) on "Motherboard TV: The Thorium Dream (Documentary)" video.

Okay, but we drill wells now that deep for oil. Just sayin'. One hot dry rock geothermal can supply thousands with power.And there is always ground source geothermal, the simple difference between the air temperature and the temperature of the ground a few feet down. Think air conditioner run backwards, temperature difference produces electricity, or at least heats your house.
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Three, water reservoir/hydro is eminently usable to store the vastly available wave power near the ocean, and four, using the batteries in everyone's electric cars to power homes is entirely sufficient if you heat the house with passive solar absorber retrofit and greater insulation and install shallow tube geothermal to assist heat. Even conventional plants use these methods to store power for peak loads. The deficiency you're pretending exists is now regarded by power analysts as a sick myth.
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Another myth. Wind blows some places and not others, sun shines some places and not others. Storage can be batteries, or compressed air in underground tanks, or molten salt on site for solar thermal plants, or water reservoirs pumped up from a lower body of water. Tidal can be used to pump vast amounts of water uphill to a small hydro dam reservoir. A cubic yard of water moving up and down is a LOT of energy. When the sun shines and wind blows, the power goes into your electric car's batteries.
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Pssst. Hey kid, governments are not profit industries, they have to give away every dollar they get, usually MORE than they get. The rich fight the people to control the government to make them richer. That's what this is about. Don't let them confuse you. The rich don't care what power we use, just whether they already own it, so that we have to keep paying them. The government is the people's attempt to restrain the rich from enslaving all of us. Don't run government down till you understand.
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Believing that people would use thorium or any quick fix as a stepping stone to renewables is forgetting the first oil crisis and how little people learned then, and how it allowed them to put off changing their ways one more time.
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@claus11212 Another big problem with Thorium is that they are not wildly profitable. The rich probably won't buy them for you because of that, so for now you can wish and dream, and waste time not getting ready for the coming scarcity.
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@howlinman801 No, no, when I got out of school the nearby reactors in CA both gave me job offers, unsolicited. They were having trouble getting help, I guess. Carlo Rubbia's ideas on Thorium are very persuasive, and he's a nice man, but the costs are quite extreme. If you think the USA can afford that in an economic slump, I don't think you're thinking. The estimated cost of nuclear, whether or NOT it's U-235 or Thorium cycle is daunting!! And to completely replace oil and coal its nuts.
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@howlinman801 Forests grow well there. Wood IS renewable, you know. Using super-efficient pellet and bricquet stoves, you can meet any unmet need for heat that isn't met by insulating, berming, and retro-fitting homes and buildings for solar heat. Also, hot dry rock geothermal can be used anywhere. At a depth of 3 miles there is hardly a place on earth that won't boil water. Also, last I looked at the DOE map, i.e., just now, you get plenty of wind AND solar. As much as Germany.
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No, the phrase is: "to all intents and purposes". I told you this once before. The reason the rich prefer thorium to renewables is that they can own the reactors and you can't. The cost of thorium is irrelevant.
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@benzlikeawillow Lots of Strontium-90 and Cesium-137 if you must know. Both DO have short half-lives, around 30-50 years, but that only means that they are HELLACIOUSLY radioactive for all that time, and much harder to handle than even the current kind of waste, despite currently making lots of it. Nuclear is NOT, repeat, NOT sustainable. Even the thorium runs out in a few hundred years.
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@jdmuhly Says the disinformationist hired by the rich.
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You have NO idea yet what the unintended consequences of thorium might be. Don't let the boy geniuses lead you down the garden path again, please. They never know what they don't know they don't know.
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@IntarwebUser That's what they don't WANT to tell you.
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First they killed the deer and wondered why the wolves started attacking their herds, so they killed the wolves, and so on and so on, and this is just another one of those rash foolish steps into unintended consequences. Don't do this, go for solar and wind and hot rock geothermal (which is probably cheaper) and tidal, and insulation and windows, and solar water heaters, and photovoltaics and solar concentrator thermal generation. all you can do is burn your hand if you're stupid.
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@RamsesReturns And so do you want these same people to get fatter giving you thorium power? Make no mistake, that IS what you'll get going that way!!
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@A1234567890J1 Because lots of people would be dead.
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Yeah, but that has nothing to do with it. We ship power right now a greater distance than we would have to do if we used highly delocalized renewables. And where the fuck do you get off telling me how to speak? What are you, some backward backwoods Xtian Fundie religioso who is still living in the Dark Ages? Nothing I said above was a "personal attack" on you, it just happened to have discredited you, and THAT'S REALLY what you don't like!! IF you didn't know, now, THIS is a personal attack!!
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@jdmuhly In the future our cars will be our home's power supply. Their batteries will be fed by and will feed the grid and your home in times of low solar/wind. The distributed battery storage for 200 million electric cars is monstrous. More than enough for our needs. And batteries are getting MUCH better right now. DBM's new Kolibri battery is under half the size of previous, twice to three times the capacity, and weighs 1/3 less than previous. And it charges in MINUTES, not hours.
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The total of tidal and wind and solar even out the available supply to meet the demand 24/7. Link a bunch of relatively close locations by the grid and you have an even more reliable supply. Store energy in electric cars and water reservoirs and you have it. The solar thermal plants right now store for nighttime load using molten salt vats, and they run their generators all night.
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@motim92 So how do you think they make the concrete? They use OIL!! That will raise your gas prices till you don't even want to SEE your car anymore.
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That's because they were limited to a safe size, but of course the profit motive will always try to make it produce more than it should or could safely. The people with the money will find a way to fuck up a sunny day!
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@utubesqueeze Correction. In one MINUTE the solar energy hitting the earth is greater than the ENTIRE energy production of humanity! An area the size of Rhode Island can produce enough to power the entire WORLD! AND the are of the world's roofs is three times that size!!! Wake UP!! This is 20.000 times more than the entire energy budget of the world right now. By the way, geothermal is of similar scale. The wind can do 25% and could do a lot more, but it might change the climate.
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@motim92 You have no idea what you're talking about. Go research reactor containment vessels and the amount of concrete involved. As for wind turbines, little concrete is needed.
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@larstheu Sun shines everywhere too. Solar can make hydrogen, or crack CO2 to oxy and pure carbon, closed loop fuel system!
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This myth has been blown away again and again by power industry researchers. The cables already exist, you simply don't localize most renewable energy, you spread it around and connect it to the grid so the grid has to pass less power from place to place. The grid only passes energy when there is a localized deficit. Example, every electric car is the backup for its house. The grid needed is less than we have now.
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@DanielMatotek Confused Youth - Governments don't get rich. Rich people get rich. They always try to buy the government to make themselves more rich. Thorium would cost plenty to use, more than solar/wind/geothermal/ /being careful/conserving. And the money would all go to the rich, just like it does now.
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@bth0mpson "Current Solar Technology grows less efficient with subsequent use and service" - Doubletalk. Meaningless drivel. Solar is everywhere. Put heavy manufacturing in the southwest, distributed solar for electricity, solar thermal for local heat apllications. We already have that amount of surface in ROOFS. Nano-cables unnecessary.
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@howlinman801 I know precisely how they operate, I'm a physicist who once almost got hired to run one. The things you obviously don't know about thorium is enough to fill several books. You'd better read up on what its opponents say before you consider yourself "informed", otherwise your NOT informed, you're just hopping on another desperate bandwagon to scare these nasty spooks away for just a little longer, delaying the problem to a time your children will be REALLY SCREWED!!
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The propaganda about thorium can be traced directly to an effort by GE reactor division to delay its demise for just a little longer and to hell with the rest of us. Ask what they're not telling you about thorium, look up the old data and see!
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@DanielMatotek You don't get it. The rich ARE the government. they WANT thorium so they can charge you for it and get lots RICHER. What they DON'T want is solar/wind/tidal/conservation, because their wealth would shrink rapidly!
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Sure, it could work, if the capitalist greed doesn't compel them to run the reactors on the cheap, lying and dirty. These people can fuck up a sunny day with their greed and you want to trust them about this stuff once again?? It could be cheap, but not cheaper than learning to make and control our own energy at home. Do we really want a solution to everything that just lets people remain stupid and stay degraded mindless consumers?
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@Campagnevoorvrijheid You fuel cars with thorium it will be gone in 100 years! What you just watched, boys and girls, was a commercial, meant to get your support, NOT to tell you the truth, NOT to explain it carefully, but to convince you that they'll take care of you, just send them all your money.
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@howlinman801 So if we're going to suffer a shortfall no matter which one we choose, it would be less at crossed purposes to have people begin to take responsibility for their own energy, refit their homes, install enough solar to maintain a semblance of an advanced technical civilization until we get more of whichever infrastructure built to do this, which may take decades or longer. How long do YOU think it takes to build 3000 nuclear reactors??????
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I WAS a geek boy genius far too long already in my life, and I'm tired of unnecessarily overly-complex technological answers to problems that are actually more personal, social and political. And the food, my god, the food, if you let them make your fertilizers for you that can only grow genetically stupid versions of the real food plants, ones with less nutrition, and if you let them degrade the soil till the water table collapses, you won't even have to worry about energy.
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@bth0mpson Consistency is now being provided in two ways, diversification of supply across multiple time zones and regions, and by solar thermal storing heat all night in salt vats to use till morning. Every analyst of solar has said that the notion of consistency of supply for solar is a myth. The combo of solar, wind, and hot salt storage and pumped water storage and pressurized ground storage more than makes up for any inconsistency. Add that to electric vehicle storage your done
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@motim92 Yes, dirty little nasty U-233 bombs, look it up. No, we don't have any, we like the efficient U-235 kind. But any insane Islamic state would LOVE some. Why should a reactor use petro-energy? YOU GOTTA BUILD IT! You can't USE it till you BUILD it. What? You want to build one, and then use it to build two more, etc? Fine, but what will you tell Joe Blow when he says, "Hey, the fuggin' reactor's workin', where's my fuckin' power?" He don't wanna wait 20 years to get the rest of them done.
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@5THunderlord Betting on undemonstrated technology is a bad bet. Fusion hasn't worked yet, no evidence it will be workable by the time we need it, which was yesterday.
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@motim92 Sure, but at the expected rate required it would only last 50 years, and then we'd be stuck once again. So do you think the folks who ignored the 1970's gas crisis when oil got cheap again wouldn't go back to sleep using thorium? And a reactor complex requires buttloads of concrete and earth-moving to build it, nearly a half billion barrels per unit to produce, energy that would be better spent on a PERMANENT solution, and which we'll never HAVE again for anything else.
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@everclarity0 Since thorium produces U-233 this is puzzling, because it's the easiest of all isotopes to build bombs with. It's easier to handle as waste, but other things it produces, even if in smaller quantities are MUCH MUCH worse!!! Do the research! GE is trying to re-sell you on reactors, to stay in the reactor biz, nothing more.
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"Current Solar Technology grows less efficient with subsequent use and service" That's a completely meaningless and baseless sentence. It's even uncertain as to what you think you're talking about. Solar "the size of Texas" is another intentional misreading of previous statements. We don't need more than one third the square area of the home and building roofs in this country to amount the the area that WAS stated. Who pays you to lie and distort the truth this way??
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@utubesqueeze Put it in the Sahara and the southwest USA. Store solar thermal in molten salt vats. 24 hour power all over Europe and north Africa and the middle east. The estimates are that half the world could be powered from only 30 miles by 30 miles of the Sahara. The USA only needs a 20 mile by 20 mile hunk of Arizona. We don't need nuclear, all it makes is heat, sun makes plenty of that, like I said, NaCl, table salt melted in earthen receptacles, a natural product of solar desalination.
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The cable exists, they are called steel. And we use them every day, probably you're using one right now. The grid needs to be updated slightly, it doesn't need to be fucking magic for renewables, and that's your stupid vicious LIE. In fact, if renewable energy were delocalized more than power plants, we'd need LESS of a total grid than we have now. And with molten salt storage and water reservoir storage, and storage in electric cars, we will need a less intensive grid than we have now!
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Who pays you to tell these lies for the fossil fuel/nuclear industries? These aren't even new lies, these are the old lies that have been demolished for a while now, are you trying to get a little more mileage out of them from the uninitiated?
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@5THunderlord Ain't there, won't be for decades. sorry bud.
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A bridge to the future sounds like a nice idea. But if it costs more than just building the solar/wind/tidal infrastructure now, then what's the point? And every estimate says it would. Amory Lovins and many others have done the math for the last 40 years on this stuff. ANY nuclear is more expensive in the long run, waste storage, decommission, initial costs, high technology required, than any of the purely green alternatives. Wind has it beat by a factor of FOUR! Do it right the first time!!
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@bth0mpson Where do you get such lies, make them up? Or are you PAID to say them? It doesn't take Texas it takes one third of the roofs of buildings and houses. And there's no need for "nanotech", are you daft?
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@jimbalio On the other hand, IF you DO want to survive, if you DO want a permanent solution to one kind of shortage followed by another till death, then bite the bullet and learn how! STOP driving, live close to your work, make small personal battery vehicles, install solar, vote for wind, tear up your lawn and grow vegetables and raise chickens, tear out every other suburban house and garden that land, grow vertical gardens in city buildings, and give up some freedom for safety.
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@MiniGeek31337 Which is why nobody lives in that county now.
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Geothermal only 10 feet below ground plus solar passive can heat every house and building on the planet. That's 30% of all energy consumption right there. Eliminating waste makes another 30%. The last 40% is needed for transport and industrial. That can be met by solar, wind and tidal. Hot dry rock geothermal can be gravy on top of that, if done safely away from fault lines and not too deep. All the energy we'd ever need. Easier than solar or wind.
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"solar and wind (even placed optimally) do not always run. Therefore these huge grids you're talking about really aren't practical." This statement proves you know little of modern power technology. One, wind that doesn't blow one place usually blows another, and that's true to some degree of solar by time zone's. And two, even current solar thermal plants right now use molten salt vats to store the day's heat to generate at night.
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@jdmuhly If you don't do it, it will do it for you. You're attacking the messenger for the message. All I'm telling you is the simple truth you don't want to hear.
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@stiffyschlong There's nothing at all wrong with technology, there's only something wrong with using it blindly. What we need is technological usage that is light on the eco-system and that people take responsibility for, not mindlessly turning on light-switches, but planning their energy consumption and generating it by their own care and industry and effort.
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You must be a shill for the rich. How much are you paid to lie?
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@howlinman801 Renewables are actually cheaper per Watt NOW when compared to the estimated costs of thorium reactors, and whichever way we go we're going to have a shortfall of available energy for decades to come as oil gets too costly. You simply can't build reactors that fast in a strapped nation, the concrete alone is daunting, we can only make a finite amount of concrete per year unless we all give up using petrol for anything else. Making concrete gobbles tons of oil.
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@jimbalio Do the math, it can't. Ask the people who do. Ask the DOE, ask Amory Lovins. A quick fix that delays the problem will only make us even shorter on supplies when we run out of thorium than we are now. A quick fix is an immature approach to a much more serious problem. If America tries that, America will undoubtedly die of shortage in 50 years, if not on the way there. Of course this species seems like it wants to die, so maybe that's for the best.
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@howlinman801 You're going to have people wanting solar and wind power just because the thorium reactors won't go online any time soon, so since they're going to do that no matter what because they need it, then why not go that way altogether?
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@MiniGeek31337 And that's why 2 counties are still not inhabited??
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@benzlikeawillow It produces bomb material like crazy, which they think is a GOOD thing because it's easier to store it in BOMBS!
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@allgoodpeople No, they just need better mathematicians to count the costs, and to realize that solar, wind and geothermal is WAAAAY cheaper than any nuclear scheme. Noble Prize winning physicist, head of LLNL, and head of the DOE Stephen Chu says that if the land used for most nuclear reactor reservations was used instead for solar PV, the same power could be produced as that reactor would produce! YouTube has a video of it.
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Do we want to wake up and have to go through this whole learning curve all over again when the thorium runs out in 500-1000 years? Do we want to remain the serfs of the rich and have to pay for energy that should be ours just for living on the planet? We have the chance to end ANY dependency on limited expendibles virtually forever, do you really want to give that up again just for the quick fix promised by the geek boys just so you don't have to learn anything?
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Anybody who believes this propaganda that is being hyped about thorium had better look carefully at the things these people are NOT telling you. Ask them the exact nature of the waste from thorium, how easy it is to make bombs from it, and why the reactors required would cost us vast amounts of our remaining petro-energy and how we would be back where we started in 50 years when we run out of thorium.
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@jdmuhly That's merely an opinion that won't work.
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