<story><title>Thorium</title><url>http://austinmeyer.com/project/thorium/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ajkjk</author><text>This writing style makes me actively distrust anything written in it. It&amp;#x27;s the opposite of convincing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>I agree, and I&amp;#x27;ve been thinking about why that is. It starts with Szilard&amp;#x27;s understanding, and then misstates that it &amp;quot;was realized in 1945&amp;quot; (the year the bomb dropped on Hiroshima), but anyone who has read about atomic energy knows that the Szilard tested his theory with Fermi in Chicago as Chicago Pile 1 [1] in 1942.&lt;p&gt;Secondly, it presents the choice of molten salt versus pressurized water reactors (PWR) as a binary choice when it clearly isn&amp;#x27;t. Running a reactor is a &lt;i&gt;process&lt;/i&gt; not a simple act. Fueling and &amp;quot;cleaning&amp;quot; molten salt reactors is an additional burden on the reactor&amp;#x27;s operation. If you put the number of &lt;i&gt;processes&lt;/i&gt; you have to develop to run a molten salt reactor to the number you have to develop to run a PWR, there are fewer processes for a PWR. So from a development stand point the PWR is the MVP of reactors. By the time the research was available on the needed processes for Thorium[2] nuclear power was already under siege [3].&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Chicago_Pile-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Chicago_Pile-1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Anti-nuclear_protests&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Anti-nuclear_protests&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Thorium</title><url>http://austinmeyer.com/project/thorium/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ajkjk</author><text>This writing style makes me actively distrust anything written in it. It&amp;#x27;s the opposite of convincing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xori</author><text>Same, author glosses over important details and is clearly biased. I agree with the spirit of the article but the execution is flawed.</text></comment>