Dear Alan,

I am sorry to hear about your health and financial situation.

I am not a nuclear expert, but yes, Thorium seems to be a nice possibility for the medium-term future. However, my comment was about the long-term future where hopefully we will not be requiring electricity any more, from any source.

Yuyutsu, In that case you need to change the we to I, given you can only speak for yourself and no other. I don't see any practical reason for your attitude and hope that the powers that be don't ever consider your flawed economic rationale.

That said, we can have a future where there's no longer designed obsolescence. And as much practical recycling as possible.

The later only doable if the energy component is truly affordable as well as being carbon free, i.e., MSR thorium and accompanied by power prices as low as 3 cents or less PKWH. If that's what you mean by doing with a little less, then we are in agreement.
Alan B.

There was one of those events about 20 years ago when it blacked out
Ontario, the NE US states and if I remember blacked out New York for
a short time.
They are real and such a major event that lasted for a day would shut
the whole earth down for a considerable time.
One of these events was featured in a BBC drama called COBRA and
featured a simulation of the real British Government COBRA committee.
In that story a main grid transformer was burnt out and a replacement
took a week to be transported from Germany to Britain.
The chaos with people that occurred was probably a good indication
of what would happen in real life.
Such an event would be no fun !

«Yuyutsu, In that case you need to change the we to I»

Well personally I have no plans to remain here that long, but I do not envy the new generations who will have to live with all this mess.

«I don't see any practical reason for your attitude and hope that the powers that be don't ever consider your flawed economic rationale.»

My rationale is anything but economic, my rationale is to overcome our present condition of slavery to material economy. I wouldn't expect these "powers to be" to willingly consider any move that would undermine their control.

«That said, we can have a future where there's no longer designed obsolescence.»

That would be wonderful.

«And as much practical recycling as possible.»

No matter what we do or don't, if the aim is to accommodate more human population then something or the other is bound to fail.

«if the energy component is truly affordable as well as being carbon free»

I don't see why either is necessary.

We are addicted to "energy", myself included, and the way to go is to gradually wean ourselves of that dependency.

If you want to use thorium in the interim, that looks fine to me.

Bazz,
Yes, I remember hearing about that North American event too. But it wasn't an inevitable feature of large electricity grids, but rather a result of underinvestment in electricity infrastructure. A well designed (and well built) grid would've been able to withstand that sort of trouble.

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Yuyutsu,
Life can't function without energy, and trying to ween ourselves off the convenient forms of it would only result in us devoting far more of our lives to gaining it.

Human population is not growing exponentially, but it is growing. Accommodating more people is a necessity, and not bound to fail at all.

Dear Aidan,

It is not about the population still growing because human population is already many orders of magnitude too high.

Technology, including artificial energy-production, is not about convenience but about containment of that many humans. As population numbers increase there will be crisis after crisis and yes, technology may still be able to continue filling the gaps, allowing more people to survive.

So if biological survival is the goal, if life has no other purpose, then you are right.

Electrical production (from any source) and consumption cannot be done by a single person, nor even with the help of one's family, extended family, one's friends, and I doubt whether even all one's acquaintances can produce a working light-bulb (let alone a LED). One can inherit a working generator and if lucky it might even work for a generation or two, but after a while it will wear down and no single person (or family, etc.) can replace its failed parts on their own.

This means that we depend on strangers, many strangers we are unlikely to ever meet, and that paves the way for kings and rulers of sorts to take control of our lives, so we too must work for strangers.

Thus we must decide: freedom or electricity, can't have both.

When we consider how much we directly and indirectly work for having comforts like electricity, we find that it's the vast majority of our time, that we struggle on our back-foot to serve the system, that we have less available time than in previous centuries, that we don't even get enough sleep in 24-hours, including for example because we must study many years to specialise enough to get a job serving strangers; and increasingly now, because we must protect our gadgets from "identity" theft, where previously we did not even need an "identity".

Electricity seems comfortable at the moment because we are addicted to it and I am not suggesting a cold-turkey approach, just very gradually over several generations letting go of one or two electrical gadgets at a time that we can easily do without.