Some wonderful news in an otherwise stupid hit-piece
I am a big fan of
Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Nuclear Reactors. They have many more advantages than the current crop of updated 60-year-old Uranium U235 technology. There is also the Traveling Wave Reactor which was first theorised in 1958. The physics is solid. Bill is Chairman of
TerraPower, a company that is designing and building these reactors -- they expect to be up and running in about nine years. In the USA, we have 700 years of energy available from just our stockpiles of Depleted Uranium (U238) left over from seperating out the U235 for conventional reactors. The core runs for 40 years and then only needs another 30 years sequestration for the radiation to die down to harmless levels. A very safe design.
Anyway, I saw that Bill Gates was being roundly chastised in the media for his "informal" handshake with South Korea's President Ms. Park Geun-hye.
The article I saw was at the
UK Telegraph:
Bill Gates 'disrespects' South Korean president with casual handshake
The picture of the meet-and-greet between the Microsoft founder and Ms Park on Monday was front page news across the country. Some newspapers cropped out the offending pocketed hand, but most chose to highlight it.
"Cultural difference, or an act of disrespect?" the JoongAng Ilbo wrote in the accompanying caption.
"Disrespectful handshake? Casual handshake?" the Dong-A Ilbo asked.
That was the first three paragraphs of the story. The story was thirteen paragraphs long and paragraph twelve was this one:
Mr Gates was in South Korea as chairman of the nuclear start-up TerraPower, promoting its project to develop a next-generation nuclear reactor.
All of this chattering over a handshake and the media is failing to grasp that BillG is offering the South Koreans a big brass ring for energy independence, saying goodbye to petroleum imports for energy (they still need petroleum for manufacturing feedstocks but this is a fraction of a percent of what they now import).
Makes you wonder about bias in the media from time to time...
Posted by DaveH at April 23, 2013 9:36 PM