As Europe and North America continue suffering their steady economic and social decline as a direct result of imposing “lockdown” on their populations, other countries have taken a different approach to dealing with the coronavirus threat. You wouldn’t know it by listening to western politicians or mainstream media stenographers, there are also non-lockdown countries. They are led by Sweden, Iceland, Belarus, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Surprisingly to some, their results have been as good or better than the lockdown countries, but without having to endure the socio-economic chaos we are now witnessing across the world. For this reason alone, Sweden and others like them, have already won the policy debate, as well as the scientific one too.
Unlike many others, Sweden has not enforced any strict mass quarantine measures to contain COVID-19, nor has it closed any of its borders. Rather, Swedish health authorities have issued a series of guidelines for social distancing and other common sense measures covering areas like hygiene, travel, public gatherings, and protecting the elderly and immune compromised. They have kept all preschools, primary and secondary schools open, while closing college and universities who are now doing their work and lectures online. Likewise, many bars and restaurants have remained open, and shoppers do not have to perform the bizarre ritual of queuing around the block standing 2 meters apart in order to buy groceries.
According to the country’s top scientists, they are now well underway to achieving natural herd immunity. It seems this particular Nordic model has already won the debate.
Because Sweden decided to follow real epidemiological science and pursue a common sense strategy of herd immunity, it doesn’t need to “flatten of the curve” because its strategic approach has the added benefit of achieving a much more gradual and wider spread.
This chart proves the point:
How well are the other non-lockdown countries doing?
Iceland has a total case count of 1799 and a death count of 10, all between March 21 and April 20.
Belarus has a total case count of 16705 and a death count of 99, and the death chart looks like this:
Here the daily death count has not risen above 5 per day. in a country of 9.5 million
Japan has a total case count of 14571 and a death count of 474, and the death chart looks like this:
Japan shows a unique pattern: It looked that they had beaten the coronavirus early, but then in April it started up again, but always at manageable levels.
South Korea has a total case count of 10793 and a death count of 250, and the death chart looks like this:
The death count rises, then stays constant for about 2 months and then declines, but slower than the new case count.
Taiwan has a total case count of 432 and a death count of 6, all between March 20 and April 10. And this in a country of 24 million!
Compare this with Belgium, the center of European Union, and roughly the size of Sweden, it has a total case count of 49906 and a death count of 7844, and the death chart looks like this
This chart, representative of a lock-down country shows the same rise, flattop and decline as the charts of the non lock-down countries, but has a much higher death rate.
The medicine suppliers have to go through a lot to get a new drug approved. There are the double blind tests that can take years to verify, and some of the people in the protocol are given placebos that only produce the side-effects, not the potential cure. Some of these people may die as a result, but that the cost of getting a drug approved. The cost can be upwards of 10 million dollars, so as a reward the Medical supplier company gets awarded a patent for the new medicine. This can take many years to develop, and a patent is valid for only 20 years, so a patent extension of up to 5 years is almost routinely granted. After the patent is expired it becomes a generic drug. And another thing, there has to be at least 170000 people suffering from the disease to make it worthwhile.
There is another way. Over 10 years ago my wife got a case of wet macular degeneration in one eye, but it was not the normal type, more like a blood-filled polyp lodging itself under the retina and causing warped vision to say the least.
There was an approved medication at 2000 dollars an injection, the insurance company paid for it, so she tried it, and it did absolutely nothing. But the eye doctor said, he worked with the Amish community, and they are uninsured and cannot afford more than generic drugs. He had had good results for a few to inject Avastin, an approved drug for colon and rectal cancer among other things, and in the amount needed for injection in one eye the cost was only 70 dollars. The trade-off was obvious; 2000 dollars for a drug that the insurance company paid for, but didn’t work versus a 70 dollar medicine that might work, so she let herself be included in the study. And it worked! And the doctor paid for the cost of the medicine himself, he wanted the study to succeed. He was not alone, a few other doctors worked together to find the cure. A few years later the insurance company accepted the treatment, and my wife’s polyp eventually disappeared.
The point of the story? To rely only on approved medications when confronted with cases out of the ordinary, medical science is advancing not only by medical companies seeking new and profitable drugs, or by University research, but by your regular doctor, in consultation with his peers, as they seek to find the best cure for the individual patient.
The Government is always to slow to react. In the case of COVID-19, it works on a time-scale of 3 days, so the best treatment must be administered immediately, not wait for normal approval procedures. So is the case with Hydroxychloroquine, it is approved and generic, no one will make a case study, the side effects are minimal for Lupus or rheumatic patients, of which there are tens of thousands patients and no one has died from it when applied in approved doses, so administer it to anyone that accepts to be in the study now!
I have been fascinated with the spread of the coronavirus and the speed of which it has spread to all parts of the world. The question is how bad will it be, how many will die, and what can be done about it. Thanks to the ability to test who are having it, and who will get it, and how many have already died from it, and how many are still in critical care we can now estimate how bad it can be in countries with a good healthcare system, the Nordic Countries will serve as an example.
Let us begin with Sweden. They took a passive approach at first, the healthcare system will take care of the cases as they have always handled the flue. The problem is, that left to itself the coronavirus cases double every 3 days until the whole population is infected except for those with natural immunity. A few days ago even Sweden clamped down and is now implementing separation. Here are the current numbers for Sweden, normalized per million inhabitants
Cases 704, serious or critical 60, deaths 47, testing 0.36%
Denmark took a similar approach, and here are the
Cases 808, serious or critical 48, deaths 32, testing 0.92%
We can see testing makes a difference, cases go up, deaths go down
Finland is very similar, but cases started later:
Cases 393, serious or critical 35, deaths 5, testing 0.6%
Norway took a different approach, they applied early testing, and tracing and testing their contacts. Here are these results:
Cases 1082, serious or critical 16, deaths 14, testing 2.5%.
Going west there is the Faeroe Islands with little more than 50000 inhabitants:
Cases 3745, serious or critical 20, deaths 0, testing 10.2%.
Wow! No deaths at all! But the sample was small.
Of particular interest is Iceland. It is a unique country. Not only do they have excellent health care, they have the DNA genome of nearly every Icelander. They did a very aggressive testing, and here are the results so far:
Cases 4577, serious or critical 4, deaths 18, testing 8.2%.
It turns out that about half of those who tested positive had no symptoms, but were probably carriers. This leads us to the conclusion that testing is important, social separation only works if everyone participates, and if the country has an excellent health care system the total cases will be 5,6% of which 2.8% show no symptoms, critical or serious cases are 0.25%, and deaths are 0.3% of the whole population.
In a country like United States this means that we will have about 80000 deaths total if we test like Norway or Iceland from now on, and about 210000 deaths if we continue with only mitigation and no contact tracing, and let the disease work itself through the whole population.
The lesson from Spain, Italy and Franceis; if the hospitals get overloaded it could be far worse.
The generic drug Hydroxychloroquine combined with one more generic drug could lower those numbers substantially if taken voluntarily by a majority of early diagnosed patients, and even if taken later in the course of the disease. Of course there will always be some that would rather die than taking something that has been recommended by President Trump, but we are a free country, and there should be enough ventilators for them.
Enough people are taking the medicine cocktail now on a right to try basis to give us the answer in about two weeks if we can go back to work and back to normal life, but with changed social separation. The regular flu and pneumonia deaths are way down already.
The pandemic has spread to the whole world, only Tajikistan and North Korea have yet to report any cases, but territories like Falkland Islands and Saint Pierre Miquelon have reported in, a total of 208 countries and territories as of now. Antarctica is so far spared, but nobody lives there anyhow, only a few thousand people on temporary assignments.
This means the COVID-19 virus is so contagious that it will affect us all, and with a 3 day doubling rate it will not take long until everybody is or has been infected, except for those with protection or immunity.
One possible such protection is the use of Hydroxychloroquine, or just plain Chloroquine Phosphate. These are common drugs to protect against malaria, and in countries where malaria is prevalent there seems to be much fewer cases than in countries without malaria threats. These drugs are safe for most people, but must be taken under advise and prescription from a physician.
Early last week, Dr. Birx in the daily coronavirus briefing promised to look into if there was any correlation between people already taking Hydroxychloroquine for relief from Lupus of Rheumatism and their incidence of contracting COVID-19. She was going to utilize the large, anonymous part of the Medicare and Medicaid database that lists everybody that receives these benefits. It is already used to study interactions between medicines and outcomes, a most valuable resource, but as always they normally take their jolly time to verify and certify the results. She wanted the results by last Friday to keep up with the enemy, the virus. If there is a statistically valid difference between Lupus or Rheumatic patients and the population in general we have our answer! (China have their answer, but they are not telling, presumably to maximize the damage in the rest of the world.) If the result is conclusive, here is the answer,
Step 1. Give the Hydroxychloroquine medication to all patients testing positive for COVID-19.
Step 2. Give the medication to all health care workers coming in contact with COVID-19 patients.
Step 3. Give this medication to all potentially coming in contact with COVID-19 positive people such as police, first responders, the military and so on.
Step 4. Give this medication to all who have been in contact with people having tested positive for COVID-19
Step 5. Make taking this medication a condition for international travel and travel to and from national hot spots.
Step 6. Offer this medication to the rest of the world.
The medicine can be manufactured by the tons if speedy approval is issued by the FDA from sources other than China! This is why President Trump invoked the Defense Production Act!
If we can ramp up this action plan speedily, we should be back to normal life within a month, except most of us will have to take one more medication, (but it is cheap). When the vaccine is approved and available this requirement will go away
On March 13 Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft abruptly resigned from the board. Not long after it was discovered that one of his small research companies held a patent on the Coronavirus, or so it was said. Being curious I took a look at the patent.It turns out, it is a corona virus all right, complete with a vaccine against it, but it is for use in animals, not humans. Bill Gates has always been interested in vaccines, especially viruses that has a potential to develop into pandemics. It is a very worthwhile research subject, you want to have the answer right away, should a pandemics develop. The good thing about patents is, you have the exclusive right to manufacture it, or license it for a fee. He knows this very well. In the beginning of PCs Bill Gates offered to sell the Microsoft operating system to IBM for 82000 dollars. IBM said no, they had their own team developing it, so they needed no help, thank you. Well, it turned out they failed, so IBM came back to Bill Gates to take him up on the offer. Bill Gates refused, but offered to license it to IBM for a “reasonable” fee and the rest is history. So it can be very profitable. The price you pay for issuing a patent is that you have to disclose all pertinent information, in this case it consisted of the whole DNA sequence of the corona virus and the method to make the vaccine. Now it shows up that this virus was close enough to the one that caused the current pandemic, so the full DNA sequence information became very helpful to have a starting point to develop a vaccine for the current strains. Where was the original research conducted? You guessed it – in Wuhan, China. Why did Bill Gates choose China for the research?
On a totally unrelated subject, but still concerning Bill Gates, his company TerraPower decided to discontinue development of a research Nuclear reactor near Beijing, China. The reason was that the U.S. Department of Energy in October announced new restrictions on nuclear deals with China, in keeping with a broader plan by the Trump administration to limit China’s ability to access U.S-made technologies it considers to be of strategic importance.
Gates, who co-founded TerraPower, said that regulations in the United States are currently too restrictive to allow the reactor prototype to be built domestically.
There we have it! China has given sweetheart deals to everybody that want to come and do research in China. No bothersome regulations, all they want is to get full knowledge of what you are doing, be equal partners in all the findings, and if it leads to good production, be equal partners until they can fully take over. This has bee going on for over 25 years, and China was ready to fully take over, but the corona virus was released prematurely by accident.
By the way, be not surprised if North Korea suddenly agrees to abolish their nuclear weapons and stockpile. Bio warfare is cheaper and more difficult to trace and control and China doesn’t want to take the blame for it.
Anecdotal evidence shows that China is now using Hydroxychloroquine as a first defense against the COVID-19 outbreak. Did they tell us? No, but they have prohibited export of one of its main ingredients, and until very recently they were single sourced.
The moral of this story is: don’t ever get caught single sourced again! By the way, it is in the Defense Procurement Regulation. And don’t get me started on Rare Earth Metals!
The impression you want to make on the public depends on how you want to present the data in charts. This is the data for the COVID-19 outbreak you would use if you are a reporter working for the mainstream media.
The chart is absolutely true, and is selected to scare you as much as possible.
Governor Cuomo of New York does no longer want to scare you, but present a clear and present danger, since New Yourk State has nearly half of all COVID19 cases, and NYC by itself nearly a quarter of all cases. He then would choose a statistics that shows the infection rate per million people
While hardly comforting, the chart is equally true, but not nearly as alarming as the first one.
Now, there is great debate if any of the two charts above show the real picture. The cases are confirmed only if a test has been made, and many go on unnoticed.
A better statistics would then be made by only counting the COVID-19 deaths, and again show the result as per million people. This would be the most accurate to show, and is used by the modelers and forcasters in the Trump/Pence task force.
Italy is doing poorly with an over 11% death rate, Spain next with 8, France is slowly increasing, but not as slow as Iran, which has different travel habits between cities and villages. United States and Germany show a very similar pattern, and both countries have excellent health systems with by far the most emergency rooms per capita of any nation.
One nation has done significantly better. Japan has a death rate of 0.3 %. It is probably because they are an obedient people and practice social separation anyway, they don’t shake hands, they bow, and they have a habit of wearing masks if they cough or sneeze.
And yes, there is one more country, China. They are officially over the crisis, but anecdotal evidence tells another story. There was an increase in demand for at least 40000 cremation urns this winter in the City of Wuhan alone, and the Chinese government paid for the cremation if the cause of death was not disclosed. Another nugget of evidence is that Chinese Telecom lost 18.5 million wireless customers and two million wired customers in January and February. They are busing in and training peasants from the countryside to fill the factories to get the production started up again after they shut down the country for a month. The Chinese Government has been less than transparent.
Nevada’s governor has signed an emergency regulation limiting the use of two anti-malaria drugs to treat coronavirus patients, the same medication that President Donald Trump has touted as possible treatments.
Trump has said that using chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as treatments for coronavirus could be “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine,” and said the drugs had been approved for a long time in the treatment of malaria.
Here is a result from a French non-randomized test. This is no time for randomized tests. They may be scientifically perfect, but they take a long time to complete and are very inefficient. Better save lives now!
U.K. and now India is blocking export of these substances, so we must make our own, and fast. FEMA has appropriated all available stockpiles of Hydroxychloroquin and is distributing to medical doctors as needed to prevent hoarding.
To be fair, Governor Sisolak in a later tweet indicated that he will not forbid a licensed medical doctor to administer whatever he/she deems necessary for treatment of a patient, in other words, render his executive order moot. But it captured the headlines.
I have always loved to teach. I especially enjoyed the person to person contact when you tell of something and get a smile back – they got it. One of the objects of teaching the so called Capstone Course for engineers to be is to teach cross-science, for it is in the intersection between different branches of science, crafts and engineering disciplines that real breakthroughs are made. The object is to revolutionize the students thinking. Up to now they have learnt – and learnt it well – do as your teacher have taught you, and you will get an A. Any deviation is a negative – and bothersome for the teacher. This is an attempt for me to change that – even in an online session, but since there is no direct feedback, it is really an offline instruction. see what you think – did it change your thinking?
This tree, the green one was planted upside down. The branches became roots, the roots became branches. It is planted just east of Penn State Main building. Think root cause analysis.
Chernobyl was a carbon moderated Nuclear reactor. Its failure mode was to go prompt critical and splat in an uncontrolled nuclear reaction. No containment vessel could contain the explosion, so why go to the extra expense of building one? Rely instead on multiple safety circuits. The night crew disabled some safety circuits to capture power on an orderly shutdown. They had never been properly trained.
The cloud. Sweden was the first to report on the accident. Two reactors shut down due to excessive radiation in the air outside the plants.
With a Molten Salt Reactor, accidents like Chernobyl are impossible. The Three Mile Island accident was bad. The Chernobyl disaster was ten million times worse. Ah yes, I remember it well.
One morning at work, after the Three Mile Island incident, but before Chernobyl a fellow co-worker, a Ph.D. Chemist working on an Electron Capture Detector containing a small amount of Nickel 63, came with a surprising question: You know nuclear science, how come the reactors in Chernobyl don’t have a containment vessel? Well – I answered, it is because they are carbon moderated and their failure mode is that they go prompt critical, and no containment vessel in the world can hold it in, so they skip it. He turned away in disgust. A few weeks later my wife’s father died, and we went to Denmark to attend the funeral. The day of the return back to the U.S. we heard that there had been a nuclear incident in Sweden, too much radiation had caused two nuclear power stations to close down. The Chernobyl disaster had happened 26 April 1986, and this was the first time anyone outside of Chernobyl has heard about it, two days later. This was still the Soviet Union, and nothing ever did go wrong in it worthy of reporting.
(But the carbon moderated Uranium reactors are the most efficient in producing Pu-239 the preferred nuclear bomb material.)
This has nothing to do with anything, but Chernobyl can be translated wormwood. It is mentioned in the Bible, Revelation 8: 10-11 “ And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter. ”
Molten Salt Thorium reactors cannot be used to supply bomb material, and they are far safer than even Light water Uranium reactors.
With Molten Salt Reactors, a catastrophe like Fukushima cannot happen. It began with a magnitude 9.0 earthquake not far from the Fukushima 6 Nuclear reactor complex. The impact was a magnitude 6.8 earthquake and the operators immediately scrammed the safety rods to stop all the reactors. This succeeded! The reactors were designed with earthquakes in mind, and they passed the test. The backup power started up successfully so the cooling pumps could operate. There was one major problem though. The earthquake was so bad that the water in the spent fuel holding tanks splashed out and exposed the spent fuel rods to air making them emit radioactivity into the air.
The water pumps worked for a while, but then came the tsunami. All the reactors were inside a tsunami wall, so far, so good
But the fuel storage tanks for the backup power generators were outside the tsunami wall and were washed away. The batteries were only supposed to last until backup power was established, and with water circulation ended the meltdown started.
This disaster was even bigger than Chernobyl and contamination is still spreading.
In the periodic table, iron has the densest core. Fusion can occur with elements with a lower atomic number than iron, fission can begin with with elements after lead. What happens in a supernova?
On climate change: Temp records come from boreholes, seashells, and looking at isotope variations among other sources . Of particular interest is the medieval warm period and the little ice age. How did the little ice age happen? There was no decrease in CO2 during that time.
Especially interesting is cosmic radiation that does not come from the sun. It varies a lot, and consists mostly of iron nuclei and comes from distant supernovas. There was two of them, in 1572 and 1604 A.D., both shone brighter in the sky than Venus. Since then we have not seen any supernovas anywhere nearly as bright . Did they trigger the little ice age?
A single iron nucleus can ionize thousands of air molecules, causing condensation and forming the beginning of a cloud.
The iron nuclei enter the earth’s atmosphere with a speed that exceeds the speed of light in atmosphere, causing this eerie blue light. It spreads like a sonic boom.
Cosmic radiation in the form of iron nuclei is the major source of the generation of Carbon 14. When fossil fuel is burned there is very little C14 in the CO2 generated, but if it is burned by digestion of food, by fermentation, by burning wood or by wildfire, it contains the same concentration of C14 as was in the air at the time of the generation of the biomass. Since C14 has a half life of 5700 +- 40 years, we could find out the age of that biomass – or could we?
This is one of my very favorite slides. The best way of finding out how a black body responds is by introducing an impulse and see what happens. In this case the impulse was open air Nuclear bomb tests, performed mostly by United States and the Soviet Union, but all in the Northern Hemisphere. Test stations to see the amount of C14 in the air were set up in Austria and New Zealand. What did we learn? We learn that the air mixes between the Northern and the Southern Hemisphere in about 2 years, and because the half-life of C14 shown here is 12.5 years, not 5700 years, it shows the absorption rate in the oceans. Both of these values would have been difficult if not impossible to find out without open air Nuclear tests, Were they bad? You bet, but since they happened, glean what you can from it. What else did we learn? You can no longer use carbon dating if there is any chance of chance of contamination with newer biomass, or if it is newer than 1955 A.D. Is the specimen appearing to be older or younger?
Since we have shown that the amount of C14 in the air has not been constant over time the age curve has to be calibrated. How do we do that? By using artifacts of known age.
The radioactive fallout decay from a Nuclear test occurs faster than from the Chernobyl disaster. Every nuclear fallout fingerprint is different.
A Liquid Fluoride Thorium based fast breeder nuclear reactor produces much less TRansUranium waste, 0.01% waste products compared to a Uranium-235 fast breeder. The Thorium process has a much higher efficiency of fission than the Uranium process.
Pu = Plutonium, Am = Americum, Cm = Curium, all TRansUraniums, nasty stuff.
With Thorium based Nuclear power, there are no real problems, with traditional U235 power long tern storage is an immense and urgent problem, and has been since the 1960’s. At that time Sweden had a heavy water U-238 nuclear power program going, but abandoned it in favor of traditional U-235 power. U.S. promised to provide the material and take care of the reprocessing and final storage of all nuclear waste at cost if Sweden joined the nuclear proliferation treaty. Reprocessing was to be done in Washington State, and one of the final storage sites mentioned was Yucca Mountain in Nevada, having the ideal Geological properties.
Time goes by and in 1982 – Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, requiring the establishment of a deep geologic repository for nuclear waste storage and isolation. Yucca Mountain was high on the list out of 9 possible sites.
Time goes by, and Congress is still not able to decide on a solution. Meanwhile, TRU’s from spent and reprocessed fuel is piling up in less than ideal locations. Thorium based nuclear power would go a long way to alleviate this problem.
Radioactive waste from an LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) decays down to background radiation in 300 years instead of a million years for U-235 based reactors. Initially LFTRs produce as much radioactivity as an U-235 based nuclear reactor, since fission converts mass to heat, but the decay products have a much shorter half-life.
And Fukushima is still aglow.
The first thing we must realize is that rare earth metals are not all that rare. They are a thousand times or more abundant than gold or platinum in the earth crust and easy to mine, but a little more difficult to refine. Thorium and Uranium will also be mined at the same time as the rare earth metals since they appear together in the ore.
The U.S. used to have a strategic reserve of rare earth metals, but that was sold off in 1998 as being no longer cost effective or necessary. Two years later the one U.S. rare earth metals mine that used to supply nearly the whole world, the Mountain Pass Mine in California closed down, together with its refining capacity. From that day all rare earth metals were imported. In 2010 it started up again together with the refining capacity but went bankrupt in 2015, closed down the refining but continued selling ore to China. They will start up refining again late 2020. Meanwhile China is slapping on a 25% import tariff on imported ore starting July 1 2020. Rare earth metals may be in short supply for a while.
U.S. used to be the major supplier of rare earth metals, which was fine up to around 1984. Then the U.S. regulators determined that Uranium and Thorium contained in the ore made the ore radioactive, so they decided to make rare earth metal ore subject to nuclear regulations with all what that meant for record keeping and control. This made mining in the U.S. unprofitable so in 2001 the last domestic mine closed down. China had no such scruples, such as human and environmental concerns, so they took over the rare earth metals mining and in 2010 controlled over 95% of the world supply, which was according to their long term plan of controlling the world by 2025.
The safe, clean water essential to all life is rapidly running out in much of the world. Yet the politicians are concentrating on air pollution in the form of CO2 and methane as if a catastrophe is about to hit us. Western US, most of the 10-40 window (the area between the 10th and the 40th latitude), Australia and western South America are using up its safe and drinkable water supply much faster than it is replenished. In addition, what is left is getting polluted.Let me give you an anecdotal example.
More than twenty years ago I was part of a team that made wet processing equipment for making computer chip wafers. It involved cleaning and etching using isopropyl alcohol, hydrocloric, sulphuric, and hydrofluoric acid as well as Ozone, all potent stuff. To collect the used chemicals we had designed a 5-way output port, so the chemicals could be collected separately after use. The equipment was made and shipped off to South Korea. It was assembled in a brand new, state of the art positive air pressure clean room facility. The processing machine was installed by the Koreans, but under the 5-way port was a large funnel, going to the drain and directly out in the sewer.
A couple of years before, in the US we had a valve in a similar machine that sprung a leak, so a small amount of hydrofluoric acid got discharged into the sewage. This poisoned the sewage processing plant, and a large fine was levied. No such worry in Asia. The sewage went directly out in the ocean to be diluted. How could they be persuaded not to dump the alcohol and acid directly into the sewage? There were no environmental regulations prohibiting them from doing so. The only argument that persuaded them was economic. It was cheaper to collect the used alcohol and hydrofluoric acid, clean and reuse it rather than dump it. Unfortunately sulphuric acid and hydrocloric acid was too cheap to buy new, so that was still dumped. This is the mindset of many developing countries.
In China many of these facilities are inland, so large water aquifers get poisoned for centuries to come. These are the people we up to now have entrusted with our future production of just about everything, since they do not have the environmental protection laws they can produce the stuff much cheaper. But it comes at a price. The yellow river now does not anymore reach the ocean for part of the year.
Not so with water pollution. It is a much bigger and dangerous problem, and only by shifting our attention to it and from CO2 can we begin to solve it. To clean up the environment will take a lot of energy, and the only solution I see is switching our electric energy supply away from fossil fuel and to Thorium based nuclear energy. Here are
Twenty-five reasons to rapidly develop Thorium based Nuclear Power generation.
We need badly to develop and build Thorium based molten salt fast breeder nuclear reactors to secure our energy needs in the future. Lest anyone should be threatened by the words fast breeder, it simply means it uses fast neutrons instead of thermal neutrons, and breeder means it produces more fissible material than it consumes, in the case of Thorium the ratio is about 1.05.
We are a divided nation indeed. In no other area is this more apparent than in our attitudes towards Climate Change. Democrats regard is as a top priority more and more, while Republicans maintain it is not much to worry about, way down in the importance of things that need fixing. The PEW research center shows the growing discrepancy:
Republicans live in over 90% of the area of the United States, Democrats are concentrated to urban areas, and in areas of majority black or Hispanic population.
Most of the Democrats live concentrated in Urban areas, and they have already experienced climate change! The Urban Heat Island effect can be as high as 7 degree Celsius on a dog day in August, with humidity to boot!
Most Republicans on the other hand live in rural areas where there are no heat islands. If anything, they are realizing that the winters are less severe, and the summers are not getting hotter. They see good in the climate change, such as we can now feed another 2 billion people on earth, thanks to the fertilizing effect of increasing CO2.
Now for the question: Should we expand the burning of fossil fuels?
Even though increasing levels of CO2 is beneficial for the climate we should not expand, but reduce the mining, drilling and fracking of fossil fuels. There are better ways of supply the energy needs of the future. We should leave some of the fossil fuels for our great grandchildren not yet born.
More solar panel farms. This I see as a niche market. China still control 90% of the rare earth metal mining we should only use them in urban areas to lessen the need for an expanded grid. One area that is ideal for more solar panels is to put them up as roofs in open parking lots, especially those that are covered with black asphalt. Parked cars will be cooler and dryer, and it will lessen the urban heat effect.
More wind turbine farms: I love birds, especially large birds such as eagles and raptors. The eagles like to build their aeries on top of the wind turbines, and – you guessed it – they get whacked by the rotor blades. During the Obama administration they upped the yearly allowable kill of bald eagles from from 1100 to 4200. If you kill a golden eagle there is still a 250000 dollar fine. If we increase the number of wind-farms we could run out of large birds.
Hydro-electric power: This is mostly already utilized to capacity. One exception is the river Congo in Africa, still waiting to produce electric power.
Nuclear plants: This is the only realistic solution, but not the common U235 power plants. No, we need a Manhattan-like project to fast track Molten Salt Thorium Nuclear reactors. Here are 25 r3qsons why this is the only realistic solution until we master fusion power, which is always a couple of decades away from commercialization.
Twenty-five reasons to rapidly develop Thorium based Nuclear Power generation.
We need badly to develop and build Thorium based molten salt fast breeder nuclear reactors to secure our energy needs in the future. Lest anyone should be threatened by the words fast breeder, it simply means it uses fast neutrons instead of thermal neutrons, and breeder means it produces more fissible material than it consumes, in the case of Thorium the ratio is about 1.05.
It turns out, it is a corona virus all right, complete with a vaccine against it, but it is for use in animals, not humans. Bill Gates has always been interested in vaccines, especially viruses that has a potential to develop into pandemics. It is a very worthwhile research subject, you want to have the answer right away, should a pandemics develop. The good thing about patents is, you have the exclusive right to manufacture it, or license it for a fee. He knows this very well. In the beginning of PCs Bill Gates offered to sell the Microsoft operating system to IBM for 82000 dollars. IBM said no, they had their own team developing it, so they needed no help, thank you. Well, it turned out they failed, so IBM came back to Bill Gates to take him up on the offer. Bill Gates refused, but offered to license it to IBM for a “reasonable” fee and the rest is history. So it can be very profitable. The price you pay for issuing a patent is that you have to disclose all pertinent information, in this case it consisted of the whole DNA sequence of the corona virus and the method to make the vaccine. Now it shows up that this virus was close enough to the one that caused the current pandemic, so the full DNA sequence information became very helpful to have a starting point to develop a vaccine for the current strains. Where was the original research conducted? You guessed it – in Wuhan, China. Why did Bill Gates choose China for the research?
Len Bilén's blog, a blog about faith, politics and the environment. 