Thorium. Is it the future of clean energy?

The industry is very conservative by nature. It spent decades perfecting its safety systems and procedures to make failures like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nearly impossible in modern reactors. The industry and its regulators view new molten salt proposals with considerable skepticism, and obtaining licensing approval for those new power plants may prove a nearly insurmountable hurdle. Development and construction costs, even for well-established and proven nuclear power plant technologies, have historically been extremely high and projects have experienced very long delays. And then there is the glaringly obvious question of why we are not allocating all the available resources we have to renewable technologies.

Even without subsidies, the cost of these technologies is now lower than that of most fossil fuel electricity generation. Battery storage technology combined with smart grids spread across different continents and time zones appears to have the potential to create a very stable and well-balanced

energy

supply for the vast majority of the planet if adopted multilaterally. Large investors are watching the graphs of the cost curves of renewable technologies versus traditional

energy

production technologies change so rapidly that you would have to be a very brave billionaire to invest your profits in any project to build a power plant. nuclear energy, let alone a completely alternative alternative. ,   commercially unproven technology.

There are a few, though, and one of them is Bill Gates, so we may come back and see exactly what he's up to in a later show. However, it arguably comes down to this... the IPCC tells us that we have less than 11 years to get our act together and put in place extremely strong measures to bend the carbon emissions curve rapidly towards zero by 2050 and, with luck, limit the atmosphere of our planet. warming will be between 1.5 and 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Is 11 years enough time to design, develop, test, license, build and operate a new wave of nuclear power generation plants on a scale that could significantly contribute to the eradication of fossil fuels?

Or do we continue with the renewable energy strategy? It is undoubtedly a very controversial and divisive debate. You definitely have an opinion on the topic and, as always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments section below. That's all for this week. It's time to say a big thank you to everyone who's joined our Patreon page's growing team since our last show, and to thank those who have recently started supporting the channel with $10 a month or more. They are Mike Jones, Vijaydev Ramdev, William Halford, Jackson Blythe and Anders Hjelmare. If you would like to participate in the Just Have a Think project and help influence the channel's content through 2020 and beyond, visit our page at patreon.com/justhaveathink.

You can also support the channel completely free of charge by liking this video and sharing it on your social networks. And most important of all, the best show of support is to subscribe to the channel and press the bell icon to help improve our profile with YouTube's search algorithms to get the message of climate change mitigation to as many people as possible. people possible. You can do it very easily by clicking there or on that icon there. As always, thank you very much for watching, have a great week and remember to think about it. See you next week.