Believers in Malthusianism are ridiculed because the concept has already proven to be wrong. The rate of population growth not only peaked long ago, it is actually in strong decline. As nations become prosperous, population growth tends toward the replacement rate, or even below it. Please see the excellent talk Nuclear Australia - Energy Freedom by Dr. Ben Heard, which covers this in the first few minutes. There is much reason to be positive about the future, and the sooner we pull the rest of the world out of poverty, the better for all.

Fortunately, it doesn't require the developed world to sacrifice anything, only to export and encourage technologies which can provide abundant and reliable clean energy, cheaper than from fossil fuels. The world will continue to develop, and the population will naturally stabilize; the only question, is whether they choose coal or we afford them access to a truly sustainable alternative. Renewables will play a part, but they alone can't support an industrial economy.

Web browsers rival operating systems in size and complexity, and are also hopelessly insecure. The main problem, shared with microkernels, is that the protection mechanisms available in common hardware don't allow efficient or convenient communication between protection domains, which are tied to address spaces. In order to cross the boundary, the address mappings must be flushed and reloaded, or at least manipulated, which are both very expensive operations. This makes any IPC very expensive, so the preferred means of communicating is by sharing memory, and for convenience and performance, nearly everything ends up in the same address space. Thus, the inevitable compromise of any part of these monolithic kernels and applications, is a compromise of the whole.

Without better hardware mechanisms for protection, that allow for efficient protection within the kernel and applications themselves, effective security will remain illusory. The furious and endless effort will continue in a futile attempt to hold the line against the flood of exploits. It is an intractable problem, unless we can shrink the protection domains to contain the effects of inevitable breaches. Capability-based addressing as with CHERI offers one approach, and the Mill architecture offers another. (see the Memory, Security, and IPC talks specifically.) Each represent a different set of trade-offs, which will limit applications. In any case, it is an area that needs work, so if there really are any nerds left on Slashdot, get to it, or at least help fund such efforts.

Targeted alpha therapy has the potential to eliminate omni-resistant bacteria, as well as inoperable cancers and viruses like HIV. It arms a targeting biomolecule with a potent alpha emitter that will ensure their destruction. Unlike with antibiotics and other drugs, there is no way for the offending organisms to evolve a resistance.

The technique has shown great promise, but research is limited by the availability of actinium-225 and bismuth-213, for which there are no good substitutes. Fortunately, they are a byproduct of energy from thorium, and this article also contains some detail on medical applications. Today though, there is only a very small amount to work with, from the dwindling remains of earlier thorium efforts.

These invaluable isotopes fall on the neptunium decay chain, which while once present in nature, went extinct on earth long ago. They are inextricably linked to the thorium fuel cycle, and LFTR is the ideal machine to reproduce their precursor in quantity, and allow its extraction during normal operation.

Only for nuclear would people consider a concentrated energy resource to be "waste", and strain to justify application of that label.

The fact remains that nuclear power makes the least demand on natural resources including land, and produces the least waste of any energy source, by far. Those pursuing the shutdown of nuclear, and hindering commercialization of improved and demonstrated technologies, demonstrate extreme hypocrisy by claiming to be environmentalists. You are either complicit or unwitting tools of the fossil industry; either directly, or by proxy of renewable interests which can only slightly reduce their use, and at great cost.

Nuclear reprocessing is already done at scale, and used to recover natural uranium and separate plutonium for MOX fuel. LFTR doesn't even need the plutonium to be separated, so the processing can be much simpler, and involves little more than pulling the uranium out. The products are essentially harmless natural uranium, and the remaining mess (4%) includes the actinides which drive long-term waste concerns, and can be fed directly to a LFTR.

Faux-environmentalists love to misrepresent "spent fuel" as "nuclear waste", even though >96% of the former it is just unused fuel, with the balance rapidly decaying to stability. Readers should appreciate that nuclear is the only energy source to responsibly manage its waste, and that it is only possible because nuclear produces such a trivial amount of waste to start with. None of the resource-intensive "renewable" branded sources have even been asked to do so.

Many advanced reactors can recycle that "waste" into new fuel, but there is one approach that stands apart from the rest. LFTR49 can consume spent fuel 90 times faster than other approaches, while producing new fuel and incredibly valuable medical isotopes unique to the thorium fuel cycle. It is also the most thorough waste burner, yet has the simplest fuel reprocessing. Using thorium enables the plants to operate with a fraction of the fuel, allowing many more to be built with the given resource, and producing virtually no long-term waste.

Flibe Energy may not offer the lowest hanging fruit among advanced reactor designs, but LFTR is uniquely able to reap the full benefits of the thorium fuel cycle: breeding in the thermal spectrum and simple chemical reprocessing. This allows LFTR to truly close the nuclear fuel cycle and run efficiently and indefinitely on nothing but the thorium byproduct of existing rare-earth mining. The online chemical reprocessing allows extraction of many valuable isotopes, and even the "waste" heat from the plant can drive industrial processes like desalination or synfuel production. Revenue from such byproducts also provides an opportunity to reduce the cost of electricity produced.

Slashdot largely seems to be missing the point of RISC-V. It isn't so much about having an open source processor, as an open specification that anyone can easily and freely implement and extend. The basic open designs are implemented in a high level design language and may be readily composed with a rich and growing selection of peripheral hardware in a flourishing ecosystem. The ISA itself is just a simple and elegant RISC, but the offer of escape from vendor lock-in or maintaining custom designs and toolchains is clearly very attractive to industry.

Even so, while RISC-V will be great for embedded applications and running legacy operating systems with minimal change, no conventional architecture will ever really be safe in a network facing system. We need a much better architectural foundation to enable genuinely trustworthy and secure systems, or there will be no stemming the flood of vulnerabilities.

The Mill Architecture is one prospect which promises very effective security mechanisms. Many common exploit vectors become impossible, and protection is flexible and virtually free, enabling the implementation of true micro-kernel based operating systems. There are many compelling aspects of the Mill, but it is not a trivial effort, and it will be a while for the hardware and ecosystem to develop, if it does while encumbered by patents. Meanwhile, it will remain a fascinating and inspiring curiosity which may be explored further under docs.

The EPA has left harmful regulations in place for decades, which caused 1600 unnecessary deaths at Fukushima, and countless more by helping suppress the most effective source of clean energy. While renewables may capture the limelight, the leading source of new energy worldwide is coal, and it is growing far faster.

Present radiation regulations are based on bad science. The linear no threshold hypothesis is provably false today, and counter evidence already existed even at the time of its adoption. Since then, a growing body of evidence and scientific understanding show that low levels of radiation are harmless and potentially beneficial. Aside from providing a basis for fear-mongering, misinformed regulations also prevent promising research into the use of low level radiation for medical applications.

Scientists for Accurate Radiation Information have recently petitioned the EPA for scientific/risk-based radiation regulations. There are also other areas where the EPA adopts the ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) principle for regulation, which is fundamentally misguided. Such regulation carries an opportunity cost, and the extensive effort to eliminate infinitesimal perceived damage is wasted when it could achieve a much greater positive effect if applied to other more serious risks.

Someone can't accept new nuclear, even to save their own life. Chances are very good that you or someone close to you will die from cancer someday, which could have been preventable if ideology didn't blind you. If the fools in government weren't more interested in weapons than energy, this technology would be saving countless lives today, and inexpensive carbon-free energy would be the norm. There is a good article detailing the specifics and history of LFTR for those with a mind open to facts.

The crusade by some to eliminate nuclear above all else will mean missing carbon targets if successful. Respected climate scientists like James Hansen agree that we can't afford to dismiss nuclear. Those working to obstruct nuclear progress also ensure that first generation reactors remain in service far longer than necessary.

For some time, Targeted alpha therapy has shown promise for treating difficult cancers, but it may also be used to kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria and pathogens like HIV. Once this capability is developed, the antibiotic arms race will end once and for all. The looming threat is very serious, and such promising research should be a high priority.

Unfortunately, there are artificial barriers that are retarding progress. The most attractive isotopes for use with TAT are Actinium-225 and Bismuth-213, which no longer exist in nature. Looking at the periodic table, one might be inclined to believe that other substitutes exist, but they simply don’t. The neptunium decay chain is unique in that it does not pass through radon or terminate in lead. Born in supernovae long ago, it was extinct in nature until relatively recently, when it was revived in the heart of nuclear reactors.

However, conventional reactors don’t produce much, and it is impractical to extract the short-lived isotopes from solid fuel rods sealed in a reactor core. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors however, are the ideal machines for producing these life-saving medical isotopes. Meanwhile, LFTR safely transforms nuclear waste into abundant and inexpensive energy.

It is worth noting that Flibe Energy is the only company in the west pursuing this technology; others developing molten salt reactors are trying to take shortcuts which miss out on the greatest benefits of the thorium fuel cycle. LFTR is a comprehensive solution, which can finally close the fuel cycle, eliminating the need for uranium mining and enrichment. It is a more challenging design, but it doesn’t kick the can down the road; it fully addresses all rational concerns with nuclear technology, and offers many new opportunities.

Taking matters into our own hands is a nice thought, but solar+battery are not happening on any meaningful scale. Such installations rely heavily on subsidies and absent far better battery technology than we have, will always depend on the grid. However, the grid can't support more than a small fraction of solar, as California is learning now.

The problem we face is that most "greens" have lost sight of the goal, which should be maximizing reduction of emissions. Instead, they are busy waging a war on nuclear, on behalf of fossil fuel interests. They measure success by "capacity" and renewable installation rate, while ignoring emissions, which are steady or increasing. Prematurely closing nuclear plants in places like Germany and California has essentially wiped away any potential benefit of their renewables, because they are inevitably replaced by fossil fuels. Every time. The only real change is substantially increased retail electricity rates.

The recent lawsuit against zero emission credits in New York is quite telling. ZEC are an attempt to recognize the value of clean energy from nuclear, which is unfairly disadvantaged by generous renewable incentives which exclude nuclear, and temporarily low gas prices thanks to the glut of supply. The ZEC hedges against the inevitable rebound in gas pricing and its volatility, ultimately saving consumers money and ensuring that retail electricity prices will not skyrocket.

This lawsuit demonstrates their real intention. Note that renewable-only incentives have encountered no resistance, because they lock in gas and coal backup indefinitely. With nuclear out of the way it will allow them to make the most of their renewable partnership and drive up fossil energy prices. That would be acceptable if the hybrid fossil/renewable system could economically reduce emissions, but that has yet to happen even once.

Your "easily" is still considerably more difficult than producing weapons grade materials the old fashioned way, so how does it matter? The fuel salt in a molten salt reactor is the safest place for any materials that pose a proliferation threat. It is both thermally and radiologically very hot, and confined to a chemical processing hot cell or the reactor itself, which makes it rather difficult to walk off with. Little of the thorium ends up as Np-237 in the first place, and it doesn't stop there--the reactor will turn it into Pu-238 and so on.

The standard LFTR design does not have the facilities to separate the Np-237 which comes out of the fuel salt with along with UF6, and goes right back into the core. A thermal breeder using the thorium fuel cycle has a very small margin for neutron loss, and if the fissile is diverted, the reactor will stop. Extra care will need to be taken with machines configured to produce Pu-238, but even that poses a significant challenge for diversion, and similarly will not go unnoticed.

Furthermore, this is the machine which is capable of making every nation on earth energy independent, and ending essentially all resource conflict. Once a nation has that, there is little motivation to produce bombs and risk losing it. There is also the fact that reactors provide the only means of destroying weapons grade materials, and provide abundant energy as a byproduct. Obstructing nuclear energy prevents that from ever happening, and will pose a substantially greater risk.

If nuclear policy had favored the sane approach, opposition would have had much less to work with. Scaling up a submarine reactor was a terrible idea, and the accident scenarios that have since played out were forewarned. When the inventor of the technology is firmly opposed, and advancing another option, a sensible person might give it some thought. Instead they fired Alvin Weinberg, for daring to voice safety concerns. Fortunately, even if nuclear technology is 50 years behind, it is still the most capable low-carbon energy source, and also the one with the greatest realizable potential for improvement.

While nuclear started off on the wrong foot, the larger problem was that it was facing very powerful entrenched interests. Along with the obvious measures to shape public opinion and policy, they also sponsored the dishonest "research" that formed the basis of nuclear regulation which persists today. They even funded early “environmental” organizations, to embed an anti-nuclear tenet at the core of “green” values, which sadly still takes precedence over decarbonization.

Driverless cars will face much less opposition though, since they are competing with people and displacing jobs. Great for owners of large businesses involving transportation and such. Good for everyone else too, but the ever increasing scarcity of productive jobs needs addressing. The gains of productivity should benefit everyone, not just a handful of owners. It is also crucial to keep in mind that while energy is the foundation of all prosperity, it will never again be a high-margin product and so offers little incentive to invest in production of it. That also needs to change, even if it means diverting a massive chunk of the defense budget to building reactors. Interestingly, that would be a much better return on investment for national security as well.

Hear, hear. The people telling you that "It's better to switch to a diet of energy conservation, efficiency, and renewables" are completely out of touch with reality. While the first world is busy sprinkling their landscapes with renewables and prematurely shutting down nuclear plants, the global share of clean energy is actually declining, and the reason is quite simple: growth. Before advocating unrealistic solutions based on ideology, please educate yourself.

There are already billions doing without, burning dung and wood just to survive; telling them that they can't have a better life is insulting. The developing world will choose the most economical option, and today that is coal. They desperately need cheap, abundant, and reliable energy to build out infrastructure and industry. It is our job to push technology, as only a better option will dissuade them from realizing the mountain of coal plants currently on the drawing board. Once built, they will continue to burn coal for the next 40-60 years.

Molten salt reactors were proven 50 years ago, and can solve the problems facing conventional nuclear. The primary obstacles are political in nature, and while it will require courage, they can be overcome. There are dozens of companies trying to push nuclear forward, but they are mired in overzealous regulations and unfair policies distorting the market in favor of renewables only and not clean energy in general. In reality, these policies lock in fossil fuel backup, which will remain the bulk of generation. Only when reactors are rolling off of assembly lines, do we have any hope of truly closing the book on fossil fuels. Until then, it is foolish to leave any effective clean energy options off the table.

(Also note: the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is an anti-nuclear organization; leading climate scientists, among others who genuinely care about the environment, do not exclude options based on the "green" ideology.)