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Let’s be clear: conventional nuclear energy has drawbacks, principally that it relies on enriched uranium. That’s problematic for several reasons. In the first place, there’s not that much uranium: if you tried to scale conventional nuclear energy to meet the world’s energy needs, you’d run out.

In the U.S., more than 700,000 metric tons of depleted uranium—the by-product of enrichment—sits in storage.

TerraPower’s technology is designed to use that depleted uranium as fuel, turning the cheap by-product of today’s reactors into enough electricity to power every home in America for 1,000 years.

The water makes the fractures, and the sand keeps them open. There’s some other stuff in that fracking blend, too: biocides, for one thing, not very different from what’s in your swimming pool, to keep bacteria and algae and other gunk from growing in the water and clogging up the works. There are also some friction reducers, because water and sand moving at speed can produce a lot of wear and tear (cf. the Grand Canyon), and the occasional jolt of 7 percent hydrochloric acid solution for boring out holes in the concrete. The mix is 99+ percent water and sand, and the rest of the stuff is mostly run-of-the-mill industrial chemicals (those friction-reducers use a polymer that also is used in children’s toys, for example). Real concerns, but not exactly an insurmountable environmental challenge.

With youth unemployment touching 50% in eurozone countries such as Spain and Greece, is a generation being sacrificed for the sake of a single currency that encompasses too diverse a group of countries to be sustainable?

What of Nobel Prize winner Robert Mundell’s famous 1961 conjecture that national and currency borders need not significantly overlap? In his provocative American Economic Review paper “A Theory of Optimum Currency Areas,” Mundell argued that as long as workers could move within a currency region to where the jobs were, the region could afford to forgo the equilibrating mechanism of exchange-rate adjustment.

That created both a sovereign debt problem and a banking problem,

Both the AQR and the stress test relied heavily on national regulators and supervisors – the very entities on whose watch the excesses that led to the financial crisis were allowed to fester and compound.