Guest essay by David Archibald
The good and the great are uneasy about the state of the world. They know that our current standard of civilisation has been made possible by cheap fossil fuels that will run out one day. And then what? Their experiments with solar panels, with mirrors, with windmills have been disappointing. And it is dawning upon people that 70 percent of the protein we eat has its origins in fossil fuels.
Our current dominant nuclear technology of burning U235 in light water reactors is inherently unsafe and produces a lot of waste while doing so. And it uses only 0.2 percent of the nuclear fuel available to us.
The situation is summed up in this blog comment:
So biofuels will power the mining of phosphorus and the manufacturing of nitrogen via the Haber Bosch process to fertilize crops to make biofuels to mine phosphorus etc etc and as well create surplus power for our appliances and food requirements. Sounds like a perpetual motion machine to me. If you think solar power can replace oil (power our industrial civilization) and have enough surplus power remaining to mine the elements needed for the manufacture of solar panels, make solar panels, and maintain solar panels then I think you’re living in a dream world. Magical thinking at its finest.
In other words, solar panels are cheap only because the diesel and coal used in their making are very cheap. So the Breakthrough Institute has announced the formation of Breakthrough Energy Ventures to fund the development of new technologies that will provide reliable and affordable power. The funding available is $1 billion, provided by private individuals. In part, global warming is a religion that elites believe in and try to impose on the rest of us. So the first order of business for their new venture is to genuflect to their god with the prime requirement that the new technologies they will invest in “have the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least half a gigaton.”
They have their screening processes for evaluating projects put to them but I can save them a lot of trouble. There is only one technology that can save civilisation – the thorium molten salt reactor, written up on WUWT here, here and here. If that technology produces power at $0.03 per kWh then liquid hydrocarbon fuel could be produced at about US$120/bbl equivalent. The molecule most likely to be used as an energy carrier is dimethyl ether (DME) which has an energy content and handling characteristics similar to those of propane. Civilisation could continue at a high level indefinitely.
Thorium has been wilfully neglected. How that came about is shown in the following graphic:
Fission of uranium was first demonstrated in Berlin in 1938. The following day, physicists at Oxoford University were brainstorming on how to make a fission-based bomb. That kind of development pace continued for three decades. Early work on how to run a thorium molten salt reactor was conducted at Oak Ridge in the mid-1960s. Then that work was terminated in favor of plutonium breeder reactor research which in turn was killed off. And nothing much has happened since, until a Chinese engineer read an article in the July, 2010 issue of American Scientist and the Chinese research effort into thorium molten salt reactors was initiated.
There are literally hundreds of different nuclear reactor designs and a range of fuels can be used. There is also a basic division on how to approach fission with consequences for inherent safety, handling and processing of fission products, and operating and decomissioning costs. That basic choice is either having the fuel circulate or having the coolant circulate, illustrated in the following graphic:
The first commercial reactor for power generation was commissioned in in 1958 in Shippingport, Pennsylvannia. It used a uranium-burning, lighwater reactor from a cancelled aircraft carrier. All subsequent commercial power reactors have the coolant circulating.
Over the last decade, governments around the world have spent tens of billions of dollars on all sorts of schemes to make energy from anything other than fossil fuels. They have tried everything except the only thing that will work. When the new administration comes into power, they will stop the waste of billions per annum on green nonsense. It would be wise to put aside a little bit of what is going to be saved and apply it to the only thing that will work.
David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution To The F-35 Nightmare.
“The first commercial reactor for power generation was commissioned in in 1958 in Shippingport, Pennsylvannia.”
No it was at Calder Hall in the UK in 1956.
Regarding the implied relative safety of nuclear reactors using Thorium as fuel:
PBS broadcast an interesting program yesterday in the INDEPENDENT LENS series called “Containment”, reviewing American history of containment of nuclear waste, with a brief aside to the Fukushima mishap. It is well worth watching, albeit with a very skeptical eye, as there is absolutely no mention of foreign storage misadventures, such as the Kyshtym event of 1957 in the Southern Urals, nor was Hanford even mentioned.
Furthermore, the viewer was misinformed by omission of the ultimate cause of the worst damage in the Fukushima event – lack of routine testing and maintenance of the containment vessel venting system, which resulted in two reactor buildings exploding and spewing radioactive fallout over the Japanese countryside.
OTOH, there is video of the Japanese PM of the time saying that, had the worst happened at Fukushima, 50 million people would have had to be evacuated.
But then, the subject was essentially the issue of reliable containment of spent fuel. One can hope that this was handled more truthfully.
Watching this prompted me to briefly look up the relative toxicity of spent Thorium fuel, and according to Wikipedia, it does seem to have a much shorter half life – hundreds, instead of thousands of years. So if one had to choose between uranium an thorium fueled reactors, I guess thorium would be the clear choice on this basis.
However, the fact remains that we have not been able to reliably contain radioactive waste even for a mere half century. So leaking or exploding thorium waste is just as likely to contaminate the earth and kill off the human race as uranium. One particularly interesting bit of news was of a container in the “most advanced nuclear waste storage facility in the world”, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) at Carlsbad NM, exploding in 2014.
And the safety of the fusion reactors has not been proven either.
The fuel they are using deuterium (H 1 proton with 1 neutron) and tritium (H 1 proton with 2 neutrons) to produce He (2 protons and 2 neutrons) releases 1 extremely energetic neutron in the process.
Yeah, fusion is not radioactive they say. That neutron radiation is going to fry everything it comes into contact with.
It cannot be in a steel chamber or any other metal. A human would be dead within 5 seconds of exposure even if behind a lead wall. They are talking about using a liquid lithium metal chamber that will absorb the neutron which will result in a different isotope of lithium which can then be converted back to H tritium (through some unknown process).
Okay, you with me so far. We are spending $26 billion on ITER which will generate massive neutron radiation (think neutron bomb) and then they need to build a liquid lithium chamber to contain it.
Its a pipe dream. We need something else.
Lots of ‘blaming the Greens’ vitriol here I see. But that’s due to not stepping back far enough to see the full context. Allow me to explain.
The global Money Elites decided many decades ago that there are far too many people on Earth. The Elites don’t care much about the environment, what they do care about is social control, ie ensuring they remain at the apex of all political power. This requires they retain total control of many things, such as knowledge and information distribution, the Media, industry, government structures, etc. But the most crucial are: banking, money supply, and the means of energy production.
Control energy and money supply and you control everything else.
With BOTH money supply and physical energy, the only way to control it is to enforce a centralized form of generation. With both money and energy, if production was allowed to function in a distributed way, with numerous small independent sources and free competition, the system would be uncontrollable (by the Elites.)
So what we have is central banking creating fiat money out of nothing, and gigantic centralized power generation stations predominating. That only the Elites (via their controlled governments) can afford to build, thus keeping us all enslaved to the Elites.
Next point: The Elites haven’t merely decided it would be nicer for them if Earth had a lot fewer humans. They are actively working to bring that about. The figure they commonly and openly talk about, is between 500 to 800 million. Total, in the world. As soon as practically possible and by any workable means. Their main rationale seems to be that this is a population level they could most easily keep under control, and at a regulated level of technology (ie no technology that threatens to remove the Elites from the top of the control pyramid.)
And yes, that does mean they wish to kill off nearly six billion people. Ha ha, you probably though Hillary’s crowd were so upset about Trump’s victory because they personally don’t like him. And that all the anti-Russia media hysteria must have some truth to it. No, it’s because the last three US presidents have been working for the Elites, playing an attrition game in which the USA (and the world) is ground down bit by bit, working towards a condition in which a Global Population Cull will seem like just some accidental consequence of unfortunate circumstances. With WWIII being an important step in that sequence. Hillary was supposed to be the one to start that war. Who would *you* trust to start nuclear WWIII, other than a dying psychopathic Satanist?
Anyway, this is why we don’t have nice things like small, safe, cheap Thorium reactors. Because the Elites consider them ‘too empowering’ for the people, too hard to keep under control. It’s also why all Fusion research is carefully steered towards huge, vastly expensive installations, that only nations could afford. Since, if someone were to come up with a Fusion generator the size of a kitchen refrigerator, able to deliver a few hundred kilowatts and fueled by plain Hydrogen, that would flatly be the end of the Elites. The technology of any age greatly determines the range of viable political power structures – and very small scale fusion (or thorium) reactors would allow small groups to tell any wannabe central authority (including the Elites) to go take a leap. Off a cliff into lava preferably. When you are thinking about this, don’t forget that small, portable energy generation systems have military applications too. Every army in the last 100 years was utterly dependent on oil. Now imagine a new one that isn’t.
As for the Greens, it’s sadly the case that although the fundamental principles are laudable (protecting Earth’s ecosystem against destruction by human industry, pollution, encroachment, habitat loss, etc), the movement was widely co-opted by the Elites and turned into a weapon of destruction of human industry and technical capability. Many lies were told, ‘Global Warming due to CO2’ being just the latest (and most effective.) But never let yourself be talked into hating those who honestly try to preserve the remaining natural jewels of Earth. The Globalists and Global Warmists otoh… hang them all.
‘Renewable energy’ – Wind and Solar, are being pushed mainly because overall they make industrial society easier to ultimately crash when the Elites decide it’s time. Wind and Solar are NOT self-sustaining, they cannot energy-fund their own industrial manufacture. When the oil ‘plug’ is pulled, that will be the death of Wind and Solar power, and all who were persuaded to rely on them.
Wind and Solar farms are also going to look remarkably stupid as the new Little Ice Age we are currently entering, really sinks its glacial teeth into us. Build lots more big coal fired power stations urgently, I say. Thorium isn’t going to come soon enough.
“if someone were to come up with a Fusion generator the size of a kitchen refrigerator, able to deliver a few hundred kilowatts and fueled by plain Hydrogen, that would flatly be the end of the Elites”.
An interesting conspiracy scenario with some plausibility. But once you have more than one elite, there’s conflict, and the conspiracy risks discovery.
And you forget Mao’s famous saying “power comes from the barrel of a gun” (or words to that effect). It doesn’t matter what the technology, who owns it, or who created it, it belongs to whoever can overpower the owners.
A more plausible depopulation theory would be that advanced aliens have the various national and international elites by the small hairs, and are forcing them to implement their own inscrutable plan for earth and humanity. Maybe they’ve promised them a place on the lifeboats.
My own crude theory is that humanity does not have the neurological robustness required to cope with all of the data it’s being exposed to. Most human beings, even if “well-educated” and well-nourished, seem unable to deal with the barrage of dubious data and outright misinformation bombarding them. Their “bull-shit detector” is seriously defective, and their ability to suspend judgment for lack of evidence or sufficient data is minimal to non-existent.
Nor can they resist responding viscerally when their “buttons” are pushed on say, flag burning, pedophilia, rape, or animal abuse. Whether unconsciously or consciously, subjects like these cause most people everywhere in the Western world to either suspend critical thought and get on the bandwaggon, or to pretend to. In the end the effect is the same in either case.
And once the habit of repressing critical thought and expression is established in these areas, it’s a short step to adopting the same behaviour in lesser situations where speaking out might bring painful repercussions.
I suspect this is the simple explanation for the fact that the automatic containment ventilation system, and its manual backup procedure were found to be non-functional when needed in the Fukushima Daichi reactors.
Either routine tests weren’t conducted at all, or the fact that they failed was not reported. I’m only guessing, because I’ve never found an explanation for this system failing identically in at least two reactors.
I see this mass stupification, turning even the brightest (Stephen Hawking is a good example) into quasi idiot savants, as a form of group dementia from which humanity probably can’t recover, and which I expect will manifest itself more and more frequently in disastrous errors of judgement and in erratic individual acts of violence.
I wonder what solution the Solomons of Congress and Parliament will come up with when the soldiers and policemen they depend on to keep them and theirs safe start to run amok increasingly with their weapons? That will likely be the point at which the leader of the Praetorian Guard will take charge of the keys to everything, heaven help us.
But enough of my little rant.
I’m curious, in your scenario is the leader of North Korea also a member of the “Elites”?
After reading the comments–Whew!– nothing convinced me nuclear was the way to go. Neither am I happy with the CO and CO2–yes, I know we exhale 6% CO2 in each respiration–that is the result of our technology. Makes me want to believe in magic, speaking of which I would like to see hydrogen leaf technology.
Food for thought:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Loma_Prieta_earthquake
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm
We might mull over the thought that March 1989 may have been the result of high energy absorbed by the Earth from? cosmic alignments? magnetic refraction? solar UV excess?
This actually might give us cause for joy as we don’t know much about anything, it seems.
How about the Dual Fluid Reactor? That is a nice concept. www.http://dual-fluid-reaktor.de/.