The Better Path In Energy

David Archibald

One of the first things that the new administration can be expected to do will be to issue a report saying that global warming is nonsense. The last time that Trump was President, he met with Will Happer, the distinguished professor of physics at Princeton, prior to inauguration in order to get the report underway. Unfortunately the President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had his ear and suggested that Republican women wouldn’t take kindly to global warming being killed off. So no report was issued and the good Professor Happer went back to Princeton. Global warming is still with us due to the baleful influence of Jared Kushner. Eight years have been lost.

No government on the planet has issued a report saying that global warming is a fiction; neither has any university. Global warming is the chief religion of the globalists. It is their moral cover for killing and tormenting the rest of us. Without global warming to justify their rules on gas stoves, vacuum cleaners and washing machines, they would just be psychopaths.

That’s the past. The report can be expected soon after inauguration. And that in turn will leave a vacuum in terms of energy policy. Don’t worry about President Trump’s promise to cut energy prices by at least half in his first year.  Oil rig numbers are in a downtrend at the current oil price. Nobody is going to dig or drill faster without the oil price going up. The only reason the price of natural gas is low at the moment is because the tight oil wells in the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico are increasing the ratio of gas to oil produced. That is a bad sign, not a good sign, because it means that the rate of reservoir pressure decline is increasing, in turn meaning that the rate of oil production from each well will decline faster.

So what is the big picture on energy? First of all, we know what not to do and that is add more solar panels and wind turbines. Our grandchildren won’t inherit those things; their fate is to be landfill. Fortunately the big tech companies have broken the logjam on small nuclear reactors and a nuclear renaissance is underway. In theory the Federal Government should stand aside and let the market sort out what is the best nuclear technology.

But there are a couple of things the new Trump administration could do speed things up and reduce risk for commercial operators which will ultimately result in faster adoption of new technology with lower prices for consumers.

Firstly, we need a third phase of synfuels research in the US. The first phase, in the late 1940s in Pike County, Missouri, was a Bergius plant making synthetic oil from coal. German engineers helped get it operating. The second phase resulted in the building of the Great Plains Synfuels Plant in Beulah, North Dakota in 1984. Unfortunately, at the time it was thought that the US had a natural gas shortage more than an oil shortage so it was optimised on producing synthetic natural gas. This was as a result of the Natural Gas Act of 1938.  Price restrictions on natural gas were finally lifted by 1993, providing an incentive to find natural gas which in turn lowered prices, impacting the Beulah plant’s profitability. The plant has recently been optimised to make nitrogen fertilisers.

As an aside on the subject of fertilisers, in 2021 the country of Sri Lanka, in a fit of eco-religious ecstasy, ran an experiment in which synthetic fertilisers were banned. Rice production fell 30%, tea production fell 20% and vegetable production fell up to 40%. The government was overthrown and starvation narrowly avoided.

Why we need a third phase of synfuels research is that there are signs that tight oil production looks like it is about to tip over into decline. Once the oil price goes through $110 per barrel, plants converting coal to synthetic liquid fuels should become profitable. But it would be better to use hydrogen produced by electrolysis with power from nuclear reactors rather than steam-reforming part of the process stream. That would make our coal reserves last longer. And it hasn’t been done before because it has been assumed that coal would always remain cheap. With the bogeyman of carbon dioxide killed off, converting coal to diesel and gasoline will be the next big thing. Anyone with a coal deposit will effectively own an oil deposit of the same energy content, less the cost of conversion.

The second big thing that the Trump administration could do is build one or more demonstration plants for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. At the moment the nuclear power industry in the US produces 2,000 tons per annum of spent nuclear fuel per annum, adding to the current pile of 90,000 tonnes. The current dominant nuclear technology worldwide is U²³⁵-burning light water reactors. Which is wasteful in the extreme. Under that technology, uranium as dug out of the ground is processed to enrich the U²³⁵ content from 0.7% to 3.5%. What is left over is 86% of the original uranium which is effectively discarded as depleted uranium, now 99.8% U²³⁸. The only thing it is used for is depleted uranium antitank rounds, even though weight for weight, if bred to plutonium it will produce the same amount of energy as U²³⁵.

For the 14% of the uranium that makes it into fuel rods, only one thirtieth of that is burnt to produce energy. Which means that of the original mined uranium, a mere 0.4% is used to produce power. This process, which has been going on for decades, is incredibly wasteful. It is like killing cattle and only eating the tongue.

It has been assumed that reprocessing spent nuclear fuel is expensive, more expensive than mining uranium at a yellowcake price up to perhaps $250/lb. But what SpaceX has shown private operators can replace some government monopolies for 10% of the latter’s operating costs. The solution may be as simple as putting the spent nuclear fuel through a molten salt reactor, producing power while separating out the actinides. We won’t know until we start and the important thing is to start early in 2025.

David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare