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To paraphrase Paul Krugman: "By the 1950s ... tobacco companies were aware that their product was killing people, but they tried to keep the public from understanding this fact so they could keep earning profits." The same can be said of the fossil fuel industry in its 25-year-long attempt to downplay and obscure the disastrous consequences of climate change caused by the continued burning of fossil fuels.

There is an untold story about a potential climate change solution that taxpayers spent more than $1 billion to design, build, operate, test and prove. This hugely successful preliminary test work was conducted in a 24 Mw pilot-scale Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) at Argonne West in Idaho in the late 1980s and early '90s. Unfortunately, the IFR program was terminated in 1994 just as the technology was ready to be tested and demonstrated at full-scale.

Anyone want to guess why the IFR program was killed when final success was just around the corner? Suppose it was because the technology had the potential to nearly eliminate the need to burn fossil fuels as a means for producing electricity? It is a near certainty that a transition away from fossil fuels would have been possible within 30 years if IFR development work had been allowed to proceed.