You wanted comments else you wouldn't be here. I gave comments. I certainly gave some of my own peeves. I thought that was obvious.

Look, I'll say this again. You asked which of the two PythonDeveloper thought were desperate. It's pretty obvious that he meant the author of the essay about "the thorium and nuclear advocates." Now you completely agree that you are desperate. Why did you ask the question if you weren't looking for an argument? The non-argumentative one would be "yes, I am desperate; Desperate that we as a civilization won't be able to survive."

You think that desperate implies a sneaky agenda. It doesn't. Here are all the dictionary entries: "1. reckless or dangerous because of despair or urgency: a desperate killer. 2. having an urgent need, desire, etc.: desperate for attention. 3. leaving little or no hope; very serious or dangerous: a desperate illness. 4. extremely bad; intolerable or shocking: clothes in desperate taste. 5. extreme or excessive." Notice how none of those imply a sneaky agenda.

Nor am I against reactors. I'm explaining, the best I can, why anything associated with nuclear power is viewed with deep distrust. Referencing work from the 1960s doesn't help. That's from the same era of researchers which downplayed the negative consequences of Operation Plowshare. The problem is that the public reaction against decades of official optimism, which deliberately deemphasized the actual consequences, cannot be easily overcome just by more optimism.

The only way to do it is to set up pilot plants now, redo the same sort of engineering project as the MSR but using the fixes suggested from that project (I believe KAMINI did that), and then develop a demonstration pilot plant which actually produces power, test out the entire lifecycle (including breeding U-233 from thorium), present all experienced problems with radioactive contamination, effect of fluorine on the pipes, etc. And above all, make that information available for public and expect rejection.

This work of convincing the public cannot be done in a single presidential term. It'll be at least 5 years just to get the full engineering data. Hence, I find the proposal that the President should use Roosevelt's bully pulpit to advocate the issues on a national scale at odds with what I think is the right way to actually do this.

Furthermore, you wrote "When they finished a weeks work. They simply turned it off for the weekend and turned it back on the following Monday." but based on http://www.energyfromthorium.com/pdf/NAT_MSREexperience.pdf , they most certainly did not have a weekly work schedule. It does not appear that you are working from the primary or even the secondary sources to make the above statement. Is you're above statement meant metaphorically? As it, I interpret it as truthiness.

In any case, you are confusing the issues. TRIGA is safe enough that it can be operated by undergraduates, and it can also be "turned off for the weekend." I think it can even be turned off for lunch. While power production reactors are a different scale entirely. Can you tell me how much decay heat will come from a thorium MSR which has been generating 300 MW use for 6 months? Can that sort of power reactor be so easily shut off and walked away from?

I read that the MSR decommissioning costs were higher than expected. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment#... says "the MSRE cleanup project was estimated at about $130 million", including a possibility for a nuclear criticality accident caused by the U-233 remaining in the system. To say nothing of the "one atmosphere of fluorine" gas above the solid salt. Are those costs and problems amplified in a full-scale commercial power plant?

And if you want to talk about alternatives to light water reactors, then one should also look to pebble bed reactors. Wikipedia quotes Richard Muller as saying they are "in every way... safer than the present nuclear reactors, and arguably safer than the global-warming danger posed by fossil fuels." Now, where have I heard that argument before? Note that PBRs had problems which were only identified by building reactors, and more PBRs have been built then thorium ones. Why should I presume that thorium MSRs won't also have problems?