taking too long is a fundamental problem here

Some problems are complex. If you asked me in 2012 if fuel cell cars would ever exist I would have called it a pipe-dream, but now you can buy one and use it as a real vehicle in California.

and when did we think we would have got fusion? We can't rely on pipe dreams when solving the climate crisis

I'm not saying thorium is a solution to the climate crisis. But I think the balance is a bit far in the other direction: people rule out Nuclear unnecessarily as a part of a larger clean energy strategy because of bad associations with mushroom clouds and Chernobyl/Three Mile Island.

and waste