Showing posts with label thorium. Show all posts
Showing posts with label thorium. Show all posts

Saturday, November 7, 2015

WaPo Gen Xer drinks climate Kool-Aid, attacks Baby Boomers for causing global warming and running up the $18 trillion debt

spotted headed to Mt. Rushmore

"Boomers soaked up a lot of economic opportunity without bothering to preserve much for the generations to come. They burned a lot of cheap fossil fuels, filled the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases, and will probably never pay the costs of averting catastrophic climate change or helping their grandchildren adapt to a warmer world. They took control of Washington at the turn of the millennium, and they used it to rack up a lot of federal debt, even before the Great Recession hit."

Substitute "liberals" everytime you see "boomers" in the essay and it makes a lot more sense than attacking your parents per se. Instead the author prefers to commit Maoism in "Baby boomers are what’s wrong with America’s economy". 

Meanwhile, exporting good jobs and importing cheap labor were artifacts of the 1960s revolution, advanced by people who were fellow travelers under FDR. The height of the baby boom generation was what, aged 10 in 1967? 

In the end, Jim Tankersley can't add and subtract, but what his father gave him for Christmas in 2012 for his patricidal thesis says it all:

"After I first outlined this argument to my father in 2012, he gifted me an actual lump of coal for Christmas."

Well done, Dad! The earth remains full of coal, especially American earth, ensuring energy independence as far as the eye can see, as well as oil and natural gas and . . . thorium! If only we'll use it. 

It makes more sense to rely on these going forward because they remain so plentiful, employing technologies to make them harmless to human health, invented by smart people from every generation.

But if a Maunder Minimum ensues in 2030, we might not care as much about the health as the warmth.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

China Ups The Ante In The Race For Thorium Reactors

The earth is loaded with thorium, but so is the moon.
The South China Morning Post reports here:

A team of scientists in Shanghai had originally been given 25 years to try to develop the world's first nuclear plant using the radioactive element thorium as fuel rather than uranium, but they have now been told they have 10, the researchers said. ... 

Professor Li, director of the project's molten salt chemistry and engineering technology division, said the smog crisis had provided huge impetus for their research. ...

Western countries such as the United States have experimented with thorium reactors but gave up on the technology because of the engineering difficulties.

Analysts have also suggested the US lost interest in thorium as a fuel for reactors because uranium was a more suitable material to produce nuclear weapons.

Interest, however, has been revived in recent years and research projects have been established in several countries, including the United States, France and Japan.


"This is definitely a race," said Li. China "faces fierce competition from overseas and to get there first will not be an easy task", he said.

h/t Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Sunday, January 6, 2013

China Commits $350 Million To Develop Thorium Power

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has the story here, and tells you better than I can why you should care. What's old may become new again.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

China Moves Forward on Discarded American Thorium Reactor Technology

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard had the story over a week ago for The UK Telegraph here, and promptly headed for the hills afterwards:

A few weeks before the tsunami struck Fukushima’s uranium reactors and shattered public faith in nuclear power, China revealed that it was launching a rival technology to build a safer, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper network of reactors based on thorium. ...

China’s Academy of Sciences said it had chosen a “thorium-based molten salt reactor system”. The liquid fuel idea was pioneered by US physicists at Oak Ridge National Lab in the 1960s, but the US has long since dropped the ball. Further evidence of Barack `Obama’s “Sputnik moment”, you could say. ...

Norway’s Aker Solution has bought Professor Rubbia’s patent. It had hoped to build the first sub-critical reactor in the UK, but seems to be giving up on Britain and locking up a deal to build it in China instead, where minds and wallets are more open.