Ten years ago I gave a TEDx talk in Colorado Springs. My kids pointed out to me the other days that it had about 1.7 million views. I had no idea it had gotten to that point.

Ten years is a lot of time. A lot of time to pass since then, which just doesn’t seem like that long ago to me. At the time I was giving this talk, things were really in turmoil. In 2014 I had a corporate “divorce” from the guy I started Flibe Energy with, and the implications of that rattled throughout the rest of the year. I would have bad dreams almost every night about it, and they only stopped when he and I came to a resolution about how the company would go forward. That was not an era I would care to repeat.

I had turned forty in the summer of 2014, and I felt really old. But having turned fifty this year, forty seems positively young and spry to me, but I remember that I didn’t feel that way back then. I had a three-year old company that was working with a large electrical utility on a study of our design. I thought at the time that it would be the start of a very big and long-lasting relationship, but it wasn’t. But I didn’t know that at this time. I just thought we were at the beginning of something great.

If you had asked me in 2014 if Flibe Energy would have a working molten-salt reactor in the next ten years, I would have said “yes” without hesitation. But here we are and clearly we don’t. What did or didn’t happen?

Several things. Although I thought I had an inkling of how risk-averse most institutional investors were, it was much, much, much worse than I thought. Although I thought I had a perception of the level of governmental adversity to the thorium fuel cycle, it was much, much worse than I could have imagined. I’m almost glad that I didn’t know back in 2014 what I know now. I probably would have given up, and that would have been a mistake.

For just as there are forces out there that are trying to hurt you or deter you, there are also forces out there that are trying to help you and support you and cheer you on. And I didn’t know about many of those either. I didn’t know many of the people who are most important to me, every day, as I go to work and try to move this effort forward. And if I had given up back then, I never would have met them.

Where will we be in ten years? Well, you know I continue to believe that we will have built at least one molten-salt reactor. I really hope that I am right about it this time, because we really need energy from thorium. I am more convinced of that than ever. It may be that thorium isn’t just the best nuclear option; it may be that thorium is the only economically-viable nuclear option in the future.