For example, at 1:27, the video makes the false and misleading claim: "Thorium's no good for nuclear weapons".
That's an outright lie, debunked in post #3 by Garwin and in post #4 by MIT:
We have not found and, based on current knowledge, do not believe it is realistic
to expect that there are new reactor and fuel cycle technologies that simultaneously
overcome the problems of cost, safety, waste, and proliferation.
The video is anti-science pseudo-science hype.
Obama's science advisor John Holdren participated in the MIT report,
don't expect him to be fooled by this crap.
In case you don't know who Garwin is, he designed the first H-bomb, he is an authority on the subject:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/24/science/who-built-the-h-bomb-debate-revives.html?pagewanted=allWho Built The H-Bomb? Debate Revives
April 24, 2001
After suffering a heart attack, Edward Teller took a breath, sat down with a friend and a tape recorder and offered his views on the secret history of the hydrogen bomb.
''So that first design,'' Dr. Teller said, ''was made by Dick Garwin.'' He repeated the credit, ensuring there would be no misunderstanding.
Dr. Teller, now 93, was not ceding the laurels for devising the bomb -- a glory he claims for himself. But he was rewriting how the rough idea became the world's most feared weapon. His tribute, made more than two decades ago but just now coming to light, adds a surprising twist to a dispute that has roiled historians and scientists for decades: who should get credit for designing the H-bomb?
<snip>
Dr. Garwin arrived at Los Alamos in May 1951 from the University of Chicago, where he had been a star in the laboratory of Enrico Fermi, the Nobel laureate and arguably the day's top physicist. Dr. Garwin had been at Los Alamos the previous summer and, intrigued by the work, had come back for another atomic sabbatical.
In the interview, Dr. Garwin recalled that Dr. Teller had told him of the new idea and asked him to design an experiment to prove that it would work -- something the Los Alamos regulars failed to do. ''They were burnt out'' from too many rush efforts to build and test prototype nuclear arms, Dr. Garwin recalled. ''So I did it.''
By July 1951, after talking at the weapons laboratory with physicists and engineers, he had sketched a preliminary design. Of its features, Dr. Garwin said, ''There is still very little I'm allowed to say.''
He continued working on the design until he went back to Chicago that fall. Then, as momentum built at Los Alamos for the H-bomb, many experts joined the design effort, which was finished in early 1952.
The prototype bomb stood two stories high. In November 1952, it vaporized the Pacific island of Elugelab, a mile in diameter. Its power was equal to 10.4 million tons of high explosive, or about 700 times the power of atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Unlike its atomic predecessors, the hydrogen bomb theoretically had no destructive limits. Its fuel was cheap, and its force could be made as large as desired. Scientists talked of doomsday weapons big enough to blow the earth's atmosphere into space, or to raise ocean waves that crushed whole nations.
<snip>
Some background on him at wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_GarwinRichard Lawrence Garwin (born April 19, 1928 in Cleveland, Ohio<1>), is an American physicist. He received his bachelor's degree from the Case Institute of Technology in 1947 and obtained his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1949, where he worked in the lab of Enrico Fermi.
Garwin is IBM Fellow Emeritus at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. For many years he was an adjunct professor of physics at Columbia University and, from 1952, a scientist at the IBM Watson Laboratory at Columbia University,<2> retiring from IBM in 1993.<3> He has also been an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.
Garwin received the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest honor for the fields of science and engineering, award year 2002.<3><4><5>
Among other things, Garwin was the author of the actual design used in the first hydrogen bomb (code-named Mike) in 1952.<6> He was assigned the job by Edward Teller, with the instructions that he was to make it as conservative a design as possible in order to prove the concept was feasible (as such, the Mike device was not intended to be a usable weapon design, with tons of cryogenic equipment required for its use).<7>
While at IBM, he was the "catalyst" for the discovery and publication of the Cooley-Tukey FFT algorithm, and did research on inkjet printing.
Dr. Garwin is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.<8> He also served on the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States in 1998. He is also a member of the JASON Defense Advisory Group.
More background on him at the Federation of American Scientists:
http://www.fas.org/rlg/Richard L. Garwin was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1928. He received the B.S. in Physics from Case Institute of Technology, Cleveland, in 1947, and the Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago in 1949.
He is IBM Fellow Emeritus at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York. After three years on the faculty of the University of Chicago, he joined IBM Corporation in 1952, and was until June 1993 IBM Fellow at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York; Adjunct Research Fellow in the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; and Adjunct Professor of Physics at Columbia University. In addition, he is a consultant to the U.S. government on matters of military technology, arms control, etc. He has been Director of the IBM Watson Laboratory, Director of Applied Research at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and a member of the IBM Corporate Technical Committee. He has also been Professor of Public Policy in the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. From 1994 to 2004 he was Philip D. Reed Senior Fellow for Science and Technology at the Council on Foreign Relations, New York.
He has made contributions in the design of nuclear weapons, in instruments and electronics for research in nuclear and low-temperature physics, in the establishment of the nonconservation of parity and the demonstration of some of its striking consequences, in computer elements and systems, including superconducting devices, in communication systems, in the behavior of solid helium, in the detection of gravitational radiation, and in military technology. He has published more than 500 papers and been granted 45 U.S. patents. He has testified to many Congressional committees on matters involving national security, transportation, energy policy and technology, and the like. He is coauthor of many books, among them Nuclear Weapons and World Politics (1977), Nuclear Power Issues and Choices (1977), Energy: The Next Twenty Years (1979), Science Advice to the President (1980), Managing the Plutonium Surplus: Applications and Technical Options (1994), Feux Follets et Champignons Nucleaires (1997) (in French with Georges Charpak), Megawatts and Megatons: A Turning Point in the Nuclear Age? (2001) (with Georges Charpak), and "De Tchernobyl en tchernobyls," (with Georges Charpak and Venance Journe) (2005).
He was a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee 1962-65 and 1969-72, and of the Defense Science Board 1966-69. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, of the IEEE, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2002 he was elected again to the Council of the National Academy of Sciences.
The citation accompanying his 1978 election to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering reads "Contributions applying the latest scientific discoveries to innovative practical engineering applications contributing to national security and economic growth." He received the 1983 Wright Prize for interdisciplinary scientific achievement, the 1988 AAAS Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award, the 1991 Erice "Science for Peace" Prize, and from the U.S. Government the 1996 R.V. Jones Foreign Intelligence Award and the 1996 Enrico Fermi Award. In 2003 he received from the President the National Medal of Science.
From 1977 to 1985 he was on the Council of the Institute for Strategic Studies (London), and during 1978 was Chairman of the Panel on Public Affairs of the American Physical Society. He is a long-time member of Pugwash and has served on the Pugwash Council.
His work for the government has included studies on antisubmarine warfare, new technologies in health care, sensor systems, military and civil aircraft, and satellite and strategic systems, from the point of view of improving such systems as well as assessing existing capabilities. For example, he contributed to the first U.S. photographic reconnaissance satellite program, CORONA, that returned 3 million feet of film from almost 100 successful flights 1960-1972.
He has been a member of the Scientific Advisory Group to the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff and was in 1998 a Commissioner on the 9-person "Rumsfeld" Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States. From 1993 to August 2001, he chaired the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board of the Department of State. On the 40th anniversary of the founding of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) he was recognized as one of the ten Founders of National Reconnaissance. In June, 2002, he was awarded la Grande Medaille de l'Academie des Sciences (France)-2002.