They should’ve kept their distance from the government as long as they could don’t volunteer to be helpful. Don’t volunteer to go meet with politicians keep as low profile as you can for as long as you can. Nothing good comes with associating with them.
Have a legal department trained to be the buffer between you and the government any contact any questions goes through them and since you’re paying them a ton of money, they are the only people the politicians should get to know, oh, and again and again do not volunteer anything.
> keep as low profile as you can for as long as you can
this is the antithesis of a tech company whether it is VC funded or not, but especially if it is. you don't attract new users by laying low. you don't attract investors by laying low. laying low isn't even in a tech company's vocab.
If the company is "hot" attracting a lot of users, then of course the gov't is going to come knocking too. They're going to want access to all of that user data even if it's not a service they could use directly. Sure, you don't have to go courting government contracts, but it's not like government employees are not going to see the same PR civilian users see.
In a world where the government has been turned into a massive customer of last resort and the game is a kind of first past the post of government capture, that’s simply not a game they can avoid, even if they’ve also been committing unforced errors.
They should’ve kept their distance from the government as long as they could don’t volunteer to be helpful. Don’t volunteer to go meet with politicians keep as low profile as you can for as long as you can. Nothing good comes with associating with them.
That was always Microsoft's modus operandi, and it almost cost them their company. You can ignore politicians, but politicians won't ignore you.
Lesson learned become more knowledgeable and learn more about the open source models and start getting busy and learn how to use them, also collaborate with any European solution, forget about the US.
It doesn’t take 20 years to build. Are we in the west gonna wait for the Chinese to build out Thorium Reactors, are we also gonna wait for high-speed rail to be built out by the Chinese too if it wasn’t for the war with Russia and the Ukraine, the Chinese probably would have built out high-speed rail, all all the way to Europe, by the way, they’ve already built a rail system all the way to Tehran.
And the Chinese have built out a high speed rail system all the way to Ürümqi, China just east of Kazakhstan in western China. (They aren’t messing around).
Switzerland is also working jointly with Denmark on a Thorium reactor and I’m sure in light of the continuing situation with Russia/Ukraine, and the fact that the Chinese have already built two Thorium reactors (a small one to work the kinks a much larger one that will go on line in 2029-2030) Danes/Swiss will be stepping up their efforts in this area.
It doesn’t take 20 years to build a nuclear power plant or Thorium reactor, which is coming online soon in China, it also doesn’t take that long to build high speed rail system either.
The Chinese have built a small thorium reactor for research and development, and they went on to build a much larger Thorium reactor which they have refueled on the fly without taking it out of service.
I am still surprised that America hasn’t it treated it like a Sputnik moment, but we live in different times than the mid late 1950s. I think we’re waiting for the Chinese to ship it around the world like EV cars. Imagine a Thorium reactor that can be put into the bowels of a Hospital or an office building basement and supply electrical power.
The Chinese demonstration plant is only 2MW thermal / 300KW electrical with the one currently under construction expecting to up that to 60MW thermal / 10MW electrical.
The difficulty with molten salt reactors is that molten salt is highly corrosive. It will be interesting to see if they are able to make them cost effective.
Please read Directive (EU) 2022/2557 and then tell me how a disgruntled office worker is supposed to do anything they aren't supposed to, given full compliance with the directive. I've seen some preliminary national implementation efforts and it's really serious stuff physical security wise.
I don't think I've ever seen a place fully compliant with all regulations down to the last letter. Somebody inevitably takes a shortcut somewhere. All you can do is push those shortcuts into places they don't matter.
Certainly not the times and culture we live in, but the "test" they tried running at Chornobyl violated their own regulations too…
"Unlike natural uranium, natural thorium contains only trace amounts of fissile material (such as Th-231), which are insufficient to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. Additional fissile material or another neutron source is necessary to initiate the fuel cycle. In a thorium-fuelled reactor, Th-232 absorbs neutrons to produce U-233. Depending on the design of the reactor and fuel cycle, the generated U-233 either fissions in situ or is chemically separated from the used nuclear fuel and formed into new nuclear fuel."
Many of specific issue around design nuclear weapons based on U-233 are classified. But:
"A declassified 1966 memo from the US nuclear program stated that uranium-233 has been shown to be highly satisfactory as a weapons material, though it was only superior to plutonium in rare circumstances. It was claimed that if the existing weapons were based on uranium-233 instead of plutonium-239, Livermore would not be interested in switching to plutonium.
The co-presence of uranium-232 can complicate the manufacture and use of uranium-233, though the Livermore memo indicates a likelihood that this complication can be worked around."
I think the larger concern is containment breach via sabotage and the resulting material release, definitely less than ideal if these things are put under random buildings where you have little perimeter control.
Thorium-based nuclear research was practically shut down during the Cold War precisely because they realized that you can't make nuclear weaponry out of it. It would have been a very different world otherwise.
Thorium-based nuclear research was practically shut down because:
1. General decline of nuclear power plant building after 1970s in U.S. Why financing research for Thorium-based reactor, when even PWRs and BWRs are not build anymore. The shutdown of sodium-based reactor research is another example.
2. Handling of highly radioactive corrosive molten salts in Molten-salt reactor designs is a big issue. Materials resistant to both intensive chemical corrosion and neutron irradiation were open research problem.
3. Online reprocessing of nuclear fuel necessary for some thorium fuel cycle designs (inside the nuclear power plant) could increase the risk of nuclear proliferation. U.S. government, as a general policy, doesn't like when non-weapon states do nuclear reprocessing.
4. Thorium-based reactor could be used to produce weapon usable Uranium-233. But this production was not necessary, as military Plutonium production reactors were already build.
Indeed we live in very different times. If a challenger appears whose success threatens certain aspects of one's worldview rather than compete and improve oneself people figured out that it is much lower effort to adopt a partisan mindset and deny reality. Modern American politics in a nutshell.
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