TEN

WHAT WE MUST DO

In 416 a.d. a Roman bureaucrat named Rutilius Namatianus set out from the imperial capital to his homeland of Gaul. He wrote an account of his journey in verse, De Reditu Suo (“Of His Return”), and much of the long poem has survived. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Rutilius’s return was that he traveled by boat up the coast of Italy; in the final decades of an empire famed for its vast network of roads connecting much of the known world, Rutilius deemed a sea voyage safer and quicker: “I have chosen the sea, since roads by land, if on the level, are flooded by rivers; if on higher ground, are beset with rocks. Since Tuscany and since the Aurelian highway, after suffering the outrages of Goths with fire or sword, can no longer control forest with homestead or river with bridge, it is better to entrust my sails to the wayward sea.”¹

The traditional date of the fall of the Roman Empire is 476 a.d., when Germanic mercenaries under Odoacer deposed the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus. Already by the time of Rutilius’s homeward voyage, 60 years earlier, decline was inescapable: roads had decayed, aqueducts had collapsed, cities lay in ruins, and harbors had silted. The barbarian invaders who periodically sacked the Eternal City in the fourth and fifth centuries found plenty of evidence of decrepitude: dry aqueducts, fallen monuments, broken water mills. Numerous theories—210 by one count, from poisoning by wine goblets made of lead to moral decadence to the hiring of mercenary armies to replace Roman legionaries—have been put forth to explain the fall of Rome and the onset of the Dark Ages. One of the more recent, first outlined by Joseph Tainter in his 1990 work, The Collapse of Complex Societies, has to do with “energy return on investment.” ² Put simply, the energy required to maintain the Roman lifestyle—all those monuments, all those games and spectacles, all those centrally heated bathhouses—became more and more costly as the centuries passed, fertile cropland was depleted, and landscapes were deforested. The empire had to import grain from farther and farther afield, even as the imperial infrastructure—roads, bridges, aqueducts, grain mills, fortifications—fell into disrepair. Remote borders became harder to defend, and the army, the source of Rome’s might for a millennium, went underfed and unmotivated. Colonial mercenaries were hired to defend the empire that had conquered their people. At the end, Rome was a hollow shell that crumpled before barbarian hordes.³

“The great problem that they faced was . . . they would have to incur very high costs just to maintain the status quo,” Tainter told an interviewer for the 2008 documentary Blind Spot. “[They had to] invest very high amounts in solving problems that don’t yield a net positive return but instead simply allowed them to maintain what they already got. This decreases the net benefit of being a complex society.”

A pithier summary of our current dilemma would be hard to formulate. One element of Tainter’s thesis, of course, is that no single explanation for the collapse of a sophisticated civilization like ancient Rome would suffice; all 210 theories likely contain shards of truth. But the kernel, as the political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon describes it, is inarguable: “The Roman empire was locked into a food-based energy system. As the empire expanded and matured; as it exploited, and in some cases exhausted, the Mediterranean region’s best cropland and then moved on to cultivate poorer lands; and as its grain supply lines snaked farther and farther from its major cities, it had to work harder and harder to produce each additional ton of grain.”⁴

Many historians have noted the curious fact that, while the Romans were the greatest builders and engineers the ancient world ever knew, their technological innovation at some point stalled. Essentially, the development of water-driven grain mills and a vast system of gravity-driven aqueducts notwithstanding, the empire was built and run for a thousand years on the backs of animals and human slaves.

Exhibiting the slightly dotty fascination scholars have with Rome’s achievements, Homer-Dixon calculated the energy consumed in building the Colosseum, in terms of the farmland needed to grow the grain to feed the laborers and pack animals. He found that “the Romans had to dedicate, every year for five years, at least 19.8 square kilometers to grow wheat and 35.3 square kilometers—or almost the area of the island of Manhattan.” ⁵ Just to extract, transport, carve, and hoist into place the single keystone required nearly 1,300 square meters (or one-third of an acre) of farmland. The empire exploited the huge reserves of wood, peat, and coal found across its territory, but it was slave labor, fed by grain imported from across the conquered lands, that enabled not only the construction of awesome public buildings and monuments but also the cultivation of a martial aristocracy. When things began to unwind, though, there were not enough free Roman patriots to defend the Eternal City. Imperial Rome fell because it failed to diversify its energy sources.

Remarkably, an innovative technology existed to do just that. Rome was the first civilization to develop all the necessary components for the world’s first steam engine—but it never built one for practical use.

In the first century a.d., drawing on earlier works by Cstesibius and Vitruvius, Hero of Alexandria described an aelopile (ball of Aeolus, the god of wind), now considered the first device powered by steam. A Greek living under Roman rule, Hero devised a water-filled cauldron heated by fire, with a pair of tubes projecting upward from its lid. The tubes supported a metal sphere, spinning on its horizontal axis, with two nozzles, or tip jets, protruding from it and bent in opposite directions. Expelled through the nozzles, steam generated thrust that spun the ball.⁶ It was considered a marvel of ingenuity but something of a parlor trick; though Romans engineers knew how to build cylinder-drive pistons, which are water pumps without return valves, and gearing (as in water mills and clocks), they never thought to use steam to drive machines to perform labor. Why should they, when slaves were plentiful? And so for want of this tantalizingly small imaginative leap, the empire—majestic, built of marble, a thousand years old, and seemingly eternal—collapsed.

Why didn’t the Romans figure out how to use Hero’s steam engine to replace—or at least supplement—slave and animal labor? From a distance of nearly two millennia, that question echoes the one asked in chapter 6 of this book: Why didn’t the United States figure out a way to build and base an industry on molten salt reactors (MSRs)? That question leads, in turn, to the inquiry of this chapter: How can we do so now?

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IN HER MASTERWORK The March of Folly, the historian Barbara Tuchman catalogs a series of critical turning points at which governments and societies, trapped by the status quo and determined to maintain it, in the face of mounting contrary evidence, failed to leap imaginatively to take bold and rational measures to change the course of events. Tuchman called it “pursuit of policy contrary to self-interest.”

“Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government,” she wrote. “It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs.”⁷

However wooden-headed they seem in the light of current events and current science, men like Hyman Rickover and Milton Shaw acted out of unquestionable motives; they opted for light-water reactors and their presumed successors, fast breeder reactors, out of the belief that the evidence and the experience of hundreds hours of experiment and reactor operation so dictated. Nonetheless, Tuchman’s definition—“assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs”—applies perfectly. Ignoring the potential for thorium power in the 1960s and 1970s was shortsighted. To do so now would be folly, in the same way that the reign of Diocletian—the third-century emperor who prolonged the Roman Empire’s death throes by oppressing the peasantry, raising taxes to crushing levels, expanding a stifling bureaucracy, and building up the army through the employment of mercenaries—looks foolish 17 centuries later. Enacting the same policy that hasn’t worked to date, only more forcefully, is a concise definition of folly. It’s also an accurate description of the nuclear industry’s strategy for its twenty-first-century renaissance.

We are not Rome (to answer the question posed in the title of a recent best-seller by the journalist and historian Cullen Murphy). But our capacity for folly is equally boundless, while our ability to foresee our own demise far surpasses that of Diocletian or the other rulers of the late empire. Energy policy today, across the West but particularly in the United States, is determined by a toxic blend of wooden-headedness, economic self-interest, scientific ignorance, theology, and technological inertia. The nuclear power industry in particular has been ruled for decades by technological lock-in—the tendency of established technologies to crowd other, competing (and possibly superior) systems out of the market. Perhaps the most prominent and far-reaching example of lock-in is the supremacy of Microsoft and its Windows software platform, a technology considered inferior by many users and analysts that nevertheless controls about 90 percent of the personal computer market. The stagnation of nuclear power technology was recognized by economists long before the industry itself woke up.

“While an appropriate decision at the time, it now seems that light water may have been an unfortunate choice,” wrote Robin Cowan, a professor at the University of Strasbourg, in 1990. “One of the interesting features of this history is the belief held by many that light water is not the best technology, either economically or technically.”⁸

Overcoming lock-in requires a combination of business incentives, technological innovation, end-user dissatisfaction, and individual determination. With the exception of the last, all are evident in the energy industry today. Whether nuclear power executives and policy makers have the will to carry those forces through to fruition remains to be seen. Nearly every nuclear power executive and expert with ties to the existing nuclear power industry with whom I’ve spoken in the last three years has uttered some version of what Paul Genoa of the Nuclear Energy Institute said: “You don’t just walk away from that and try the new shiny toy, even if the new shiny toy might work better.”

In other words, we can’t do it because it’s not the way we’ve always done things. Given the degree of technological lock-in and institutional inertia that pervades the industry—not to mention the political paralysis that grips Washington—how, then, might the thorium revival actually happen? What must we do?

The baseline condition, the first thing that must happen, is for public perceptions of nuclear power to shift. Put simply, people have to see the risks and rewards of nuclear power more clearly—a task made more difficult than ever in the wake of Fukushima.

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BY WAY OF COMPARISON, consider two recent energy-related industrial accidents: the natural gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno, California, on September 9, 2010, and the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear accident that began six months later.

When the pipeline exploded in San Bruno, sending a wall of flame more than a thousand feet into the air, eight people in nearby homes died immediately. Thirty-five houses were leveled and dozens more damaged. Two days later, when the fire was extinguished and the rubble cleared, crews found a crater 167 feet long, 26 feet wide, and 39 feet deep. It was as if an asteroid the size of a refrigerator had gouged the earth.

The San Bruno explosion joined a rash of industrial accidents that included the April 2010 blast that brought down the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig, killing 11 workers and spilling about 206 million of gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. Others were the 2006 Sago mine disaster, which killed 12; the collapse of the Kingston Fossil Plant in 2008, which resulted in the largest release of coal ash in U.S. history; and the Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion that killed 29 miners, also in April 2010. Other countries, of course, were not immune: in July 2010 an oil pipeline exploded at the port of Dalian in northeast China, resulting in the worst oil spill in Chinese history.

The San Bruno disaster was also notable in that it involved natural gas, commonly thought of as a cleaner, safer form of fossil fuel than coal or petroleum. It was not unusual, however, in that PG&E, the owner of the pipeline, did its best to avoid blame and legal liability for the accident. Nearly a year after the blast, the company claimed in a court filing that it owed nothing to victims because third-party welders had damaged the “state of the art” pipeline. “The company also indicated it would seek to assign some of the blame for the losses from the explosion to residents themselves,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

In the Fukushima nuclear accident three people died: two young workers trapped in the turbine hall of Reactor 4 (ironically the only unit that contained no fuel at the time of the earthquake and tsunami), and a third man who died at Fukushima Daini, Daiichi’s sister plant nearby. The death toll is a facile and sometimes misleading unit of comparison; it will take many decades and billions of dollars to clean up after Fukushima, and the damage to the national psyche of Japan—a country that prided itself on putting to safe and peaceful work the force that had destroyed two of its cities—was incalculable. In the context of the natural disaster of the quake and tsunami, which killed at least 18,000 people, though, the nuclear accident was a footnote. And in comparison with the series of fossil fuel disasters during the previous four years, it hardly rates mention.

“It is the extent of Western civilization—its successes and apparent solidity—that magnifies the shock and terror on the occasions, however contained, of its collapse,” wrote the journalist William Langewiesche in his analysis of the 1994 sinking of the ferry Estonia in the Baltic Sea, which took the lives of 852 passengers and crew.⁹ That description applies powerfully to the Fukushima accident, which engendered a worldwide soul-searching into the history and future of nuclear power and led to at least three nations’ forsaking nuclear power altogether. It almost certainly hastened the end of the era of conventional uranium-based reactors.

More than other modern disasters, nuclear accidents inspire shock and terror. Arnold Gunderson, a former nuclear power executive who served as an expert witness in the Three Mile Island investigation and who has become a fierce Cassandra on the subject of nuclear plant safety, called Fukushima “the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind,” an extreme statement regardless of which unit of comparison you use. Several nuclear power advocates I spoke to, meanwhile, referred to Fukushima as “a minor industrial accident,” which is probably easier to conclude the farther you live from the east coast of Honshu. The stark differences measure the polarization of attitudes surrounding nuclear power. Either Fukushima proved, beyond doubt, the inherent danger of nuclear power (“If the Japanese can’t operate a nuke plant safely, nobody can,” commented many analysts), or it proved that even in a natural catastrophe of biblical proportions, far beyond any nuclear plant’s design margins, the loss of life and release of radiation from one of the world’s largest nuclear power stations was minuscule. There is little middle ground.

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WHAT FUKUSHIMA ALSO HIGHLIGHTED was the public’s misperception of risk. From its earliest days, the nuclear power industry has faced a fundamental risk dichotomy that is hard to clearly explain but has the power to startle the uninformed mind. Simplified, it goes like this: the chances of a significant accident at any single nuclear power plant are very, very small, a claim evidenced by the industry’s nearly 60-year record of operation. In many ways, nuclear power is one of the safest industries in the world today. The theoretically possible consequences of a runaway nuclear accident, however, are almost unimaginable. That was the point of the 1957 congressional report that found that the chances of a serious accident were remote but potentially catastrophic. And that’s why the Eisenhower administration considered the findings so inflammatory that it did its best to suppress the report.¹⁰

The media have long reflected this focus on the nuclear threat rather than its relative safety. A study by the University of Pittsburgh physicist Bernard Cohen of coverage in major U.S. newspapers found that, from 1974 to 1978, those papers ran nearly twice as many stories a year on radiation accidents, which caused zero deaths in that period, than on auto accidents (about 50,000 deaths annually). And this was before Three Mile Island.¹¹

I’m not arguing that the potential for catastrophic nuclear disasters should be ignored. And the nuclear power industry, by consistently underplaying the risks and being both unforthcoming and untruthful with the public, has compounded its own problems. Nuclear power executives rank with lawyers and politicians near the bottom of the list of trustworthy public figures. They have earned that mistrust. But it’s clear that the actual risks of nuclear power, as demonstrated by the industry’s record, are far outweighed by the public’s fear of radioactivity.

Compare the risks of fossil fuels. Despite the quarrels of some U.S. politicians and a few holdout junk scientists, there’s no question that, by continuing to burn huge quantities of coal, oil, and gasoline, modern societies are hastening the onset of disastrous global climate change. The risks are clear: in a century or less, many large coastal cities could be under water, millions of acres of agricultural land will have turned to desert, severe drought will be widespread, resource wars (particularly over increasingly scarce supplies of water and energy) will be common, and so on. The certainty of global warming, however, is for many people abstract and less persuasive than the small but real danger of a nuclear accident that has been amply displayed at Chernobyl and now Fukushima. Even many environmentalists remain implacably opposed to the expansion of nuclear power because their tenuous fears of radioactivity outweigh their certain knowledge of the consequences of continued reliance on fossil fuels.

In part the difference is time. The earthquake and tsunami that devastated parts of Japan happened in a few hours and the ensuing nuclear accidents at Fukushima unfolded over days and weeks. Global climate change is a slow-motion disaster, occurring over decades. Like Romans failing to notice that their bread is getting more costly and their soldiers surlier, we are baking ourselves to death in greenhouse gases while refusing to make the technological leap that would save us.

When it comes to nuclear waste, a subject even more clouded by politics and misinformation, the timescales are inverted: the small risk of radioactivity’s leaking from nuclear fuel stored underground is spread out across millennia, while global warming could profoundly change the world that our children and our grandchildren inhabit. “Time transforms risk,” wrote the economist Peter Bernstein, “and the nature of risk is shaped by the time horizon; the future is the playing field.”¹²

The distortions of time are multiplied by “the false belief that [our] tools could measure uncertainty,” wrote Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his best-seller about the miscalculation of risk, The Black Swan. “The application of the sciences of uncertainty to real-world problems has had ridiculous effects.”¹³ Taleb was referring mostly to the financial markets, where the tendency to overlook outlying and unlikely possibilities, which he terms “black swan events,” led to the economic crash of 2008. His argument is that, in planning for the future, it’s human nature not to account for highly improbable, yet far-reaching, disruptions—the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or the Fukushima tsunami—because our forecasting models are caught in the bell curve of predictability. Nuclear power is one of the few areas of modern life where the opposite is true: the merest possibility of black swan events (“another Chernobyl”) has enmeshed the entire industry in a net of fear of the unknown and the unpredictable. (The so-called war against terrorism is another; since 2001 fears of another devastating terror attack have poisoned American life and cost Americans billions of dollars, in ways both visible—long lines at airport security—and invisible—the economic costs of making America less welcome to other nationalities and other creeds.) Despite the nuclear power industry’s comparatively clear record of safety, nuclear energy’s potential, at least in the United States, has been stifled by risks that are almost too small to measure.

This timorousness is compounded, in the case of thorium power, by an inability to envision, and to make manifest, a different future for nuclear power— one not bound by the cost curves and risk graphs of the uranium era. Risk aversion in the nuclear industry takes two forms: technological and financial. Apart from the comparatively small group of scientists and engineers profiled in this book—many of whom are dismissed as dreamers and dilettantes by the nuclearati—most nuclear technologists are hemmed in by an incrementalism that eliminates the possibility of bold and visionary leaps. Only the smallest and most predictable next step is safe. Only small adjustments to existing technology are acceptable risks. Obvious counterexamples abound in U.S. history; the most obvious are the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program to land men on the moon. Both depended on technologies that did not exist at their inception; both called forth entire new industries based around those technologies, industries that promised no obvious profits before they arose; and both entailed high opportunity costs in that they demanded resources (financial and intellectual) that could, seemingly, have been devoted to other, more obviously attainable objectives. What has changed to render us incapable of summoning the will, confidence, and unity to produce similar achievements against a threat every bit as existential as our opponents in World War II and the Cold War?

The political system, most obviously. Early in the Obama administration, the choice was made to reform the U.S. health-care system rather than produce a far-sighted energy program that would shift the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels and toward sustainable sources, including new forms of nuclear power. Whether that was a wise decision is debatable; unquestionably, though, the current political paralysis in Washington (and, it must be said, the intransigence of the far right) prevents even a rational discussion of such a program, much less a national consensus around a daring and innovative technology such as thorium power.

The other change is in our financial system. Much as the thorium movement would like to see a “new Manhattan Project” for energy, current levels of governmental debt make that impossible, particularly for one based on a technology that most U.S. politicians have never heard of and that a substantial portion of the electorate would reject out of hand. At the same time, the evolution of the private-sector financial system—particularly venture capital and the stock market—favors quick returns over long-term investing, clear “exit strategies” over building new industries and new technologies for the common good, and consumer-focused technologies (mobile phones and applications, social media, new forms of entertainment) over large and complex infrastructure projects. It’s a catch-22: thorium power companies have a hard time getting funded without government support, and the government won’t support new technologies without demonstrated demand and investment from the private sector.

Boiled down, the challenges facing the thorium movement in the United States are twofold, with the one growing out of the other. First, the nuclear power industry as a whole is hamstrung by objections, mostly based on irrational fears of radioactivity, that nuclear power can never be “truly safe.” Second, those objections—along with the broader inertia of an entrenched and stagnant industry—have blocked technological innovation to such an extent that the idea of pursuing a dramatically new system, even one as tested and proven as liquid fluoride thorium reactors, is rejected out of hand. We can’t do it because we’ve never done it before, and even if we could do it, the public will never support it. This dual dilemma turns the discussion of LFTRs, and of fourth-generation reactors in general, back on itself in a pointless circle. It always comes back to the same point, and we are trapped in this moment of political paralysis, technological timidity, and financial insufficiency. There must be a way out of this cul de sac.

One way out can be glimpsed by looking to another powerful American industry that risked extinction by a combination of overseas competition, technological obsolescence, and simple folly. At one time it was the largest and most important U.S. industrial sector of all: the auto industry.

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THE STORY OF THE PHOENIX-LIKE fall and rise of U.S. carmakers is one of the most remarkable business dramas of the first decade of the new century, by any measure a tumultuous ten years for American industry. Here I will quickly review the sequence of events and then draw some big-picture lessons that could be applicable to the energy industry.

In March 2009 President Obama rejected the restructuring plans of GM and Chrysler, saying that their executives had not gone far enough in their strategy for transforming their businesses. At this point, the U.S. auto industry was shedding 120,000 jobs a month, and the two companies were on the brink of complete collapse. Recognizing that the liquidation of a major automaker would have a disastrous effect on the larger economy, which was already in the midst of the most severe downturn since the Great Depression, Obama committed the federal government to what amounted to a takeover of GM and Chrysler, eventually providing a total of $80 billion in loans and investments that gave U.S. taxpayers a large equity stake in the failing carmakers. Both companies entered bankruptcy that spring. While GM reached historic new agreements with its workers and focused on newer, more economical models, Chrysler renewed itself through a merger with the Italian carmaker Fiat.

By the end of 2009 both companies had exited bankruptcy and had begun paying back the loans from the U.S. Treasury. In the first quarter of 2011 both, along with Ford, posted quarterly net profits and were achieving their first sustained net sales gains since the 1980s. By early 2012 GM was once again the world’s largest automaker in terms of sales. The industry still faces major challenges—since 2007 more than half of all vehicles sold in the United States have been made overseas, a trend that is likely to continue— but its turnaround has helped stabilize the overall economy and helped the U.S. manufacturing sector add more than 300,000 jobs between the end of 2009 and early 2012. While the Obama administration has been criticized for its inability to bring down total unemployment (which, at this writing, stands at just below 9 percent), critics have been largely silent on the subject of the automakers’ turnaround.

That’s because the rescue of the automakers went against decades of anti-Keynesian, purist free-market economic doctrine. Declining to let market forces run their course, Obama chose to keep a pair of large companies afloat through large outlays of taxpayer dollars, and he explicitly involved the government in the day-to-day management of the foundering carmakers. In this case, industrial policy—for many years a term of contempt in Washington—worked.

Whatever you think of the principles involved, the bare truth is that the auto industry had become too big, too complex, too globalized, yet deeply intertwined with the fate of the nation for Obama, or any president, to stand by and let it fail. The same is true of the energy industry.

Here I’ll acknowledge that the differences in the two industries make this, to some degree, an apples-and-oranges comparison. While the auto industry and the electrical generation sector are roughly the same size in terms of revenues, the power sector is much more heterogeneous, with multiple big vendors (one of which, Westinghouse, is Korean owned), a half-dozen or so major plant operators, and a miscellany of suppliers and service providers. There are only three major U.S. automakers. The vast majority of the vehicle market is retail, consumers buying from dealers; power generation is a mix of wholesale and retail. The power sector is heavily regulated, the auto industry only in regard to vehicle safety and environmental limits. The Big Three are all public companies. The energy industry comprises a hodgepodge of investor-owned utilities, big public corporations, local co-ops, and so on.

Finally, and most obviously, the energy companies are not bankrupt. In some cases they are more prosperous than ever.

What’s more, the auto industry’s current recovery may well be a deathbed reprieve that only postpones the inevitable, much as Diocletian’s draconian reforms stabilized the Roman Empire enough to stave off collapse for another century and a half. But what worked for carmakers could work for nuclear power vendors and producers. From that experience we can draw five lessons for the energy industry:

1.There must be a sense of crisis.

Two major U.S. automakers failing in the midst of a global financial crash constituted a crisis. The majority of Americans see the prospect of catastrophic global warming as a crisis, but so far not enough (at least in Congress) see it that way to push through comprehensive energy policy legislation. At the same time, prominent Republican candidates for president refer routinely to climate-change science as a ploy for research dollars. But the prospect of failing national competitiveness, an unemployment rate of nearly 9 percent, and a staggering trade deficit might be a combination that could generate support for a transformed energy sector, based on alternative technologies, including thorium power, and generating billions in annual exports.

2.Broad social and national competitiveness goals, not just narrow “shareholder value,” must guide the transformation.

Globalization is an inevitable force, but that doesn’t mean that the United States should abandon entire manufacturing and technology sectors to low-cost developing countries. Having a strong and competitive auto industry is seen as a key national interest. So is having a strong, competitive, and innovative energy industry.

3.New technology must be the basis of the transformation.

With a few notable exceptions, the nuclear power industry’s plans for the next generation can be summarized as “the same, only more so.” Any broad nationwide energy strategy should promote, and require, the rapid development and deployment of new forms of nuclear power, especially liquid fluoride thorium reactors. “Generation III” technologies will not solve the energy crisis; thorium power can.

4.Government support is necessary, but it must be limited and conditional.

While the big automakers wound up repaying the billions invested in them by the U.S. government, the funding came with a price: they had to replace top executives and invest in new technology and new production systems. Also, the loans were explicitly temporary. Any program to transform the energy sector must come with equivalent conditions.

5.The transformation must draw on America’s competitive advantages.

Chrysler and GM were able to recover (or begin to recover) because they had strong production and supply-chain infrastructure in place, able managers who were not tethered to the failed strategies of the past, trusted brands, and a deep pool of experienced workers willing (or, rather, forced) to adapt to new terms of employment. The competitive advantages of the U.S. energy sector include the top engineering schools in the world; a vibrant alternative-energy investment market; a pervasive, though aging, power grid; and large numbers of experienced technologists and entrepreneurs who view the energy crisis as the signal challenge of the twenty-first century. Plus, we invented liquid-fuel thorium reactors.

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THERE IS A PRECEDENT FOR AN INDUSTRIAL POLICY explicitly aimed at fostering specific technologies in specific energy sectors: the lithium-ion battery industry. Since 2009, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Obama administration has invested about $2.5 billion in stimulus funds in companies, many of them start-ups, making lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles. Overseen by the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as ARPA-E, the program is rooted in a growing consensus that “U.S. corporations, by offshoring so much manufacturing work over the past few decades, have eroded our ability to raise living standards and curtailed the development of new high-technology industries,” as a cover story in the New York Times Magazine put it.¹⁴

This is overt industrial policy, but, like the bailout of the automakers, it has elicited few howls of protest from right-wing opponents. The energy policies of India and China—which combine mercantilist economics, the transfer of advanced technology from the West, and a specific focus on next-generation nuclear power, including thorium—raise the question: Is the energy sector too large, too complex, too globalized, and too intertwined with national security to leave to the blind forces of the pure free market? Put another way, are command economies and industrial policy better at building the energy sector of tomorrow than the unguided free market?

In advanced technology sectors like alternative energy, wrote Vaclav Smil, author of Energy Myths and Reality, “China increasingly attracts high-tech manufacturing because of its established networks of suppliers and infrastructure—both of which are comparative advantages created through government policies, not granted by nature.”¹⁵

Economic decline is no more foreordained by God than global climate change. And the ideology of unfettered capitalism should not prevent us from thinking and acting strategically about the future of energy and U.S. economic competitiveness. A transformed energy sector based on thorium power could be fueled by intelligent and far-sighted energy policies—admittedly a distant prospect in the current political climate—but the question remains: What would it cost?

The brief answer is more than the $2.5 billion handed to lithium-ion battery makers and less than the $80 billion poured into failing automakers.

Hector Dauvergne, of DBI, believes he can build a solid-fueled thorium reactor for less than $1 billion. Some leaders of the thorium movement have stated that it will take about $5 billion to build the first commercial LFTR, and about $1 billion to build a small prototype. The House of Representatives’ draft appropriations bill for all nuclear energy R&D in 2012 totaled $439 million, including $95 million for “nuclear energy enabling technologies.” That’s not nearly enough, but it’s a start.

Several attempts have been made to calculate the cost of electricity from liquid fluoride thorium reactors; these efforts go back to the late 1970s, when a group of Oak Ridge scientists headed by Richard Engel figured that the R&D costs for a thousand-megawatt commercial MSR would be $700 million, or $2.3 billion today, accounting for inflation—in line with current estimates by LFTR start-ups. The overall cost of electricity from a thorium-fueled LFTR plant, however, will depend on several variables, including the cost of capital, length of time to licensing, operating costs such as labor and overtime, the plant’s operating efficiency, and so on.

Basing his calculations on the work of Engel’s Oak Ridge team and factoring in the estimates for the variables I have just described, Ralph Moir, a scientist formerly associated with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in 2002 calculated the cost of electricity from a LFTR to be 3.8 cents per kilowatt-hour, less than either conventional reactors (4.1 cents/kWh) or coal (4.2). (New natural gas plants are considered to have among the lowest costs per kilowatt-hour, but natural gas is expensive to store and transport, and the gas industry faces serious environmental challenges around the practice of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”) Figures published in 2008 by the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s trade association, show a much lower cost for conventional nuclear power: less than two cents per kilowatt-hour. That figure is almost certainly low.

Several thorium supporters have calculated the “overnight costs” for a LFTR plant—the actual cost to build and start up a plant, excluding the interest paid to finance the project—and they came up with a range of $2,258 per kilowatt of capacity, plus or minus 30 percent. Thus, a one-megawatt prototype plant would cost $2.2 million in overnight costs, while a commercial thousand-megawatt plant would cost $2.2 billion. Other estimators have come up with costs as low as $1,400 per kilowatt—which, if true, would make the cost of new LFTRs roughly equivalent to that of new natural gas plants. (According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the overnight cost per kilowatt for new conventional nuclear plants is $5,335. For conventional natural gas, without carbon-capture and sequestration [CCS] capability, it’s less than $1,000; with CCS natural gas is $2,060.)

Much of this is pure speculation. Just getting a dramatically new design through the licensing process of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) could take a decade or two and half a billion dollars, which makes building the first LFTRs in the United States an unlikely prospect. For the purposes of this discussion, I will assume that it’s possible. At any rate, LFTRs have plenty of characteristics that will make them less expensive to build and operate than conventional nuclear plants—and should make them easier to license, too.

As I described earlier, LFTRs need less plumbing and fewer expensive safety features. Unlike conventional pressurized water reactors, liquid-core reactors do not need massive containment structures or superthick 600-ton pressure vessels (manufactured today only in Japan). Because fuel is reprocessed on the fly, planned downtime is virtually eliminated. While the cost of fuel is a minuscule portion of overall operating costs for today’s nuclear power plants, the abundant thorium used in breeder reactors will never see the price spikes hitting uranium purchasers today and will never be in short supply. The simplicity and modular nature of LFTR designs will make them easier to fabricate en masse and assemble on site. And insurance costs for inherently safe reactors will, over time, approach those of conventional power plants burning natural gas, for instance.

There is at least one fly in this punchbowl, and it has to do with starting up a LFTR. You need an external neutron source, specifically a fissile material, to transmute thorium into U-233 and begin the fission reaction. Thorium advocates have almost certainly understated this challenge, but it is hardly insurmountable. The United States has a stockpile of about a ton of U-233, largely left over from the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. True to form, the government plans to blend this valuable feedstock material with depleted uranium, rendering it useless. (Estimated to cost half a billion dollars, the blending program is set to begin at the end of 2012.) Many in the thorium movement are campaigning to prevent this wooden-headed plan. Once a sustainable number of LFTRs are up and running, they would breed enough fuel to ignite subsequent reactors. Any realistic plan for building and deploying thorium-fueled nuclear plants, though, must account for the cost of fissile feedstock.

Then there are the social costs, which are rarely factored into estimates for either fossil fuel or nuclear power plants. LFTRs are carbon free; their contribution to nuclear proliferation risks is near zero; they not only essentially eliminate the cost of long-term storage of radioactive waste but also provide social benefits by processing existing waste from conventional plants, making it easier to store; and they will jump-start a new era of energy technology innovation that will benefit the companies and the nations that build them in ways impossible to quantify today. Seen in this light, there’s no question that thorium power offers the most economical avenue to bring online massive amounts of new generating capacity without adding to current levels of carbon emissions.

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WHILE A NEW MANHATTAN PROJECT is not going to happen, some form of government support is necessary. Transforming the energy sector is too large a project for the private sector alone. That’s the fundamental dilemma that faces the thorium movement. However, there is a middle way, involving higher levels of federal support, a conscious industrial policy to foster advanced nuclear power, and broad incentives to harness the entrepreneurial energy of the private sector.

Congress and the White House should establish a matching funds program, aimed exclusively at two or three technologies, including thorium power, to drive the creation of a Generation IV reactor industry that would swiftly—within this decade—build prototypes and then small commercial versions, first to supplement and later replace the current collection of outmoded plants, then to replace existing coal plants. The government should overhaul the NRC to streamline the licensing process and favor Generation IV designs over incremental, halfhearted advances. It should explicitly benefit start-ups, like TerraPower and Flibe Energy, not just established vendors and manufacturers like GE, and it should promote homegrown technologies like the LFTR. And it should be conditional on not just submitting new designs for licensing but bringing reactors into commercial production in the shortest time possible. With matching investments coming from the private sector, the program should provide at least $2 billion a year and no more than $5 billion, for a total of $4 billion to $10 billion a year.

Many conservatives and liberals alike scoff at the notion of significant funding for new nuclear power—or, indeed, for renewable energy projects such as wind farms and solar arrays. In September 2011 Solyndra, the California-based maker of solar panels, filed for bankruptcy protection after receiving a loan guarantee for more than half a billion dollars from the federal government. Critics of renewables funding, such as Robert Bryce, seized on the Solyndra affair, which threatened to turn into a major political landmine for the Obama administration, as evidence of why the federal government should never “pick winners” in the energy sector.

Here it’s important to recall that, as of late 2011, investment by the United States in new energy sources was paltry compared with that of the countries of Western Europe, to say nothing of China. The Solyndra debacle represented less than 3 percent of a loan program that had delivered $19 billion in private capital for reshaping the energy economy, creating thousands of jobs in the worst employment environment since the Great Depression.

For further perspective, keep in mind that, according to the Nobel Prize– winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, in 2007 the Iraq War was costing $720 million per day.¹⁶ Big Oil subsidies are also huge in comparison with investment in alternative energy. In 2010 the Government Accountability Office found that the oil industry’s waiver for royalties for deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico—originally passed by Congress in 1995, when oil was selling for $18 a barrel—“could cost the Treasury $55 billion or more in lost revenue over the life of the leases.” The federal government is already picking winners—it’s just backing the wrong horse. Simply requiring big oil companies operating in the Gulf to pay half the usual royalties for extracting oil from U.S. territorial waters would fully fund a nuclear power transformation program through 2020, at no cost to U.S. taxpayers. The tobacco industry has funded billions of dollars in health-care and prevention programs to move toward a smoke-free society. Let the fossil fuel industry take a large role in funding the movement toward a carbon-free society based on thorium power.

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SO, LET US ASSUME THAT A NUCLEAR POWER transformation program is fully funded. The goals are to:

•Build a prototype LFTR within five years

•Commercialize LFTRs starting in 2020

•Bring LFTRs on line at a rate sufficient to replace fossil fuel plants with clean energy sources by 2050

How much power would that be? The United States consumed about 3.8 million gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2010. Coal accounted for 44 percent of that, nuclear for 20 percent. Total U.S. electricity-generating capacity is about 1,000 gigawatts. Under an optimistic scenario for renewable energy production from wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, and so on, let’s say that, to reduce carbon emissions enough to stave off catastrophic climate change, by 2050 we must increase the portion of our electricity generated by nuclear power to 50 percent. One half of 1,000 gigawatts is 500 gigawatts, or 500,000 megawatts.

Electricity demand will grow in the next four decades, of course, by as much as 50 to 60 percent in some forecasts. But I’m being optimistic. So let us say that improved conservation technology and changing consumer habits will limit the increase in demand, and we must build enough new nuclear power plants to generate 500 gigawatts by 2050. That’s the equivalent of 500 thousand-megawatt nuclear reactors. Between 2020 and 2050 that means building about 17 LFTRs a year. Let’s be ambitious and call it 20 new thousand-megawatt thorium plants a year, for a total of 600.

One of the beauties of LFTRs is that they can be mass-produced. Small, modular LFTRs can be built as 250-megawatt machines and assembled into larger plants. Boeing builds about one $200 million jet a day. A modern airliner has many, many more moving parts and greater overall complexity than a 250-megawatt LFTR. If we build, say, four LFTR manufacturing plants a year with each plant producing 20 250-megawatt reactors (five 1,000-megawatt plants) a year (think of the jobs and spillover technological benefits each plant would bring to the state in which it’s located), that would just about do it. And from 2050 to 2100 we can build another 400 plants, until we have created 1,000 gigawatts of thorium power. By the end of the century, we will have built a safe, clean energy infrastructure based on a mix of offshore and land-based wind farms, big solar arrays in the West, geothermal, and natural gas plants, layered on top of a baseload power-generating sector of thorium reactors. Particularly in the Southwest, these plants will use excess heat energy to desalinate seawater.

How much will this cost? Technology advances will bring the cost of thorium reactors down rapidly after commercialization, potentially to the cost of a new jet. Call it $1 billion per thousand-megawatt plant. The cost of building 600 thousand-megawatt LFTRs (or twenty-four hundred 250-megawatt machines) would come to $600 billion. Add 15 percent for start-up costs and financing and round up: $700 billion. In comparison, the 2010 budget for the U.S. Department of Defense was $685 billion. In other words, for about what we spend in one year on defense in wartime (which, by the way, is almost as much as all other countries spend on defense combined), we can lay the foundation for a thorium-based, carbon-free energy economy that could last a millennium. And most of that construction cost will be borne by private industry, which, thanks to the expedited licensing and speedy construction of LFTRs, will generate profits from this construction boom in a short timeframe. Consider the costs, direct and indirect, of building any other thousand-megawatt power plant (coal, conventional nuclear, solar, natural gas)—or of doing nothing and allowing climate change to run rampant by midcentury. Building a couple dozen LFTRs a year starts to sound like a bargain.

Alvin Weinberg’s vision of a nuclear-powered world running on molten salt reactors will become a reality a couple of generations later than he foresaw.

These are ambitious goals. What, then, must we do to pull them off? To create a thorium energy economy in the next decade, three things must happen at once: funding, licensing reform, and R&D. I have already described the funding mechanism that must be put in place quickly, by the end of 2013. Licensing reform and R&D—including the development and procurement of the needed materials and fuel—must occur in parallel. The president should order the NRC to expedite its licensing process so that the period from application to final approval is no more than five years. That means that by 2015, while a prototype LFTR is being built (at the Savannah River Site, Idaho National Laboratory, or Oak Ridge), companies will begin submitting applications.

At the same time, you must have fuel to start up all those reactors. Two kinds are required: fissile fuel to ignite the chain reaction and transmute thorium into uranium-233, plus the thorium itself. Luckily we have plenty of both. The Department of Energy (DOE) has more than a ton of U-233, produced by past thorium reactor experiments, on hand. Foolishly, the DOE is planning to spend half a billion dollars to blend the U-233 with U-238 and throw it away in the desert. That plan must be scrapped and the U-233 put to good use as starter fuel for LFTRs.

As for thorium, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that total thorium reserves in the United States are about 440,000 tons, mostly in Montana and Idaho. If we assume that future LFTRs will achieve an energy efficiency of 50 percent (half the available energy in a given unit of thorium is actually converted to electricity), then a single ton of thorium would produce about 12.1 billion kilowatt-hours (or 12.1 million megawatt-hours) of electricity. About 1,650 tons of thorium would satisfy all the electricity needs of the entire world for a single year. Since LFTRs can be run as breeder reactors, producing more fuel than they consume, 440,000 tons is effectively a limitless supply of nuclear fuel.

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THE NEXT STEP, once a prototype reactor has been built and tested, is to build a series of liquid fuel reactors to burn up the plutonium and fission products from existing spent uranium fuel. Kirk Sorensen has proposed a type of liquid chloride thorium reactor, a cousin to LFTRs, that will consume transuranic fission products and use plutonium to create uranium-233. The U-233 will be used to start up new LFTRs.

Next we must create the infrastructure to manufacture LFTRs. The expertise to build these machines is dispersed among a cadre of start-ups described in chapter 9, including Flibe Energy, DBI, and so on, as well as among the big nuclear suppliers like GE and Westinghouse, which already, in some cases, have R&D programs for liquid-core reactors. As has happened in the electric vehicle market, the actual manufacturers would likely include established companies (GE), start-ups (Flibe), and joint ventures combining the two. States will compete to host the new plants with tax incentives, university-based R&D support, and training programs to provide the skilled workers. (Here it’s worth noting that the Navy has for years been training recruits with only high school educations to be shipboard nuclear engineers. The new thorium power industry will create thousands of skilled, high-paying jobs that do not require a Ph.D. in nuclear physics.)

It does no good to build carbon-free thorium reactors if you don’t get rid of the existing nuclear and coal-fired plants. Decommissioning nuclear reactors is a long, involved, and costly process. A typical decom costs $300 million and takes a decade; an extreme case, like the Hanford Weapons Reactor, can cost billions and take many decades. Ways must be found to bring down that cost. One way would be to build new LFTRs on the sites of old nuclear plants and use the new thorium reactors to consume the fission products from the old machines.

As for coal plants, new regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will lead to the retirement of dozens of aging facilities in the next few decades, regardless of what type of new plants come on line. In July 2011 the consulting firm ICF released a report saying that, while shutting down existing coal plants will take longer than foreseen in the EPA deadlines, 30 to 50 gigawatts of coal-fired electricity production will be retired in the coming decade.¹⁷ Total coal-fired generating capacity in the United States is about 314 gigawatts. Shutting down 50 gigawatts of that every decade, and replacing it with safe, clean thorium power, will eliminate coal from the U.S. electrical portfolio by 2070.

These are achievable goals. Remember: the obstacles to creating a thorium power economy in the next 40 years are not technological or even economic. They are political and perceptual. If we don’t do it, it will be because we chose not to—not because it was impossible.

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HERE IS WHERE THE CURRENT nuclear power establishment—the nuclearati— guffaw and roll their eyes. There are a hundred reasons why the scenario I’ve laid out will not happen, they say. Uranium is inexpensive (for now), the existing reactor population is safe (except when it’s not—see Fukushima), plenty of new reactor designs are less radical than LFTRs (which is why they won’t make enough of a difference), and so forth. We can’t do it because we’ve never done it before.

They are right about one thing: the United States is not likely to be at the center of the thorium power revolution. Here’s a more likely scenario.

Discovering the advantages of thorium technology, the Chinese accelerate their program to build a dozen LFTRs in the next 15 years. They recruit the top thorium talent in the world and co-opt the nascent Japanese program, signing lucrative contracts with the top nuclear suppliers in Japan and South Korea, thus compressing further the R&D timeline. By 2030 China is the leading source of LFTR technology—and of raw thorium fuel—in the world.

India, watching its Asian rival move rapidly to the fore in advanced nuclear power, shifts its three-stage program to a more accelerated development schedule based on solid fuel technology from TerraPower and Lightbridge. Using its huge reserves of thorium as leverage with other emerging thorium power nations, such as the United Arab Emirates, India builds a thriving thorium power sector, building reactors at a slower pace than China but, by 2030, becoming a leader in its own right. Enhanced energy security, and the economic power and diplomatic prestige that come with it, allow India to reach a lasting détente with its perennial foe, Pakistan.

Farther east, on the Pacific Rim, both Japan and South Korea rapidly build thorium reactor technology sectors, supplying China and India with the advanced materials and components they need while starting to build thorium reactors of their own. By 2030 the fastest-growing source of electricity in Asia is thorium power; by 2050 liquid fluoride thorium reactors are supplying a significant fraction of the power not only in China, India, Japan, and Korea but also in secondary, technology-importing countries like Vietnam, Taiwan, Singapore, and Indonesia.

Watching this transformation unfold in Asia, the nations of Western Europe—led by France, Norway, and the Czech Republic, already in 2012 the home of significant thorium R&D efforts—belatedly underwrite their own thorium power programs. While the European Union attempts to establish its own thorium power technology sector, low-cost equipment and fuel from Asia prove irresistible, and China becomes the Saudi Arabia of the new nuclear-powered world.

And the United States? Saddled with debt, paralyzed by wooden-headed political opposition to taking action to reverse climate change, and bound to powerful fossil fuel and nuclear power sectors and their well-funded lobbyists, the United States enters an irreversible cycle of declining living standards, diminishing international stature, and ravaged cities. Civil unrest ensues, and the collapse of our political institutions accelerates. Our top graduates, unfulfilled by their professional prospects at home, emigrate to booming technological centers like Shanghai, Singapore, and Seoul. Our vaunted military, unable to procure energy for its far-flung overseas missions, contracts. As in fourth-century Rome, the roads decay, harbors silt up, the legions become disaffected, and the elite retreat into their marble palaces. All because we failed to capitalize on a technology that we once held in our hands.

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THAT’S A WORST-CASE SCENARIO. And it’s hardly inevitable. So what are the chances that Congress will back a technology that, though proven and tested decades ago by American scientists, is seen today as a radical new system? What is the likelihood that the American public will support a new form of nuclear power so soon after Fukushima? How plausible is it that Silicon Valley venture capital funds will provide billions to thorium power start-ups?

One answer to all those questions is: no more likely than it was, in August 1939, when Albert Einstein wrote President Roosevelt to urge development of atomic weapons, that the United States would design, build, test, and detonate a nuclear warhead within six years. The Manhattan Project, which mobilized vast intellectual, material, and technical resources in a short amount of time, is often cited as the paradigm for solving big and complex problems. General Groves’s list of essential requirements, born out of his Manhattan Project experience, has become famous in management theory circles: “Put one man in charge, give him absolute authority, keep the chief outside the bureaucracy, use existing government organizations whenever possible, create a small advisory committee,” and so on. To that list, based on the experience of the nuclear power industry, I would add, “Keep military concerns separate from economic and energy-related goals.” One main lesson of the thorium power debacle is that for too long we have polluted nuclear power policy with rationales and missions produced in the Pentagon. What a disgrace it would be if the United States—the cradle of nuclear physics, the country that first designed and built liquid-fuel thorium reactors, the greatest source of technological innovation the world has ever known—failed to muster the resources and the will to create the energy source for the twenty-first century and beyond.

Forests have been consumed to produce books wondering whether we, as a nation and as a people, are still capable of Manhattan Project–sized achievements and, if not, why not. The declinist school, it must be said, is in ascendance, exemplified most clearly in books like The End of Influence by the Berkeley economists J. Bradford DeLong and Stephen Cohen: “The American standard of living will decline relative to the rest of the industrialized and industrializing world. . . . The United States will lose power and influence.”¹⁸

My middle-aged, well-educated American friends unquestionably have a waning confidence that they will pass on to their children and their grandchildren a world as clean, safe, peaceful, and full of promise as the one we grew up in. Unimaginable budget deficits; rising competition from populous and dynamic Asian countries; declining educational, moral, and cultural standards; the rise of seemingly insurmountable environmental crises; the coarsening of public discourse; and the disappearance of inspirational, admirable leadership have all contributed to our sense that we now live in a Spenglerian era of Western decline. A New York magazine cover line actually referred to this as the era of “Post-Hope America,” the same week Foreign Policy magazine’s cover headline asked, plaintively, “What Ails America?”

So, when I think about what I’ve seen reflected in thorium’s glossy surface in my three years of research, it’s simple: hope. Hope that technology can lead us out of the mess into which technology has gotten us. Hope that through divine Providence or intelligent design or the random workings of quantum mechanics, Earth has been granted an inexhaustible energy source that will not destroy the systems and balances that sustain life. Hope that my son, now 12 and a gifted mathematician, may help engineer a thorium power revolution that will solve the energy crisis, dissipate the threat of nuclear annihilation, restore a sense of higher purpose and collective endeavor, and keep the lights on for another few millennia at least. In about a century and a half, the Age of Hydrocarbons delivered us a world of shrinking ice caps, resource wars, mass extinctions, and creeping drought. It could take us less than a century to reverse those trends and usher in the Age of Thorium.

For millions of years, thorium has been there, awaiting the right time, the right circumstances, and the right minds to bring it to light and enable it to provide thousands of years of clean, safe, affordable energy. Alvin Weinberg was right. The time is now. The technology exists, the economics are favorable, and the need is urgent. The choice is ours.