By 2050, the cost of desalinated water could be quite reasonable. However, we need to start soon, and incentivize appropriate technologies. Reverse Osmosis plants will always be high maintenance, and use electricity which is expensive and wasteful. Multi-Effect Distillation uses half the electricity of RO, plus some thermal energy, which can be supplied by heat rejected from power plants, that would otherwise go to waste.
The key is to combine the processes, which will decrease the cost of both electricity and co-products like desalinated water. Since thermal plants are typically 30-60% efficient in generating electricity, there are large opportunities for making use of that heat for industrial processes. High temperature nuclear reactors are especially attractive, and offer more options for co-generation, including synthetic fuels and ammonia. This also allows reactors to run continuously at 100% power, while adapting to demand by varying generation of co-products.
The economics favor coupling co-generation to reliable sources of energy. Using excess renewable capacity is substantially more challenging, and of questionable benefit. For such plants to be cost effective, they can't be sitting idle most of the time, waiting for sporadic bursts of energy.
The true path to sustainability involves using more energy and less natural resources. Unfortunately, there is a common yet misguided ideal that we should minimize energy use through conservation and efficiency, and that expensive energy is good because it decreases demand. This kills recycling, desalination, synthetic carbon-neutral fuels/fertilizer, and other sustainability efforts. Worse yet, the preferred "natural" energy sources that are supposedly "free", require vast resource-intensive infrastructure to harness, store, and distribute. The massive environmental harm is tacitly accepted as necessary for saving the world, and if these efforts are scaled up, the results will be devastating.
It is rather remarkable how many have been blinded by dogma and propaganda, and can't even acknowledge the most basic tenet of minimizing resource use and impact on the natural world. Instead, the (fossil-funded) "green" lobby insist that we pave the world with renewables and continue their subsidies indefinitely, all without any plan or even a fund to manage their final disposition. The reality is that renewables only transform fossil energy and natural resources into a new waste stream. How can wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries ever be sustainable if we can't afford to recycle them?
Environmental impact is ultimately a function of energy density. Fission (and fusion) generate enormous amounts of energy from a tiny quantity of material, are produces even less waste, all of which is contained and self-funded by per-kWh fees. Advanced technologies are even more effective, and produce invaluable isotopes for medical and space applications. With rational policy, not only will it be the cleanest energy source, but also the cheapest. Then, economics alone will drive rapid decarbonization. Nuclear is already the safest by any objective measure, and even the very small risks can be virtually eliminated.
The controllers on their graphics cards are RISC-V. Now they're considering implementing their compute cores as well since the compilers are good enough.
Assuming this trajectory keeps up for the next couple of years, nothing short of a Mill Computing level breakthrough will stop RISC-V from replacing ARM and x86. There's just little to no value in paying for ISA IP when the fabs are doing all the real hard work anyhow.
I’m just curious how long we will remain in the dark ages because of Imaginary Property. Many are skeptical of the Mill, but suppose it pans out; how would that innovation benefit people in this lifetime? We’d now have a wonderful new proprietary architecture that no one will touch, because there isn’t a second source. So it will remain confined to niches until the patents run out and someone implements the ideas anew, which may only repeat the cycle with a minor variation. Without an open model, I fear the Mill will be doomed to obscurity.
The RISC-V ecosystem has demonstrated rapid progress with community efforts, and while the architecture is more attractive than ARM and x86, it is basically a nice yet open conventional ISA which suffers from the same fundamental drawbacks. Even before entering the nightmare of speculative execution exploits, the hardware security mechanisms have long been lacking. Current in-order RISC-V cores are extremely compact, making them attractive for embedded and many-core applications. However, OoO will reduce security even further, and the performance it offers comes at great expense in complexity, area, and power, sacrificing much of the benefit.
The Mill aims to deliver DSP efficiency and cost on general purpose workloads, and is invulnerable to those exploits and many others. One might argue that the Mill performance advantage is a luxury, but the greatly enhanced security characteristics of a Mill are not; they are basic functionality which is desperately needed by general purpose CPUs. While the Mill is a fascinating novel architecture, the most compelling aspect may be the security model, which will enable efficient microkernels and much greater isolation in applications.
Except that you can't steal ideas, and trying to monopolize them is backward, and not at all in the interest of humanity. We should all encourage the proliferation of good ideas; not only can we all share their benefit at no cost, but then the entire world can freely cooperate to improve the state of the art.
The problem isn't that the US "stole" ideas from Britain, but that they didn't discard the regressive concept of "Intellectual Property" after disrespecting it. In reality, new ideas don't spring forth from a vacuum, they are built upon a mountain of collective experience, and are as much a product of circumstance as ingenuity. Allowing a monopoly on any one can further impede progress by introducing artificial bottlenecks. Everything is a Remix illustrates the concept nicely.
To be fair, this specifically is about trade secrets, but corporate secrets don't stay that way, and it is hard to argue that US monopolists haven't already seen a fair benefit from anything China has "stolen". I'm more concerned about the snowballing monopolies in the US which certainly don't benefit the majority of citizens.
"IP theft" is oxymoron. "Theft" implies that the owner was deprived of the "property", which is impossible with an idea. This line of reasoning is also highly hypocritical considering how much imaginary property America "stole" from England.
The free sharing of ideas benefits everyone and lubricates progress. People believing that it is possible or beneficial to maintain a monopoly on ideas are deluded. The bill will come due, yet it won't be the result of "rampant IP theft", but of your own greed and stupidity, in believing that your ideas have more value than the manufacturing infrastructure to realize them.
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.)
Solar and wind can't survive without subsidies, government mandates and market intervention giving them priority on the grid. Per unit of energy produced, they receive outrageously lavish subsidies, and their preferential treatment is pushing all reliable generators out of the market, not just nuclear. It is the pinnacle of hypocrisy to criticize nuclear, which receives virtually no help. Nuclear advocates don’t even want subsidies; they want a fair marketplace and rational technology-neutral regulation. Go ahead: eliminate all subsidies. Technologies with real potential don’t need subsidies, only an environment free of insurmountable obstacles.
Why should nuclear bear the considerable cost of integrating unreliable and destabilizing energy sources into the grid? Shifting the cost onto a competing clean energy source is extremely unfair, and nuclear itself is far from mature. Conventional reactors don't even scratch the surface of the design space, and the nuclear supply chain and construction industries have wasted away. If ever there were a technology deserving of subsidies, this is it. In terms of fuel efficiency and waste production, the potential improvements are more than a hundred-fold, and these can be realized in a LFTR, with unparalleled economics, safety, and a minimal environmental footprint.
After decades of intense investment, renewables still contribute very little in terms of useful energy or avoided CO2 emissions. What they have achieved is sharply increasing energy costs wherever deployed. Proponents trumpet their supposed low cost, but experience tells another story. Germany has some of the highest electricity rates, and far from decarbonizing, they are constructing new coal plants. Even the Germans are correcting course now, and people should confirm the facts and reflect on them. Sadly, when faced with facts and reason, the human instinct is to doubled down on stupid, so it will require effort.
x86 and systems based on it are hopeless from a security perspective, and that is even before considering the ticking time bomb that is Intel's Management Engine. It will be exploited eventually, and it would be surprising if the NSA wasn't already compelling Intel to backdoor it.
See the Mill security architecture, for an example of how a clever architecture can eliminate the bulk of common exploit vectors, and require little more than a recompile. It isn't the only option, but I highlight the Mill because it is a fascinating and novel architecture which also addresses many other long-standing issues with conventional systems. The security mechanisms also enable performant microkernels to be built, and protection between applications and libraries.
Operating systems will require work to take advantage of the protection features, but that will benefit everyone and be well worth the investment. This is the kind of "cyber" initiative I would like to see, rather than the focus on offensive capabilities. The latter poses a direct conflict of interest with securing systems, and ensures that adversaries will stock vulnerabilities rather than share and fix them.
Expanded tabs are a waste of space. The reasonable solution is using tabs for leading indent, and space otherwise. Tabs provide proper semantic meaning for indent, allowing editors to respect user preference.
Fundamentally though, the question shouldn't even need to be considered. Code is necessarily structured and should have a canonical format, enforced by a tool like gofmt, which makes mechanical transformations of code much simpler. The amount of time wasted on formatting, both for writing and reading code is absurd.
I'll even suggest that a free-form text editor is an annoyingly primitive tool for programming. Given a suitable language and a canonical representation of the code, a contextually aware coding environment with full knowledge of the syntax could allow a significantly better development experience.
What you have just described gives an artificial advantage (or disadvantage in the case of bittorrent) to managed protocols, discouraging innovation. A neutral network should not discriminate based on packet contents whatsoever. It is fundamentally impossible to fairly classify traffic, because there will always be unknown traffic and lack of agreement on priorities. In some cases, encryption may even prevent classification; why should those packets suffer? The only place where QoS is both functional and useful is on a customers own connection, where they set priorities among their own traffic.
Beyond that, an ISP has no business discriminating based on address or packet contents. The moment that is allowed, ISPs game the system. As seen, they invest in smart hardware capable of culling unwanted traffic rather than adding capacity, which inevitably results in a more congested network. This devalues the network for all non-priority traffic. There is exactly one good solution: add more capacity when necessary. This is the simplest, least expensive, and perfectly fair. It also ensures that there will be an excess of capacity available for innovative new protocols and uses.
A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for continued support of "green" energy fantasy. Her anti-nuclear position is proof that she is either deluded, or doesn't give a damn about the environment. Either way, she will support the endless and enormous subsidies for renewables, which ultimately provide very little energy and big problems for maintaining a reliable grid. It is time to cut all energy subsidies and let the CO2-free options compete on merit alone, and encourage affordable and reliable energy.
As disgusted as I am by both Trump and Clinton, at least the GOP platform is pro-nuclear and even encourages energy from thorium and development of advanced reactors. It also encourages fossil fuels which is unfortunate, but still better than the "green" position which will plunge us into energy poverty. At least it is more honest and direct, rather than green-washing the expansion of inefficient natural gas turbines required to support unreliable wind and solar energy. Incidentally, without the requirement to support renewables, more efficient gas turbines can be used, which would be even more environmentally friendly than running the inefficient renewable/gas combination, and do so at considerably lower cost.
As cool as a clean burning column of fire is, a vortex engine looks like a more practical use of the phenomenon. The idea is to capture the energy of a rising warm air column as in a solar updraft tower, though without needing to construct a tower. It also offers the potential to replace cooling towers, and extract energy from the significant amount of "waste" heat available at thermal or nuclear plants. (That heat need not be wasted, and can also be used for cogeneration. The higher temperature heat produced by advanced reactors like LFTR or other MSRs can also drive industrial processes including desalination, production of carbon-neutral synthetic fuels and ammonia, etc.)
Uranium mining is in the noise of todays mining activities, and would remain so even if we stopped mining coal. It can also be extracted directly from seawater, and from rare earth mine tailings which also contain thorium. Nuclear fuel is so energy dense that you barely need any at all; the worlds entire yearly energy demand could be met with byproducts from a single small rare earth mine. The tremendous energy density also puts the cost of the fuel in the noise, and even seawater extraction wouldn't impact energy costs more than a fraction of a cent per kWh.
To mention something so insignificant, you are either ignorant or drinking the green kool-aid. A hell of a lot more mining is needed for wind turbines and solar panels, and neither are remotely environmentally friendly to produce in the quantities needed. Nor do renewables replace fossil fuels, because they are not reliable.
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By 2050, the cost of desalinated water could be quite reasonable. However, we need to start soon, and incentivize appropriate technologies. Reverse Osmosis plants will always be high maintenance, and use electricity which is expensive and wasteful. Multi-Effect Distillation uses half the electricity of RO, plus some thermal energy, which can be supplied by heat rejected from power plants, that would otherwise go to waste.
The key is to combine the processes, which will decrease the cost of both electricity and co-products like desalinated water. Since thermal plants are typically 30-60% efficient in generating electricity, there are large opportunities for making use of that heat for industrial processes. High temperature nuclear reactors are especially attractive, and offer more options for co-generation, including synthetic fuels and ammonia. This also allows reactors to run continuously at 100% power, while adapting to demand by varying generation of co-products.
The economics favor coupling co-generation to reliable sources of energy. Using excess renewable capacity is substantially more challenging, and of questionable benefit. For such plants to be cost effective, they can't be sitting idle most of the time, waiting for sporadic bursts of energy.
The true path to sustainability involves using more energy and less natural resources. Unfortunately, there is a common yet misguided ideal that we should minimize energy use through conservation and efficiency, and that expensive energy is good because it decreases demand. This kills recycling, desalination, synthetic carbon-neutral fuels/fertilizer, and other sustainability efforts. Worse yet, the preferred "natural" energy sources that are supposedly "free", require vast resource-intensive infrastructure to harness, store, and distribute. The massive environmental harm is tacitly accepted as necessary for saving the world, and if these efforts are scaled up, the results will be devastating.
It is rather remarkable how many have been blinded by dogma and propaganda, and can't even acknowledge the most basic tenet of minimizing resource use and impact on the natural world. Instead, the (fossil-funded) "green" lobby insist that we pave the world with renewables and continue their subsidies indefinitely, all without any plan or even a fund to manage their final disposition. The reality is that renewables only transform fossil energy and natural resources into a new waste stream. How can wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries ever be sustainable if we can't afford to recycle them?
Environmental impact is ultimately a function of energy density. Fission (and fusion) generate enormous amounts of energy from a tiny quantity of material, are produces even less waste, all of which is contained and self-funded by per-kWh fees. Advanced technologies are even more effective, and produce invaluable isotopes for medical and space applications. With rational policy, not only will it be the cleanest energy source, but also the cheapest. Then, economics alone will drive rapid decarbonization. Nuclear is already the safest by any objective measure, and even the very small risks can be virtually eliminated.
The controllers on their graphics cards are RISC-V. Now they're considering implementing their compute cores as well since the compilers are good enough.
Assuming this trajectory keeps up for the next couple of years, nothing short of a Mill Computing level breakthrough will stop RISC-V from replacing ARM and x86. There's just little to no value in paying for ISA IP when the fabs are doing all the real hard work anyhow.
I’m just curious how long we will remain in the dark ages because of Imaginary Property. Many are skeptical of the Mill, but suppose it pans out; how would that innovation benefit people in this lifetime? We’d now have a wonderful new proprietary architecture that no one will touch, because there isn’t a second source. So it will remain confined to niches until the patents run out and someone implements the ideas anew, which may only repeat the cycle with a minor variation. Without an open model, I fear the Mill will be doomed to obscurity.
The RISC-V ecosystem has demonstrated rapid progress with community efforts, and while the architecture is more attractive than ARM and x86, it is basically a nice yet open conventional ISA which suffers from the same fundamental drawbacks. Even before entering the nightmare of speculative execution exploits, the hardware security mechanisms have long been lacking. Current in-order RISC-V cores are extremely compact, making them attractive for embedded and many-core applications. However, OoO will reduce security even further, and the performance it offers comes at great expense in complexity, area, and power, sacrificing much of the benefit.
The Mill aims to deliver DSP efficiency and cost on general purpose workloads, and is invulnerable to those exploits and many others. One might argue that the Mill performance advantage is a luxury, but the greatly enhanced security characteristics of a Mill are not; they are basic functionality which is desperately needed by general purpose CPUs. While the Mill is a fascinating novel architecture, the most compelling aspect may be the security model, which will enable efficient microkernels and much greater isolation in applications.
Except that you can't steal ideas, and trying to monopolize them is backward, and not at all in the interest of humanity. We should all encourage the proliferation of good ideas; not only can we all share their benefit at no cost, but then the entire world can freely cooperate to improve the state of the art.
The problem isn't that the US "stole" ideas from Britain, but that they didn't discard the regressive concept of "Intellectual Property" after disrespecting it. In reality, new ideas don't spring forth from a vacuum, they are built upon a mountain of collective experience, and are as much a product of circumstance as ingenuity. Allowing a monopoly on any one can further impede progress by introducing artificial bottlenecks. Everything is a Remix illustrates the concept nicely.
To be fair, this specifically is about trade secrets, but corporate secrets don't stay that way, and it is hard to argue that US monopolists haven't already seen a fair benefit from anything China has "stolen". I'm more concerned about the snowballing monopolies in the US which certainly don't benefit the majority of citizens.
"IP theft" is oxymoron. "Theft" implies that the owner was deprived of the "property", which is impossible with an idea. This line of reasoning is also highly hypocritical considering how much imaginary property America "stole" from England.
The free sharing of ideas benefits everyone and lubricates progress. People believing that it is possible or beneficial to maintain a monopoly on ideas are deluded. The bill will come due, yet it won't be the result of "rampant IP theft", but of your own greed and stupidity, in believing that your ideas have more value than the manufacturing infrastructure to realize them.
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.)
Solar and wind can't survive without subsidies, government mandates and market intervention giving them priority on the grid. Per unit of energy produced, they receive outrageously lavish subsidies, and their preferential treatment is pushing all reliable generators out of the market, not just nuclear. It is the pinnacle of hypocrisy to criticize nuclear, which receives virtually no help. Nuclear advocates don’t even want subsidies; they want a fair marketplace and rational technology-neutral regulation. Go ahead: eliminate all subsidies. Technologies with real potential don’t need subsidies, only an environment free of insurmountable obstacles.
Why should nuclear bear the considerable cost of integrating unreliable and destabilizing energy sources into the grid? Shifting the cost onto a competing clean energy source is extremely unfair, and nuclear itself is far from mature. Conventional reactors don't even scratch the surface of the design space, and the nuclear supply chain and construction industries have wasted away. If ever there were a technology deserving of subsidies, this is it. In terms of fuel efficiency and waste production, the potential improvements are more than a hundred-fold, and these can be realized in a LFTR, with unparalleled economics, safety, and a minimal environmental footprint.
After decades of intense investment, renewables still contribute very little in terms of useful energy or avoided CO2 emissions. What they have achieved is sharply increasing energy costs wherever deployed. Proponents trumpet their supposed low cost, but experience tells another story. Germany has some of the highest electricity rates, and far from decarbonizing, they are constructing new coal plants. Even the Germans are correcting course now, and people should confirm the facts and reflect on them. Sadly, when faced with facts and reason, the human instinct is to doubled down on stupid, so it will require effort.
x86 and systems based on it are hopeless from a security perspective, and that is even before considering the ticking time bomb that is Intel's Management Engine. It will be exploited eventually, and it would be surprising if the NSA wasn't already compelling Intel to backdoor it.
See the Mill security architecture, for an example of how a clever architecture can eliminate the bulk of common exploit vectors, and require little more than a recompile. It isn't the only option, but I highlight the Mill because it is a fascinating and novel architecture which also addresses many other long-standing issues with conventional systems. The security mechanisms also enable performant microkernels to be built, and protection between applications and libraries.
Operating systems will require work to take advantage of the protection features, but that will benefit everyone and be well worth the investment. This is the kind of "cyber" initiative I would like to see, rather than the focus on offensive capabilities. The latter poses a direct conflict of interest with securing systems, and ensures that adversaries will stock vulnerabilities rather than share and fix them.
Expanded tabs are a waste of space. The reasonable solution is using tabs for leading indent, and space otherwise. Tabs provide proper semantic meaning for indent, allowing editors to respect user preference.
Fundamentally though, the question shouldn't even need to be considered. Code is necessarily structured and should have a canonical format, enforced by a tool like gofmt, which makes mechanical transformations of code much simpler. The amount of time wasted on formatting, both for writing and reading code is absurd.
I'll even suggest that a free-form text editor is an annoyingly primitive tool for programming. Given a suitable language and a canonical representation of the code, a contextually aware coding environment with full knowledge of the syntax could allow a significantly better development experience.
What you have just described gives an artificial advantage (or disadvantage in the case of bittorrent) to managed protocols, discouraging innovation. A neutral network should not discriminate based on packet contents whatsoever. It is fundamentally impossible to fairly classify traffic, because there will always be unknown traffic and lack of agreement on priorities. In some cases, encryption may even prevent classification; why should those packets suffer? The only place where QoS is both functional and useful is on a customers own connection, where they set priorities among their own traffic.
Beyond that, an ISP has no business discriminating based on address or packet contents. The moment that is allowed, ISPs game the system. As seen, they invest in smart hardware capable of culling unwanted traffic rather than adding capacity, which inevitably results in a more congested network. This devalues the network for all non-priority traffic. There is exactly one good solution: add more capacity when necessary. This is the simplest, least expensive, and perfectly fair. It also ensures that there will be an excess of capacity available for innovative new protocols and uses.
A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for continued support of "green" energy fantasy. Her anti-nuclear position is proof that she is either deluded, or doesn't give a damn about the environment. Either way, she will support the endless and enormous subsidies for renewables, which ultimately provide very little energy and big problems for maintaining a reliable grid. It is time to cut all energy subsidies and let the CO2-free options compete on merit alone, and encourage affordable and reliable energy.
As disgusted as I am by both Trump and Clinton, at least the GOP platform is pro-nuclear and even encourages energy from thorium and development of advanced reactors. It also encourages fossil fuels which is unfortunate, but still better than the "green" position which will plunge us into energy poverty. At least it is more honest and direct, rather than green-washing the expansion of inefficient natural gas turbines required to support unreliable wind and solar energy. Incidentally, without the requirement to support renewables, more efficient gas turbines can be used, which would be even more environmentally friendly than running the inefficient renewable/gas combination, and do so at considerably lower cost.
As cool as a clean burning column of fire is, a vortex engine looks like a more practical use of the phenomenon. The idea is to capture the energy of a rising warm air column as in a solar updraft tower, though without needing to construct a tower. It also offers the potential to replace cooling towers, and extract energy from the significant amount of "waste" heat available at thermal or nuclear plants. (That heat need not be wasted, and can also be used for cogeneration. The higher temperature heat produced by advanced reactors like LFTR or other MSRs can also drive industrial processes including desalination, production of carbon-neutral synthetic fuels and ammonia, etc.)
Also see the atmospheric vortex engine.
Uranium mining is in the noise of todays mining activities, and would remain so even if we stopped mining coal. It can also be extracted directly from seawater, and from rare earth mine tailings which also contain thorium. Nuclear fuel is so energy dense that you barely need any at all; the worlds entire yearly energy demand could be met with byproducts from a single small rare earth mine. The tremendous energy density also puts the cost of the fuel in the noise, and even seawater extraction wouldn't impact energy costs more than a fraction of a cent per kWh.
To mention something so insignificant, you are either ignorant or drinking the green kool-aid. A hell of a lot more mining is needed for wind turbines and solar panels, and neither are remotely environmentally friendly to produce in the quantities needed. Nor do renewables replace fossil fuels, because they are not reliable.