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June 25, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:04:25
Episode 577 Scott Adams: Thorium Reactors Saving the World, Border Funding
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
It's time again for Coffee with Scott Adams.
I'm Scott Adams. I've got my coffee.
If you would like to join in the simultaneous sip, if you would like to feel the unparalleled pleasure, you want to feel that dopamine just rushing through your body, making you alive for the first time today.
Alive, I say. Well, then you want to join me.
Now, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass.
You could have a tanker, a chalice, or a stein.
You might have a thermos, possibly.
A flask. But whatever kind of vessel you have, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Ah! If you don't do the ah part at the end, You're missing a lot of the good stuff.
So I have a special guest on.
I'm going to try to bring him on around 15 minutes from now.
Kirk Sorensen, a nuclear and aerospace engineer and thorium evangelist.
We'll ask him a few questions about the future of thorium nuclear.
But before we do that, we'll wait for you people to pile in here and talk about a few other shorter topics.
You all know that Trump signed this major, I think it was an executive order, to create healthcare transparency.
You all heard about that, right?
You heard about the big story, one of the biggest stories in the country.
Oh, you didn't hear about it?
Maybe there's a reason you didn't hear about President Trump lowering healthcare costs.
I'm just going to take a stab at why maybe you didn't hear about it.
One of the biggest stories in the country.
Could it be because your major news sources are healthcare companies?
That's the problem, right?
Is Fox News a news organization or a healthcare organization?
Who pays them?
Where does their money come from?
Fox News money comes from pharmaceutical commercials.
Mostly, right?
What about CNN? Where do they get their money?
Pharmaceutical commercials?
Healthcare commercials? Alright.
So, can we expect that our news sources will tell us what we need to about why the healthcare industry is ripping us off?
There's not a chance.
There's not a chance.
Now, I think only a President Trump could simultaneously have Fox News as his best friend while chipping away at their major source of income, which is healthcare profits.
So I don't know if that's the only problem, but it looks like one of the biggest stories in the country that almost disappeared upon arrival.
So you've got to ask yourself, Do we have a news business or do we have a healthcare business that tells us a little bit about the news sometimes?
That's a big problem.
I think it's at least as big a problem as the social media companies having any alleged bias.
Let's talk about border funding.
Everybody wants to save the children who are being kept in these detention camps slash concentration camps slash Whatever you want to call them.
Yes, we all care about the children.
Let's save the children.
But meanwhile, the children are suffering in these facilities, and Congress doesn't seem to be able to pass some money for it.
And the reason it looks like is because these bills, people pile on unpleasant things with the things that people agree on, to try to get some unpleasant things through the system on the coattails of the thing we all agree on but of course the two sides can't agree on anything so it means that we can't get anything so in a real sense border funding has become a contest wait for it it's a contest I wish I were making this up I'm going to say something that's true that's horrible and I wish it weren't true But the process of making laws in this country has turned into a process of who is willing to torture children the longest.
That's who will win.
Whoever is willing to abuse children the longest, in this case the children that are on the border and don't have as much care as we would like them to have.
And I'm thinking, how could you fix this?
How could you have a better system?
I'll give you some ideas. Number one, you should change the name of whatever this law is or whatever the bill is.
Whatever the bill is for giving money toward taking care of those children, we should change it to something like the Border Children Protection Bill.
Something like that.
Because you want people to vote for or against protecting children.
If you give it any other name, the public doesn't really know what's in the bill.
And they don't really get involved.
The Tortured Children Act.
That wouldn't be bad.
That wouldn't be wrong.
It wouldn't be wrong to call it the Tortured Children Act and see who votes against it.
All right. Suppose we introduced a bill to withhold Congress's pay until the children at the border are safe.
How about that one?
There's just two points in the bill.
Give money... To protect the children at the border or your own pay is withheld.
I just put that out there.
How about that? Would that get us somewhere?
How about this?
Instead of torturing, I don't know how many children are involved, hundreds?
Would you say hundreds of children are involved?
Thousands? I don't know the numbers.
But there are a lot of children involved and they're all being tortured.
I would suggest a way to greatly reduce the discomfort.
Instead of torturing all those children for a long period of time, let's just get one kid to volunteer, put them in a little hot box in Congress, and see who can keep them there the longest.
In other words, you've got Congress, you've got, you know, both sides are there, and you've just got a little hot box.
You put one kid in there, volunteer, and you just start turning up the temperature.
You can't get out.
You know, you get up to like 110, and he's like, oh, the child is being tortured.
And the Republicans are like, nope, not enough.
And the Democrats are like, it looks like he could take a little bit more.
And the Republicans say, turn it up.
They go, 120.
The kid's dying in the box.
And the Democrats will be, I don't know, we'd like to get a few more things in this bill.
A few more things.
We could let that kid go a little bit longer.
And the Republicans would be like, ah, he's barely sweating.
Turn it up. Turn it up.
Now all of you are saying, my God, how could you even say that?
Scott, your thought is so dark.
People are saying here in the comments, that is a dark thought.
Is it? Is it?
Is making one kid very uncomfortable worse than whatever we're doing right now?
I don't know. Doesn't seem like it.
Seems like it would be 1% as bad.
Because if there are 100 people being tortured, and you could make that stop just by having this one kid a little bit more tortured, is that worse?
I don't know. Obviously, I'm not literally suggesting this.
I'm just using it as a way to point out that torturing children is not a frickin' government.
It's not a government.
It's not a system.
If who can torture children the most is all we're trying to...
That's the contest?
Seriously? Fire every one of you idiots.
Every one of you idiots in Congress needs to be fired if torturing children is now the new system for making laws.
Come on. You can do better than that.
All right. Maybe you can't do better than that.
Next short topic before we get to our guest...
I hope Kirk is signing on and lining up in the queue here to be a guest.
Did you all see the video of Trump's accuser who says that he raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store in the 90s?
Well, you know, when you first heard that story, you probably said to yourself, you know, That story doesn't quite track because it's hard to believe that this assault happened in the middle of the day between two people who just ran into each other in the lingerie area of Bergdorf Goodman's and nobody saw it.
Just a lot of it didn't make sense.
What have I taught you about hearing a story where a lot of it doesn't look like it's true?
If that's the only thing you know, it's a story.
It's not this story, just generically.
Let's say you hear a story, and you hear the details, and you go, that doesn't even sound true.
I mean, maybe.
Maybe. But just the details sound so unbelievable.
What did I teach you is the likely outcome, if you wait a little while, what is the likely outcome of that story?
Well, by a ratio of probably 20 to 1, You'll find out it's not true.
Sometimes it might be true, because there are weird things that happen in the real world, but by a factor of about 20 to 1, if a story sounds that on the nose, it's made up.
Now, I'm not saying she made up a story.
I'm saying that as a general rule, when you hear a story that's that unusual, 20 to 1, it's made up.
So... CNN made the huge mistake of interviewing the accuser.
Now, at first, I was going to say to myself, I don't want to try to diagnose somebody's mental health at a distance when it's just somebody on television.
I don't know them.
I'm not a medical professional.
I don't have those skills.
It would be irresponsible.
It would be bad behavior.
Bad social practice to diagnose somebody's mental illness.
I complain about it when people do it to Donald Trump, the president.
Why would I do the same thing when I'm one of the biggest critics of that practice?
But I would say to you, there's probably some line beyond which you don't really have to be an expert.
Would you agree with this general concept?
That if somebody is, let's say, has a mental problem but they're sort of within the normal range of human behavior that, you know, your friends are sometimes crazy and you get a little crazy sometimes or maybe had a bad day.
There's a pretty broad range of things that are normal and a little abnormal and maybe a little bit of mental illness that you can't tell the difference unless you're a professional.
Unless you've actually worked with them, you've really, you know, put in the time and investigation.
But I think you'd agree.
There is some level of craziness where everybody can see it.
Would you agree with the general statement that at some level you don't have to be a professional?
It's just right there.
I think CNN made the mistake of putting somebody on the air who was sort of up there.
And I feel sympathy because she doesn't look well.
And she doesn't look healthy.
Now it could be because of all the things that happened to her.
So you can't rule out the fact that maybe she's the victim of a bad life and that's what happened.
But I will tell you that almost nobody who sees it, the interviews on CNN, believes that she's telling the truth.
It is the least credible thing you'll ever see in your life.
Maybe literally the least credible story you'll ever hear, which doesn't mean it's not true.
I wasn't there.
I'm just saying that of all the things you've ever seen, it might be the least credible one you'll ever see.
And you could tell from the comments on Twitter that it's pretty much universally true, that people go, what the heck happened?
There's something, this is not right, and this should not have ever been in the news.
So CNN found their new Michael Avenatti, The person that they can talk to endlessly and turn nothing into news.
All right. And she actually said, and I think I have to say this because it's part of the story now, when talking to Anderson Cooper, the accuser, Trump's accuser said that she thinks that most people think of rape as being sexy.
I'm not even going to comment on that.
I mean, that's just, you know, right?
I don't have to say anything about that.
She said that on TV. That says a lot.
All right. Let me see if I can find Kirk, who should be waiting for me any moment.
But I don't see him yet.
So, Kirk, if you have a mobile device, it only works on a mobile device, not a laptop, you would be looking at the little icon of the smiley faces down at the bottom of your screen.
If you press that little button, you will be eligible for me to add you on.
But I don't see you yet.
So I'm going to do something else and then wait to see if you come on.
So Iran, a spokesman for Iran, said that he's the president...
President Rouhani of Iran, he mocked the White House and said that it is, quote, afflicted by mental retardation.
Now, the first thing I ask about that is, did he say that in English?
Because if he said it in English, I'd want to hear it, but I don't think he did.
I think it was translated.
Who translated whatever Rouhani said into the word retardation?
You're not supposed to say that, right?
So I would wonder, is there some other word in English that maybe would get the same sense of it without being one of the most offensive words in the English language?
I mean, did we really need to have this story translated into the one word that I'm not supposed to say in public?
I mean, the only reason I would say that word, I would never use that word, except that the president of Iran allegedly said it.
But I interpret this as a good sign.
Why? Because it's exactly where we were with North Korea, where the leaders started insulting themselves about their intelligence and their mental health and all that.
They did say that another official said that it has closed the door forever on negotiations.
Yeah, closed the door permanently on negotiations.
Is that true? Do you think that's true?
Doesn't seem like it would close the door forever on negotiations, if you ask me.
All right. Now, the President has asked, the President has asked, why is it we're protecting the Straits of Hormuz, is it, when the local powers should be doing that?
And then, of course, CNN turned it into, hey, Pompeo says...
It's an international thing.
We have to all protect the shipping lanes and the president saying why are we doing this?
Are they in conflict? That's not really the story.
What Pompeo was saying was not in conflict with what the president said.
Pompeo was saying internationally we all have to protect these international waters.
The president saying why is it mostly on us?
Those are not really in conflict.
Because you could still want to protect international waters while saying, maybe other people should pay a little bit more than we are.
Maybe they should put a few ships in the water.
Maybe they could take a few missiles.
So the President is asking exactly the right question and only the way...
This is exactly why people voted for him.
I think he's the only one who could ask that question.
The question is, why are we paying for it?
We're exporting more energy than we're importing.
Can't we just sort of keep our own energy where it is and you keep your energy where it is?
Why does the United States even care so much?
I'm pretty sure Saudi Arabia and the other countries there could take care of it.
All right, let me see if Kirk is here.
So, Kirk, I do not see you unless you're trying to come in on some different name.
Let's see if you have emailed me.
All right. Kirk says he's standing by on Periscope.
And that would mean that one of these people who does not say Kirk's name is actually Kirk.
But Kirk, you're going to have to tell me if you're coming in under a different name.
So I'm going to just send a little message here.
But I can't write this because AutoCorrect keeps changing it.
All right, Kirk, I'm trying to find out if you were coming in under a different name than your real name, and then I'll have you on.
All right, we'll talk about Project Veritas if I don't get an answer on this right away.
And I will get an answer on this right away, I think.
Alright, well, there's only one way to find out.
He says he's standing by.
There's one name on here I don't recognize.
I'm going to select it, and I'm going to at least eliminate the question of whether this is Kirk.
Is this Kirk? Hello?
Hello? Yeah, it doesn't sound like Kirk, so we're going to turn that off.
All right, I guess we'll do Kirk another time because we have some kind of technological problem here, apparently.
Let's talk about Project Veritas.
If Kirk comes on later, I'll try him.
Let's see. Yep, not there yet.
Project Veritas.
So you know how I always tell you that I think I'm talking about the news and then suddenly I am the news?
This is one of those things that it's the weird thing about being me.
So yesterday I did my Periscope about Project Veritas and their undercover video of the Google executives talking about addressing the Trump situation with their algorithms.
And the next thing I know, my Periscope, a A clip from it, or a few clips, are being retweeted around by James O'Keefe as part of Project Veritas.
Now the part that Project Veritas and O'Keefe retweeted was where I was saying that regardless of what the exact details are of the undercover video, whether that undercover video is telling us what we think it is, Or whether it's out of context and not telling us what we think it's saying.
Either way, it tells you the same story, which is that Google can manipulate the algorithm.
They're talking about it, and they have a situation they're trying to fix with fairness, which is subjective.
And even if nothing on the video from Project Veritas was exactly what we think it is, it's still the same problem.
We can't tell if Google is manipulating things, and they explicitly tell us that they can.
It's possible. So we should have the same amount of worry either way.
All right, we have Kirk.
Let me get back to Project Veritas in a minute, because I've got more to say about that.
But we'll bring Kirk on first.
Kirk, are you there?
Sure.
I'm good. So glad to have you on here.
My apologies. I've never used Periscope before, so I just turned on the app and I didn't know what else to do.
Well, there you go.
You figured it out. I would expect no less from somebody who is a...
Wait, don't tell me. As I look through my notes, which are all in the wrong order now...
Huh.
I managed to have four pieces of paper and lose...
Oh, come on. Seriously.
Here it is. Kirk Sorensen, you are a nuclear and aerospace engineer and a thorium evangelist.
Is that right? That's right.
That's right. And the name of your company that you work for is, say the name of the company.
Flybe Energy. How do you spell that?
F-L-I-B-E Energy.
And you're a startup?
Are you trying to create a thorium reactor that has never been created, right?
Yes. Yes, we are a startup and we are trying to create a thorium reactor that has never been created.
For the benefit of the audience, who is very primed to hear about nuclear, because most of the people watching this understand that nuclear energy is really the only practical thing Would you say those two statements are true?
Absolutely. I feel exactly the same way.
Those of us who are non-technical, we get lost very easily in the nuclear world, and so I wanted to see if we could help break it down.
I want to just give this little framework, and then I'm going to ask you some questions.
Most of the people know there are four generations of nuclear technology, broadly speaking.
The fourth generation isn't really up and running yet.
It's more in the development.
We'll talk more about that.
Generation three... There are 80-some plants in the world.
Do I have that right? Generation 3 nuclear?
No, there's just a handful of Generation 3 plants.
Most plants are considered Generation 2 plants.
And I've always kind of smiled a bit at this characterization of these generations.
It was like kind of a retcon on the whole thing, because almost all of our nuclear reactor technologies, even the ones that are considered Generation 4, We're invented back in the 40s and 50s.
In fact, the very first reactor we ever had in the United States that produced electrical power was a sodium fast breeder reactor.
It was a so-called Generation 4 reactor.
That was built in 1951.
All right, but let's keep it easy.
So the generations are very broad, arguable categories, but would you say the Generation 3, where...
Arguably, a lot of the current plants are.
If you were going to build one today, most likely it would be a Generation 3.
Would you say that's true? Yeah. The plants that are being built in Georgia right now are the AP1000s.
They're considered Generation 3 plants.
Right. And this is non-thorium.
What is the technology called that most of the Generation 3 have?
Pressurized water reactors.
I see a comment that says sodium equals salt.
No, sodium is a constituent of salt.
All right. So, those plants have had, correct me if I'm wrong, there's no Generation 3 plant that's ever had a nuclear event, right?
No meltdowns?
Nope. Nope. But they have some other problems in terms of waste, etc., proliferation.
So, give us the quick...
The quick benefits of thorium and for the layperson without the technical details, where do you get thorium versus where do you get plutonium, which fuels the Generation 3 that we know about?
Give us the quick tour of that.
Billions of years ago, there was a supernova, and all kinds of things got made, and most of them decayed away, but two of them had really long half-lives and were still radioactive.
That's thorium and uranium. Kirk, for the benefit, the tough thing for this audience is that most of them are not technical.
So talk to us in terms of the user-important stuff, such as there's lots of thorium.
Where do you get it? Well, yeah, that's why we have three times as much thorium on Earth as uranium.
It's pretty much everywhere.
They're evenly distributed.
Some places we have higher concentrations of it.
One of the richest deposits of thorium in the Western Hemisphere is in Idaho.
But it's not hard to get.
It's in your front yard. It's in your backyard.
It's in a scoop of dirt you go pick up.
If you had a Geiger counter, you could detect it.
It's not rare. It's a common material.
It's about as common as tin.
Now, I did see somewhere, I was just looking before we talked, that somebody's saying that there's no more or less thorium than there is plutonium when you consider how hard it is to actually get to it.
Does that ring true or no?
Well, there's no natural plutonium.
Every speck of plutonium on Earth we made in nuclear reactors.
But thorium is naturally occurring, and you go and you can make it into a nuclear fuel called uranium-233, In an analogous way that we turn uranium into plutonium.
Thorium isn't directly a fuel, just like most uranium isn't directly a fuel.
A very tiny sliver of uranium is directly a fuel, but all uranium, all thorium can be turned into nuclear fuels and can produce the energy we need for billions and billions of years.
We'll never run out of energy if we utilize these materials.
Now, would it also be true we'll never run out of energy with the older technology, in a real sense?
Well, with the way we use uranium today, we're only using about one half of one percent of the energy content of the uranium.
So we use uranium exceptionally and efficiently.
If we use uranium efficiently, then yes, we'd never run out.
But we're not using it efficiently in today's technology.
Ironically, that's what that very first reactor was for, was to try to use uranium more efficiently.
So there are people who think that plutonium could last us as long as we need, but maybe thorium would be a little easier to have enough.
Is it really a problem that we'll run out of The fuel for any of these technologies.
Is there really a problem that will run out?
Well, we're using uranium inefficiently now.
If we use uranium efficiently, then yes, it would last forever.
Thorium would last forever. We'd never run out.
The big question would be, what's going to be the basis of your nuclear fuel in the future?
Is it going to be plutonium or is it going to be uranium-233?
And there's a couple of technical reasons why it's harder to use uranium and plutonium in a reactor than it is to use thorium.
And that has to do with Whether it's a thermal reactor or a fast reactor.
If you want to use uranium efficiently, it has to be a fast reactor.
Now, when I do my ten seconds of reading on thorium, the pros and the cons are that We have built a number of the existing technologies, so we have a good idea how to do that, but there are only startups and sort of developmental people working on thorium,
including yourself. Would you say that there's an extra engineering risk for thorium, or is it something That in the normal engineering course of things is quite solvable.
It's quite solvable.
It's very solvable. I spent my entire career in technology development.
I was at NASA my first 10 years of my career doing advanced propulsion development.
So I've always been working on how to bring good things to life, you know, how to bring new things out.
And as I learned about this technology, I thought, my goodness, compared to what it's going to do, this is so doable.
This is so tractable.
I mean, there's very few things where you think this could actually power the entire world for billions of years, and it's not that hard to develop, guys.
We can do it. So what are the obstacles to iterating, the normal iteration until you've got something that you feel good about?
What is slowing things down?
We're exceptionally funding constraint.
You know, everything we've done has been privately funded until very recently when we won our very first DOE award.
But, you know, the amount of money that has gone into this since 1974 has been almost zero.
So, you know, don't be surprised when things don't happen when there's no resources to work on them.
You know, originally, my understanding is that was it back in decades ago, there was a contest between a thorium reactor and more traditional reactor reactor.
And the traditional reactor won for whatever reason.
What's changed since then?
So there was a point in which thorium was considered and rejected.
What's changed? Oh, that's happened several times.
What's happened since...
I mean, the first time was in 1945.
Right at the very end of World War II, you had reactor designers working on the idea of a thorium reactor.
And they were told by General Gross, the Manhattan Project, you know, stop doing that.
We're focused on weapon material.
Don't think about thorium. So they quit for a few years.
Then a few years later, you know, they kind of came back and they tried to pick up the thread again.
And then again, they were told in the early 1950s, you know, don't go after that.
We need to focus on things that make weapons grade materials.
And so they put it down again, only to pick it up later.
And then in the 70s, they were stopped again by saying, hey, you know, this other plutonium technology is more mature.
We're going to put all resources on that.
You can't have money to work on thorium.
And they were shut down yet again.
But in no case were they shut down for solid technical reasons.
It was always something that is now obsolete.
Like, we don't need weapons-grade materials anymore.
We haven't been making weapons-grade materials in this country since...
You know, the 80s. And so that's, you know, way in the rearview mirror.
In fact, we're trying to get rid of weapons-grade materials now, not make more of them.
But it does matter that we have experience with one technology and less experience with the other.
How do we get as much experience or at least iterate?
Are you building test sites in the United States?
That's what we'd like to do.
We're not building it at the moment, but we'd like to.
And do you have one end of the country anywhere?
No. No, we don't have anything out of the country.
Are there four startups doing stuff like this?
There are other startups doing molten salt reactors, but there's no other startups doing molten salt reactors for the thorium fuel cycle.
We're the only one. And why are the other people not loving it and you guys do?
What do you see that they don't see?
Why do you have this ability in this?
Well, they think that what we've bid off is too challenging.
They think that our ambition to have an efficient nuclear fuel cycle that closes all the gaps, that uses the fuel at high efficiency, they think, no, it's too hard.
We don't want to do that. So they're designing reactors that are going to use uranium just as inefficiently as we use it today in pressurized water reactors.
I find that pretty unambitious.
I find that like, well, what's the point of doing that?
So we just see things differently.
What part is ambitious?
There must be some part of the engineering for thorium that you have some unknowns about.
We're taking on an entire nuclear fuel cycle in one machine.
If you see a nuclear reactor today, you're actually seeing a very small part of its entire nuclear fuel cycle.
It's just the part that takes the fuel and irradiates it, gets some heat, and then discharges it.
There's a whole lot more on the front end and the back end.
Our machine is actually going to take in this entire concept and internalize it into one unit so that you'll feed it thorium and out will come out energy and fission products.
And that'll be it.
So can thorium be used at existing power plants?
Is there a way to retrofit them or attack it on?
It could, but it's not efficient.
You wouldn't even be able to do as well with thorium as you're doing with uranium today with the pressurized water technology.
It's been tried before.
The Indian plant point in New York actually began on a thorium-uranium-235 core.
Other places have tried it, but it's like putting diesel in a gas car.
You're going to go, wow, this is terrible fuel.
Look how bad my car is running.
You're like, no, you put it in the wrong kind of car.
I'm watching the comments and people are getting a little lost in the technology.
So let's see if we can take it up a level to something simpler and more accessible.
Can you describe the engineering challenge with Thorium in a way that the audience would understand?
In other words, is there a specific thing you haven't done yet that you need to see if you can do?
Is there any way to simplify what is it that you need to solve with Thorium Can you simplify that for us?
I can try. Think of it like digestion.
We need to build a digestive system for the reactor, a chemical processing system inside the reactor that handles the material at different stages, moves it from one part to the other, and makes sure everything's taken care of.
Let me stop you there.
Have you completely developed that on paper, but you need to build it in the real world?
We have sketched it out on paper.
I did a report with the Electric Power Research Institute in 2015 where we described the parameters of that system and how it would work, but again, that was preliminary.
There are pieces that we need to do in the real world, and this contract that we got with the Department of Energy is to begin working on part of one of those pieces.
But let me say that again, because I need a specific answer to this.
On paper, is it fully designed?
No, it's not fully designed on paper.
Okay, and is that because there are some things that would need to be tested in the real world before you could know to put them in your design?
Yes. Okay, and is it stuff that could be tested without building the entire plant?
Yes. Okay, so how much funding would it take, do you imagine, to get, let's say, just your company?
How much money would you need to know that you could get to a design that's worth building?
Fifty million dollars.
Fifty million in how long?
To know that we have a design worth building?
Two or three years. Two or three years.
And then you'd have to actually build a test site somewhere safe, etc., to know that you could really scale it up, right?
Yes. And how long would it take to build this test site?
Let's say if you had it instantly improved, how long would it take?
Five or six years. But it might take five or six years to get it approved as well, wouldn't you say?
That's a possibility, yes.
Okay, so we're looking at a 10, 15-year best case to have a thorium reactor up and running.
No, best case is better than that.
You're talking more of a median case.
Okay, so best case under 10?
Yeah, best case 7, median 10, pessimistic 15.
Would you ever be able to build one of these in the United States or do you think it's so hard because of approvals we would just have to find some other country to host this thing?
No, it's quite the contrary. Right now we can only build in the United States.
Okay, that's good.
And how would you handle...
Is it true that there's a uranium-233 that's generated by the thorium reaction and you'd have to...
Do something with that? Would that become a waste product or do I not understand it?
No, no. That's exactly... That's the fuel of the thorium reactor.
Uranium-233 is generated from thorium and that's what fissions and creates the energy.
And the ideal of the reactor is that all of that uranium-233 is consumed in the system.
It's not part of the waste.
So your advantages are...
Well, what about proliferation?
So... Can somebody turn anything that happens in the thorium reactor, can anybody turn that into a weapon with some extra processing?
Well, any fissile material can theoretically be turned into a weapon.
There are three fissile materials, uranium-235, plutonium-239, and uranium-233.
Two of those have been made into operational weapons.
They tried to use uranium-233 in weapons.
In fact, I wrote my master's thesis about the attempt to do that during the Manhattan Project.
And they decided not to because of some very realistic problems with it, practical problems.
It throws off a lot of radiation that makes it difficult to handle.
Ironically, uranium-235 and plutonium-239 throw off very little radiation.
You can hold them in your hands.
People have this idea that they're deadly.
They're really not. They're actually quite benign.
But that was why uranium-233 was rejected as a weapons material.
Now, we've had lots and lots and lots of countries that all could have done this over the last 80 years, and none of them did, not because they're nice people or because they have altruistic motives, but because there are very real engineering problems with using uranium-233 for a weapon.
And those problems sound like they're big enough That maybe if you were a nation state, you could figure it out with enough resources, but if you were ISIS and you're trying to make a bomb, it would be out of reach.
Would that be fair to say?
It would be absolutely impractical for any terrorist to attempt uranium.
For one thing, the uranium-233 would be broadcasting its existence to anybody looking for it.
Satellites could look down and go, yep, it's right there.
You know, you can't do that with plutonium or uranium-235.
Now, I saw one mention of thorium that said that it would be potentially cheaper.
Do you make that claim?
Cheaper than the other older nuclear technologies?
When you say thorium, remember thorium is a material.
How are you going to use it? It's like saying diesel is cheaper than gas.
Well, it depends on what car I'm going to put it in.
In the reactor, we want to put it in the yes, we believe it will be much cheaper, but that is not a blanket statement.
You can't say that across the board for all reactors.
So you have a design that you think will be cheaper, independent of the, well not independent of, but that uses thorium.
That uses thorium, yeah. It needs thorium to be cheaper.
How much cheaper are we talking?
Are we talking 10% cheaper or 90% cheaper in the best case scenario?
Well, I like to use an analogy, Scott, that I think you might appreciate having worked for the phone company.
You remember when we used to get charged by the minute for things, right?
Right. Well, we don't get charged by the minute for things now.
Is that because the phone companies are really nice people and have decided to give us free stuff?
It's because it's so cheap.
Well, they've figured out other ways to monetize.
You actually spend more on your phone now than you did back then, but you're happy because you're getting more stuff.
We want to create a nuclear technology analogous to that where electricity is not the primary economic product anymore.
So we're doing other things.
What would be? That's part of our business plan.
But we're doing other things so that we're not super worried about what the electricity costs.
In fact, to first order, it's almost a waste product of our reactor.
So that really upends an economic situation.
People say, you know, is it cheaper than now?
And I'm kind of like, it's different than now.
It's not like now.
Alright, so there's some other economic benefits beyond electricity which you hope to monetize.
There are a number of, more than one.
Like cancer treatments?
What are other things? That's one of them, yeah.
Alright, you probably can't tell me all the secret stuff.
You'll probably figure most of it out.
You're a pretty clever guy. The point I'm trying to make, though, is today's reactors only monetize electricity.
That's the only thing they make that they sell to people.
And so it's all about racing to the bottom on the cost of electricity.
What if you had different products to monetize?
What would you do? Okay.
All right. Got it.
So we won't have details on that, but I will accept that that's a path.
Okay. What is the design you guys are working on?
Is that the one with the liquid fluoride or no?
That's right. It uses a liquid fluoride salt mixture and that's lithium fluoride, beryllium fluoride.
That's where the word flide comes from.
Fluorine, lithium, beryllium.
Let me give you some help on the marketing of this idea.
When I read about this design, see if I'm right, there's some kind of a...
There's a liquid fluoride plug that will melt under certain conditions, and that's the safety valve.
Am I saying that right? Can you say that in better words?
There is. There's this idea of a freeze plug.
It's like a drain on a bathtub.
And the notion being, and they tested this back in the 60s, the notion being that if all power is lost to the plant, That this hot salt will simply melt this plug, and the plug is being actively cooled.
It's being kept frozen intentionally by active cooling systems, so that when all power is lost, all control is lost, you know, everything goes dark, well, those active cooling systems stop, and that plug melts, and the salt drains out of the reactor into a passively cooled configuration.
All right, let me tell you the marketing problem with that.
I'm willing to accept that that's an easy-to-engineer, safe thing.
I'm not going to complain about the actual safety of it, but when I hear it or read about it, and I hear, wait a minute, the thing that is keeping this nuclear plant from blowing up Or at least melting down under the worst case scenario, let's say it loses power, is that a plug has to melt.
And as soon as I hear that, that sounds low-tech.
I'm thinking, wait a minute, a plug has to melt?
That feels like not technically safe enough, even though it probably is.
So just in terms of the way the public perceives it, The requirement that the only way you could protect something bad from happening is that a plug melts just immediately makes me go, whoa, do we really have a handle on this?
Because waiting, you know, if the only safety is something has to melt, maybe it's completely safe.
But it just doesn't feel safe.
It's got something about that plug melting thing That is more scary than it needs to be, just the way it sounds to human beings.
Anyway, I think we lost Kirk, but I was getting ready to close out that conversation.
So we've got these technologies that are brewing.
$50 million per startup might get things going.
So if anybody wants to follow Kirk, you could follow him at Kirk Sorenson.
K-I-R-K-S-O-R-E-N-S-E-N. So don't put an O-N at the end.
It's a S-E-N at the end.
Kirk Sorensen.
At Kirk Sorensen. And you can check out his Twitter.
Alright, I was talking about Project Veritas.
Let's get back to that. So I said I became part of the story because James O'Keefe and Project Veritas, they retweeted part of my...
Periscope. And here's what I wanted to talk about.
So my first take when I saw the undercover video of the so-called Google executive was, you know, the way she's saying this stuff sounds like it could just be out of context.
It looks like And Kirk, by the way, if you sign back on, thank you very much.
The audience appreciated this.
I could tell by the number of audience members watching because it stayed very high, which is unusual.
So thank you so much for that.
The audience appreciated it, and so did I. But anyway, I thought this Project Veritas thing was potentially somebody taking out of context.
It took all of one day For the person in the video to write an article on some blog site in which she said, wait for it, I was taken out of context.
It looked like she was taken out of context.
She said she was taken out of context.
But she also did not directly refute the way it was interpreted.
It's one thing to say I was taken into context, but the part that was missing was what I meant was, but I don't know that that means anything that she didn't go that far, because I think what she meant was maybe just simply talking about it again would have just created more of the same problem.
It's entirely possible, probable I would think, that Google lawyers, executives got involved and told her, keep it to the minimum.
If a lawyer is talking to you, they say, don't say anything more than the minimum.
So it looked like she wrote a blog post that a lawyer approved.
Because I think if a real person within a lawyer writes a blog post to explain themselves, they explain themselves.
Why would you write a blog post to explain yourself and then leave out the explaining yourself part?
Well, it's because a lawyer looked at it.
And a lawyer probably said, look, if you try to explain yourself, you're just going to say more stuff that can be taken out of context.
The way you say it will open you up to worse problems.
So say the minimum.
What's the minimum you could say?
I was taken out of context.
Google would never do such a thing.
That's what the blog post said.
I was taken out of context.
Google would never try to buy us stuff.
But here are the other things you need to know.
She pushed back on the idea that she was a top executive.
So she has some job that was fairly important, but maybe not a top executive.
She was the head of Google Innovation at the moment, but she used to work for Google's trust and safety team.
And she said that the 2020 presidential election had been top of mind for the team.
Alright, does Google's trust and safety team, are they the engineers that program the algorithms?
I don't know.
I'll bet not.
I'll bet the trust and safety team are probably mostly non-technical.
I mean, I would imagine they work with the technical people, but The only people who know what Google's algorithm is doing are the people who program it.
Am I wrong? There is literally nobody at Google who knows what their algorithms do unless they program them.
And even the programmers might be only handling a small sliver of the algorithm.
I don't know that there's one programmer.
Who handles all of the algorithms?
It seems unlikely. It would be a complicated thing.
I imagine there are lots of engineers.
They each have their little piece.
But here's my point.
How much does a Google executive know about Google's own algorithm?
Let me tell you.
About as much as you do.
Have you ever worked at a big company?
Let me tell you about a big company.
However many... Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people work at Google.
How many of them, executive or non-executive, how many of them actually know what the algorithm is doing?
Almost none. I'm not entirely sure there is even one Google employee who knows what the algorithm does.
There are lots of people who know things about the algorithm, and there are probably people who know more about it than other people.
But I don't know that there's anybody who can actually penetrate all of the complexity of it, knows all the inputs, and knows how those inputs will flow through it, and knows what the outputs will be.
They know that they can suggest things, and they know they can bar people, and they know they can do some things, but probably nobody knows the details completely.
People know parts of them.
So the first thing I'd say about this undercover video is it could have been an undercover video of you or me.
Because we probably don't know any more about Google's inner workings than this executive did.
I don't think she was programming things.
I think she said something like there was a Trump situation, whatever that means, and it's top of mind for Google to create an unbiased and fair platform.
Basically, that's what anybody would say.
So... I don't think that this was the smoking gun that people imagine it to be.
I think that this is somebody who didn't know much more than you or I know and they were saying some generic things about Google.
It's not the person who's programming the algorithm.
And also not the person who's ordering the people to program the algorithm.
So I don't think she was even in the right chain of knowledge to tell us anything.
Charlie Worzel, who's a New York Times opinion writer, said this about the video.
He tweeted, he said, so it seems to me that this, quote, investigation about Google's bias is really just a bunch of non-technical people mixing up algorithmic bias with political bias.
Am I wrong? Could one of you smart technologists who follow me explain?
Now, that's a pretty good take.
It's a pretty good take, because it was exactly what I thought when I first saw it.
I first saw it and I thought, I don't know, it feels like she's talking about the fact that the algorithm just can naturally bias things whether you like it or not, and they don't want to do that.
Because why would you introduce bias for no reason and let the algorithm do it on its own?
So that it was top of mind to create something that was fair, Which is a problem, right?
Because fair is subjective.
But here was my take.
So let me say it again, what Charlie Wurzel said.
He said it looked to him like it was maybe non-technical people, us, mixing up algorithmic bias, which is just something that happens because of the algorithm, it's nobody's intention, versus political bias, which would be somebody's intention.
And I said, My take is that algorithmic bias and political bias are only different in the short run and that we're already in the long run.
In other words, in the short run, you could certainly have the algorithm doing things you didn't quite intend and your intentions about politics could be separate and over here.
In the long run, the people who have intentions about politics We'll get a handle on what the algorithm does, and they will control it better.
If the people who have political bias, which is every human being, every human being has political bias, if those human beings get more control over the thing that didn't have any intentions, it was just doing its stuff, the thing that was just doing its stuff before will acquire the intentions of the good people who thought they were fixing it.
And I think most of the times they actually are trying to make the world a better place.
It's just that it has a free speech kind of implications.
So I would sort of agree with that, except that I would say that it's only the short run that the algorithm can do its own thing and separately people can have their own biases.
In the long run, those biases start guiding and adjusting and modifying the algorithm until it is political bias.
Which the people who have that bias would describe as trying to make things more fair.
What is subjective?
What you think is more fair isn't going to be what I think is more fair.
And you can never solve that problem.
which is why there needs to be some kind of judge or court to look at the algorithms and have some, at least people who are paid to be objective, try to figure out if we're being compatible with our ideals of free speech.
And those were, oh, so Bernie Sanders' plan about student debt, Let's talk about that for a second.
Student debt, so Bernie floated the idea of taxing Wall Street transactions, you know, the big money buying and selling of financial assets, to tax that some tiny little bit, far less than 1% per transaction, and it would create so much money that it would make all college free, and it would pay off everybody's loans.
Now, my first take on that was, huh, I'd like to hear what the economists say.
I needed to, like, think about it a little bit more.
But it turns out I don't need to hear what the economists say about it.
Because I've got this thing called Twitter, and I found out what Twitter thinks about it.
Well, it turns out that fairness is subjective.
Has anybody told you about that?
And that if you pay off all the loans of these people who have loans, all the people who paid off their own loans want to start a revolution.
I didn't quite see that coming since I've never had a student loan, so I had a little blind spot in my first impression.
My first impression was, wouldn't it be great to have free education?
That could be good for everybody.
On a concept level, free education is amazing.
And if you can find a way to pay for it with just the top 1% in their financial transactions, they're not even going to notice the difference.
In fact, they might make a profit from it because a more educated population is good for the economy and the people at the top who paid for it in the first place would be the beneficiaries.
They would gain more from a good economy than somebody who just got a job.
But there is literally no way to implement this plan.
It is completely divorced From how humans work.
The humans in this country who have paid for their own college, no way in hell are they going to let the other people get a free pass, especially the people who just finished paying off their student loans recently.
Now, I personally have paid off some student loans for loved ones and I can tell you, I would certainly question Why I had to pay a very large amount of money to pay off a student loan.
It wasn't mine. And other people don't.
That's a pretty good, pretty good problem.
And then other people were saying, well, what about the people who worked all through college so they didn't have to have a student loan?
Such as me. I worked all through college so I didn't have to have a student loan.
Should I get reimbursed? Should I be reimbursed for all that work I did?
So what about the people who went to expensive colleges when they didn't need to?
Should we rescue them from their bad decision?
What about the people who took out tons of loans instead of getting a corporate job and then having your business pay for it while you go to school at night or something?
What about that? Do you know how I paid for my MBA at Berkeley?
Berkeley is pretty expensive.
Do you know how I paid for that MBA? I worked full time and went to school at night and I would get up at like 4 in the morning so that I could do stuff and get to work and then I would be done at 10 or 11 at night by the time I got home.
I would fall in bed for 5 hours and wake up and do it again.
I had 3 years of absolute hell so that I wouldn't have a student loan.
Do it And so people who made all the wrong decisions and did not work twice as hard, I'm going to give them my money?
I'm going to reward them for not working twice as hard?
I don't think so.
It doesn't sound so good anymore.
So the point is that Bernie's plan sounds great on paper, but like many of the plans that come out of Bernie, completely impractical.
I hope somebody can come up with some way to...
Slice this thing into something practical, but I don't think so.
Now, the funniest story is that Elizabeth Warren has floated the idea of gay reparations.
You almost can't say that.
You almost can't say gay reparations without laughing, because I don't know why.
It's just those two words just don't go together for some reason.
Now, the idea is, and by the way, the idea is solid.
It's impractical, but it's solid.
The idea is that gay folks who could not get married had to file as individuals instead of file as married couples and therefore they paid more money than they needed to because the government was discriminating against them.
And now that they can get married, they can file jointly and they would save money.
But they need to be repaid for all the money they overpaid.
Sorry, there's probably a few more of those coming.
So, what I love about this story is that it makes slavery reparations basically impossible.
For the same reason that the Bernie plan can't work, it sounds good on paper.
When she makes that argument, I say, that's a completely logical argument.
Gay people paid more taxes than they needed to because the government was discriminating against them.
That's just true.
But, you know what else is unfair?
Turns out that tall people make more money than short people.
Is that fair?
Is it fair that I live in a country Where at my height I am discriminated against all the time, and it almost certainly influenced my income over my life.
Shouldn't I get some reparations for being short?
Shouldn't I? Wouldn't that be fair?
Well, no, not really.
But the point is, everybody has a reason that they need some reparations.
There's nobody who doesn't have an argument for reparations.
Yeah. Everybody has an argument for reparations, which means nobody can get any.
That's why I say that if the African American community and the people who have good intentions working on slavery reparations, if they're smart and clever, what they will do is they'll come up with a plan that helps everybody who's in the same situation.
So if the African American reparation plan It's a general plan that helps people in the lower economic situation, and it helps them all, white or black or whatever they are.
Then I think that would be not only a healing situation, because the country would have listened to their concerns, taken them seriously, found the best action that they could to address them, It would be the healthiest thing that this country ever saw as long as the African American community is reasonable and so far it looks like that's where they're heading.
It looks like they're heading towards something that is not specific to African Americans because there's no way you could figure out who really is a descendant of slaves and who really was the people who should be paying.
There's no practical way to do it unless you help everybody in that situation.
If the African-American community does something that helps everybody in that situation and maybe helps them the most because there are more of them in this situation, it would be one of the greatest things that any community ever did for this country.
You could say that the African-American community would be the most productive, most helpful, most morally fit group in the country.
They would be contributing in a way that would be amazing.
And I think that I would respect that tremendously.
So they do have a path to something that's just purely good and really amazing if they do it right.
But we'll see if they can do it right.
All right. That's all I got for now.
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