But first, one of my favourite twangers, not twanging in this case, though there are some licks that have a sniff of a pedal steel in them. If you know Gatton, you’ll know this isn’t his steady diet, but it seems he could do just about anything. I’m terribly thankful that he wasn’t camera or microphone shy, and there is a lot of his playing available.
The real mainstream of tonight’s symposium ( steal a quip from Tom Lehrer, another of a different ilk, but worth a listen), is nuclear energy, particularly the recent statement by a group of respected (outside of the Heritage/Fraser Institute crowd) climatologists, including James Hansen, that we need nuclear energy to make the transition to an economy eventually centered on renewables, solar, wind, tidal, geothermal and the like. As I watch the plume of radioactive cesium from the Fukushima disaster spill out across the Pacific Ocean, I recoil in horror from such a concept. The idea of feeding the beast that is the nuclear industry with all the forever-in-practical-terms waste it generates, the vast corrupt business and government connections it maintains, the general willingness to cut corners in the name of profit and the inherent danger in corralling a runaway fission reaction strikes me as being repugnant and counterproductive in the extreme, almost on a par with the continuation of the use of fossil fuels, with all the attendant pipeline, rail, fracking, refinery and distribution infrastructure, and, of course, the myriad layers of labyrinthine connections between those same industry and government structures.
Then I spent a bit of time yesterday watching a Youtube video, when I could, and perhaps should have been studying to become more Gatton-esque, about molten salt reactors and the use of thorium rather than uranium. I won’t go into the gory details, most of which are irrelevant, nor can I get into the physics, but it seems as though there is legitimate expectation that this technology could, and should, replace our current nuclear infrastructure. Here is the video:
So I did a bit of a quick search and found the company that is looking to propagate this technology:
And this morning, a former student posts a link to this on Facebook, stirring the whole thing up some more:
Industry Tap: Thorium Powered Automobile
Not that the process of reconversion isn’t fraught with pitfalls and dangers, but it almost looks like one of those offers that’s too good to be true. And even with the promise of plentiful and non-polluting energy (or, shall we say, less-polluting), there is the constant danger that the whole scheme, like so many others, will fall prey to the rapacious control behaviour of the same clique that is responsible in large part for the corner into which we have backed ourselves.
Finally, from the wonders of the information age, a closing statement from the aforementioned Tom Lehrer: