The presidental candidate from a few years back, Andrew Yang, even championed thorium reactors in the US, and now here we are.
Andrew Yang also championed hiring a management consulting firm to identify areas of inefficiency in the federal workforce and cut 15–20% of current government workers, assigning KPIs and sunset clauses to all Congressional legislation, and assigning AI life coaches with Oprah’s voice to people in need of marriage counseling.
So, a very mixed bag of ideas. Few of them had a serious implementation behind them. Yang loved to noodle, but failed to explain where the novel technologies and extra-constitutional authorities would come from.
Cool, but I am more excited about the French maintaining a fusion reaction for over twenty minutes.
I remember reading somewhere that the US started work on Thorium reactors in the 60s and 70s, but abandoned work for reasons. China picked up on that old work.
“Rabbits sometimes make mistakes or grow lazy. That’s when the tortoise seizes its chance,” Xu told the meeting, referring to the US abandoning its molten salt reactor research in the 1970s after initial experiments.
American scientists pioneered molten salt reactor technology – including building a small test reactor in the 1960s – but the project was shelved in favour of uranium-based systems.
“The US left its research publicly available, waiting for the right successor,” Xu was quoted as saying. “We were that successor.”
From the article
