Thorium cycle reactors look interesting to me, enabling a grid-distributed generation of power with multiple-path redundancies, just like the Internet "cloud."

But one thing in the article turned me OFF..
"our team honed in to the right molecule"... If these Harvard folks, or the writer who interviewed them, can't say "homed in on," and understand the difference, they're not too bright in my book. Yes, I'm a grammar-and-usage snob. Maybe I'll take a few knives down to my workshop and home them...

Too bad these guys didn't have the opportunity to design the obamacare website.

Fusion energy has been "a few decades out" since 1948. The government and private financing have collectively pumped about $100B (more than has been spent on all of the "renewables")into magnetic containment (which I label "fusion delusion"), and it has yet to reach "break even" (produce as much energy as it takes to continue the reaction).

I did a study on fusion for space propulsion in graduate school, with Dr. Edward Teller as my adviser, and he even admitted he saw no breakthrough for magnetic containment (Tokamak type) power. Since then I've been intrigued with the work of Philo T. Farnsworth (inventor of the cathode ray television that made that medium commercially attainable) in inertial electrostatic fusion (IEF) as what has a chance of making fusion power possible, but nowhere near 1% the money spent on Tokamak has been spent on IEF.

There's a better low cost battery for home storage than lead acid, which is the lead silica fluid battery. It's smaller, takes more charges, and has better capacity. Do a search (your favorite non-Google engine) on zelectricvehicle for the batteries and other interesting stuff, which is where I found the technology.

An exciting development, without some sort of cost effective storage, wind and solar is a money pit. It remains to be seen however if it can be economically scaled and made to work in the real world. I would not get too exercised about "Reaping the profits" If Government were to actually get the profits out politicians would just piss the money away on buying votes for themselves. "We" would never actually see the money. I would be perfectly happy to see some big evil corporation take this and make something out of it. "We" would then benefit as a whole by a "rising tide". As an example of this I cite the invention of Kerosene by standard oil. They made billions of dollars, but the public got kerosene at pennies a gallon and this replaced Whale oil [which was very expensive] for lamps. Even if government had invented it they would never have rolled it out commercially to the public because it would displace all of the whale industry. Government cannot stand to gore the ox of a constituency. They would keep the rest of us in the stone age rather than allowing a constituency to loose out..

I agree with all of this, although I won't rule out solar and wind completely. My gut feeling is some kind of new nuclear power will be the future of energy.

khalling is probably referring to The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution. The Innovator's Solution is my all-time favorite business book.

+1 for disruptive technology..there's a book you should read...;)

This will be an interesting technology to keep an eye on.