HAHHA Hmmm…where have I heard that before???

There’s a paper I read once where they fired nukes in a cavern, made by nukes, and then used steam to make power. It would work just fine. We have a lot of experience in nuking in tunnels for nuclear testing.

As for nuclear I think molten salts are the way to go. Even of there’s an accident the stuff would run out on the ground and freeze like lead poured on the ground. You then get a robot to scrape it up.

Pressurized water reactors were the surest bet when Rickover wanted to make nuclear submarines. That was what we had that we knew worked so Rickover used it. We kept using them because even if it was inferior tech it offered little financial risk. You knew the cost.

As for lasers and fusion, lasers are getting ten times more powerful every 3 years.

So this could be made to work in the future. It seems to me that everything is going faster and faster. Tech is increasing by leaps and bounds every day. I’m old enough to remember when the plastic Bakelite was still around. It was on its way out, but there was a lot of it still around. Things have changed a lot and it’s really speeding up.

Which is what the smart people have been telling me since I was a kid, back in the mid- to late 1970s.

Oh, well… One day, it will be true. I think we’d be smarter to pursue thorium-cycle fission, because we’re pretty sure that will work with the technology we have now.