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Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

This writing style makes me actively distrust anything written in it. It's the opposite of convincing.

I agree, and I've been thinking about why that is. It starts with Szilard's understanding, and then misstates that it "was realized in 1945" (the year the bomb dropped on Hiroshima), but anyone who has read about atomic energy knows that the Szilard tested his theory with Fermi in Chicago as Chicago Pile 1 [1] in 1942.

Secondly, it presents the choice of molten salt versus pressurized water reactors (PWR) as a binary choice when it clearly isn't. Running a reactor is a process not a simple act. Fueling and "cleaning" molten salt reactors is an additional burden on the reactor's operation. If you put the number of processes you have to develop to run a molten salt reactor to the number you have to develop to run a PWR, there are fewer processes for a PWR. So from a development stand point the PWR is the MVP of reactors. By the time the research was available on the needed processes for Thorium[2] nuclear power was already under siege [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_protests

You need a lot more fuel fabrication and waste processing facilities for a conventional light water uranium reactor.

This is because uranium fuel must be enriched, and there also is orders of magnitude more waste, because only a small portion of the fuel in the solid can be used.

One could say that in a liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) those separate plants are integrated in the same building, but they can be much simpler because of the very different nuclear physics and chemistry.

Here's a simplistic diagram http://imgur.com/aKK7JaO

But in terms of processes, this diagram is too simplistic. What about all the attached chemical plant required for semi-continuous on-line fuel reprocessing? Keeping that safe, leak-free and coping with the activation of all the pipework and processing equipment is a huge engineering challenge.

Don't get me wrong, I love the simplicity of the LFTR reactor, but keeping the reactor running at scale requires a lot of additional infrastructure around it, and that's the hard part.

Same, author glosses over important details and is clearly biased. I agree with the spirit of the article but the execution is flawed.

At least the author should have someone proofread it. There are grammar and spelling problems throughout.

Could use a fact check too. Atom was first split by humans in 1938, not 1945.

I thought the article made some interesting points, but the plentiful spelling errors were a red flag. They detracted from my reading experience and casted a doubt on the credibility of the author's writing.

Examples: won;t, he(the) waste, yesterdays, todays, it's power source, flouride, bug(big), radio-active vs. radioactive, lots of unnecessarily Capitalized Words.

Let's not forget that the technology is relatively unexplored. No matter how clean; nobody is going to use something that simply doesn't work. Funding is the only way to improve that, but it's definitely not as peachy as the article tries to make it look. The technology is not mature enough to take to your local congressman (unless you're after funding for research).

Also, generation IV uranium reactors (e.g. PBR) are designed to be passively safe, although expensive. Thorium reactors will need to be safe and most of all cheap - we've become quite efficient at splitting uranium during all the years that thorium has been ignored.

A reactor needs to be economically viable before it is built.

Don't know what you lot are talking about.

It's very easy to read the article, get the basic argument down, and search for more information for everything that didn't sound convincing to you.

It's an article that has a point -- right or wrong. Not everything has to be written as some journal submission.

I'd agree with you, yet the article leaves me with the same type of response.

I don't know if it's true, but the writing style for me too invokes a feeling that I'm not getting the complete story. Similar to articles from conspiracy theorist or advertising for local unions (I live in Toronto, I have nothing against unions, but their ads just feel like I'm being lied to).

I also thought it was easy to read and had no strong qualms with the style.

I'd like to sell you some BEAUTIFUL, SCENIC land in Florida, perfect for raising you're children in a CLEAN, WHOLESOME environment free from the HECTIC, DANGEROUS modern world.

I found it very easy to read too, and when halfway through I remember thinking it's a great example of why I prefer blog posts so much over scientific papers.

However I have to agree with the person you're replying to: the typos and general writing style were making me unsure of the trustworthiness. It's too black and white, not a nuanced list of pros and cons. It seems written to convince people who don't want to know the details, rather than the uninitiated.

> It's very easy to read the article

Not for me, at least. My eyes jump to the all-caps words, they jump to the repeated letters in "weeeeelllll....", and I find the unqualified binary assertions and fake dialogue utterly unconvincing.

All these writing techniques combine to set off my crackpot and scam detectors.

I agree with the article's premise, but it takes conscious effort to not dismiss it based on style issues.

Agreed, I didn't finish reading the post due to the writing style.

It seems to be written in a tone typically used for narrative fiction.

He at the very least stole the setting, theme and the beginning from "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes, mutilated it too.

I agree. It just came off to me as made-up and non-authoritative.

So terrible that I've stopped reading and came back to HN to read the comments to see if it was serious. Now I don't need to finish it.

It's a writing style that is very familiar to anyone who has read X-Plane press releases. Austin Meyer is very fond of all-caps for emphasis.

This is written very similarly to the anti-vaccination articles. Just sets off all kinds of red flags.

It really does, even though I generally tend to favor thorium-cycle power generation.

Also, why is "fluoride" such a hard word to spell?

It's those "chemtrails" messing with your mind

the "uo" letter sequence is pretty rare. from the latest collins wordlist:

$ grep UO ~/CSW15.txt | wc -l 603

$ grep OU ~/CSW15.txt | wc -l 12564

the most common are QUO- and -UOUS words, plus a handful of _UOS words like "virtuoso"; removing those we are left with a handful of root words:

FLUOR [as noted], BUOY [which americans pronounce "booee" and everyone else "boy", so the letter sequence even leads to dialect pronunciation differences!], DUO, LANGUOR [i've seen this misspelt a lot too], PLUOT, SKEUOMORPH, and a handful of scientific words like GLUON and VACUO-, and words borrowed from other languages like EUONYM and OCTUOR.

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