President Trump promises innovative approaches to eliminate nuclear waste. Thorium is the answer! A limerick.

The nuclear waste meant for Yucca

would destine Nevada the sucka

But with Thorium we rid

us of waste that is hid

No need for that waste to be trucka!

Where is the storage for spent nuclear fuel and other nuclear waste now? Look at the map, it is scary.

And this is just the U.S. installations!

Many years ago I studied Engineering at Chalmers’ University in Sweden and I thought I would become a nuclear engineer. Sweden had at that time a peaceful heavy water based nuclear power program together with Canada and India. The advantage with heavy water as moderator is that it can use natural, un-enriched Uranium. One of the end products is of course Plutonium 239, the preferred material to make nuclear bombs, but it could also use Thorium, and the end product is then Plutonium 238, used in space exploration, and we were dreaming big. One of the advantages of Thorium as fuel is that it produces about 0,01% of trans-Uranium waste compared to Uranium as fuel. About that time the U.S. proposed we should abandon the heavy water program and switch to light water enriched Uranium based nuclear power. They would sell the enriched Uranium, and reprocess the spent fuel at cost. They also had the ideal final resting place for the radioactive waste products in Nevada. This was an offer the Swedish government could not refuse. This was in the 1960’s! India on the other hand did refuse, and they eventually got the nuclear bomb. In disgust I switched my attention back to control engineering.

What did President Trump mean with innovative approaches?

This is where Thorium comes in!

Here is a list of

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.

1. A million years supply at today’s consumption levels.

2. Thorium already mined, ready to be extracted.

3. One ten-thousandth of the TRansUranium waste compared to a U-235 based fast breeder reactor.

4. Thorium based nuclear power produces Pu-238, needed for space exploration.

5. Radioactive waste from an LFTR decays down to background radiation in 300 years compared to a million years for U-235 based reactors.

6. Thorium based nuclear power is not suited for making nuclear bombs.

7. Produces isotopes that helps cure certain cancers.

8. Molten Salt Thorium Reactors are earthquake safe.

9. Molten Salt Thorium Reactors cannot have a meltdown, the fuel is already molten.

10. Molten Salt Nuclear Reactors have a very high negative temperature coefficient leading to a safe and stable control.

11. Atmospheric pressure operating conditions, no risk for explosions.

12. Virtually no spent fuel problem, very little on site storage or transport.

13. Thorium Nuclear Power generators scale beautifully from small portable generators to full size power plants.

14. No need for evacuation zones, can be placed near urban areas.

15. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors will work both as Base Load and Load Following power plants.

16. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors will lessen the need for an expanded national grid.

17. Russia has an active Thorium program.

18. China is having a massive Thorium program.

19. India is having an ambitious Thorium program.

20. United States used to be the leader in Thorium usage. What happened?

21. With a Molten Salt Reactor, accidents like the Three Mile Island disaster will not happen.

22. With a Molten Salt Reactor, disasters like Chernobyl are impossible.

23. With Molten Salt Reactors, a catastrophe like Fukushima cannot happen.

24. Produces electrical energy at about 4 cents per KWh.

25. Can deplete some of the existing radioactive waste and nuclear weapons stockpiles.

Look carefully at note 17. We can do better than Russia!

Breaking wind news. Do not worry about methane.

Break wind is the habit of cows,

far more than clean air act allows.

Let’s collect all their gas,

give the cows some pizzazz;

the food a methanotrop chows.

Gretacowbreak

Fear not, dear Greta: This is the solution.

On second thought it isn’t. Methane, even if it is a much stronger greenhouse gas than even CO2 when analyzed by itself , is an irrelevant gas.

Water vapor has already absorbed the very same infrared radiation that Methane might have absorbed. (You cannot absorb more than 100% of the radiation emitted in any given band)

Guest essay by Dr. Tom Sheahen

Q: I read that methane is an even worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and cattle are a big source of methane emissions. How are they going to regulate that? Not just cattle, but dairy cows as well! That doubles the worry.

Fortunately, there is really nothing to worry about, scientifically. The main thing to worry about is over-reacting politicians and another layer of unnecessary government regulations.

To understand methane’s role in the atmosphere, first it’s necessary to understand what absorption means. When light passes through a gas (sunlight through air, for example), some molecules in the gas might absorb a photon of light and jump up to an excited state. Every molecule is capable of absorbing some particular wavelengths of light, and no molecule absorbs all the light that comes along. This holds true across the entire electromagnetic spectrum – microwave, infrared, visible, and ultraviolet.

The process of absorption has been studied in great detail. In a laboratory set-up, a long tube is filled with a particular gas, and then a standard light is set up at one end; at the other end of the tube is a spectrometer, which measures how much light of each wavelength makes it through the tube without being absorbed. (Mirrors are placed so as to bounce the light back and forth several times, making the effective travel path much longer; this improves the precision of the data.) From such measurements, the probability of radiation being captured by a molecule is determined as a function of wavelength; the numerical expression of that is termed the absorption cross-section.

If you carried out such an experiment using ordinary air, you’d wind up with a mixture of results, since air is a mixture of various gases. It’s better to measure one pure gas at a time. After two centuries of careful laboratory measurements, we know which molecules can absorb which wavelengths of light, and how likely they are to do so.

All that data is contained in charts and tables of cross-sections. Formerly that meant a trip to the library, but nowadays it’s routinely downloaded from the internet. Once all the cross-sections are known, they can be put into a computer program and the total absorption by any gas mixture (real or imaginary) can be calculated.

The many different molecules absorb in different wavelength regions, known as bands. The principal components of air, nitrogen and oxygen, absorb mainly ultraviolet light. Nothing absorbs in the visible wavelength range, but there are several gases that have absorption bands in the infrared region. These are collectively known as the GreenHouse Gases (GHG), because absorbing infrared energy warms up the air – given the name greenhouse effect.

The adjacent figure shows how six different gases absorb radiation across the infrared range of wavelengths, from 1 to 16 microns (mm). The vertical scale is upside-down: 100% absorption is low, and 0% absorption (i.e., transparency) is high.

It’s important to realize that these are shown on a “per molecule” basis. Because water vapor (bottom bar of the figure) is much more plentiful in the atmosphere than any of the others, H₂O absorbs vastly more energy and is by far the most important greenhouse gas. On any given day, H₂O is a percent or two of the atmosphere; we call that humidity.

The second most important greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide (CO₂), which (on a per-molecule basis) is six times as effective an absorber as H₂O. However, CO₂ is only about 0.04% of the atmosphere (400 parts per million), so it’s much less important than water vapor.

Now it’s necessary to scrutinize the figure very carefully. Looking across the wavelength scale at the bottom, H₂O absorbs strongly in the 3-micron region, and again between 5 and 7 microns; then it absorbs to some degree beyond about 12 microns. CO₂ has absorption bands centered around 2.5 microns, 4.3 microns, and has a broad band out beyond 13 microns. Consequently, CO₂ adds a small contribution to the greenhouse effect. Notice that sometimes CO₂ bands overlap with H₂O bands, and with vastly more H₂O present, CO₂ doesn’t matter in those bands.

Looking at the second graph in the figure, methane (CH₄) has narrow absorption bands at 3.3 microns and 7.5 microns (the red lines). CH₄ is 20 times more effective an absorber than CO₂ – in those bands. However, CH₄ is only 0.00017% (1.7 parts per million) of the atmosphere. Moreover, both of its bands occur at wavelengths where H₂O is already absorbing substantially. Hence, any radiation that CH₄ might absorb has already been absorbed by H₂O. The ratio of the percentages of water to methane is such that the effects of CH₄ are completely masked by H₂O. The amount of CH₄ must increase 100-fold to make it comparable to H₂O.

Because of that, methane is irrelevant as a greenhouse gas. The high per-molecule absorption cross section of CH₄ makes no difference at all in our real atmosphere.

Unfortunately, this numerical reality is overlooked by most people. There is a lot of misinformation floating around, causing needless worry. The tiny increases in methane associated with cows may elicit a few giggles, but it absolutely cannot be the basis for sane regulations or national policy.

So, dear Greta, go back to school and learn some physics, some chemistry, and learn how nature really functions. Then you would not be as worried any more. There is a great temperature regulator, called water vapor. Yes, water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas, and without it the earth would be so cold that no life would be possible. Not only that, but water vapor is a condensing gas, and it forms clouds, which are the main regulator of temperature here on earth.

Have you ever noticed that it is cooler in the shadow?

And by the way, what are methanotrop bacteria?

Methane-utilizing bacteria (methanotrophs) are a diverse group of gram-negative bacteria that are related to other members of the Proteobacteria. These bacteria are classified into three groups based on the pathways used for assimilation of formaldehyde, the major source of cell carbon, and other physiological and morphological features. The type I and type X methanotrophs are found within the gamma subdivision of the Proteobacteria and employ the ribulose monophosphate pathway for formaldehyde assimilation, whereas type II methanotrophs, which employ the serine pathway for formaldehyde assimilation, form a coherent cluster within the beta subdivision of the Proteobacteria. Methanotrophic bacteria are ubiquitous. The growth of type II bacteria appears to be favored in environments that contain relatively high levels of methane, low levels of dissolved oxygen, and limiting concentrations of combined nitrogen and/or copper. Type I methanotrophs appear to be dominant in environments in which methane is limiting and combined nitrogen and copper levels are relatively high. These bacteria serve as biofilters for the oxidation of methane produced in anaerobic environments, and when oxygen is present in soils, atmospheric methane is oxidized. Their activities in nature are greatly influenced by agricultural practices and other human activities. Recent evidence indicates that naturally occurring, uncultured methanotrophs represent new genera. Methanotrophs that are capable of oxidizing methane at atmospheric levels exhibit methane oxidation kinetics different from those of methanotrophs available in pure cultures. A limited number of methanotrophs have the genetic capacity to synthesize a soluble methane monooxygenase which catalyzes the rapid oxidation of environmental pollutants including trichloroethylene.

Sounds excitig, doesn’t it. Harvesting methane, put it into warm water (about 45C) and let the bacteria do their job, producing fish food. It may even be profitable.

All electric cars in our future? Is there enough mining capacity in the world?

Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer is preparing to spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on a plan that would fast-track the elimination of nearly every gas-powered vehicle in the country.

The Senate’s top Democrat wants to spend a massive amount of money enticing Americans to exchange their gas-guzzling vehicles for an electric car. Schumer’s proposal, which he announced in a New York Times Oct. 24 editorial , shows Democrats are lurching leftward on the issue.

Sounds good on paper. Sen. Schumer promises advances in battery technology not invented, much less developed yet. There is not enough mining capacity to provide 65 million or more electric cars with enough battery capacity to have an acceptable range, using existing technology.

There is another problem with today’s batteries. Cobalt is already in short supply for the manufacturing of electric car batteries currently in the production chain. Half of the world’s mining supply takes place in the Democratic republic of Congo, and

Image result for cobalt supply and demand"

they use a lot of child labor to mine it.

And China is, as always ready to exploit Africa. Never mind the consequences.

And one more thing. Electric cars are for the future. If CO2 is the great driver of environmental destruction, never mind that the increased CO2 is feeding 2 billion more people than before thanks to the greening effect of increased CO2, then we should develop the battery technology first, and when all Coal fired and natural gas fired electric plants are eliminated, then switch to electric cars.

How do you eliminate all Coal and natural gas electric plants? Look at the U.S usage: (Last year 2016)

We can see that renewable energy will not suffice. The only real answer is to go nuclear, bur we are already the world’s biggest importer of Uranium. (The Uranium One deal, when we sold 20% of our Uranium mining rights to Russia did not help). No, the only real answer is to rapidly develop molten salt Thorium nuclear energy production. There are many advantages to that. Here are 25:

Twenty-five reasons to rapidly develop Thorium based Nuclear Power generation.

1. A million years supply at today’s consumption levels.

2. Thorium already mined, ready to be extracted.

3. One ten-thousandth of the TRansUranium waste compared to a U-235 based fast breeder reactor.

4. Thorium based nuclear power produces Pu-238, needed for space exploration.

5. Radioactive waste from an LFTR decays down to background radiation in 300 years compared to a million years for U-235 based reactors.

6. Thorium based nuclear power is not suited for making nuclear bombs.

7. Produces isotopes that helps cure certain cancers.

8. Molten Salt Thorium Reactors are earthquake safe.

9. Molten Salt Thorium Reactors cannot have a meltdown, the fuel is already molten.

10. Molten Salt Nuclear Reactors have a very high negative temperature coefficient leading to a safe and stable control.

11. Atmospheric pressure operating conditions, no risk for explosions.

12. Virtually no spent fuel problem, very little on site storage or transport.

13. Thorium Nuclear Power generators scale beautifully from small portable generators to full size power plants.

14. No need for evacuation zones, can be placed near urban areas.

15. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors will work both as Base Load and Load Following power plants.

16. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors will lessen the need for an expanded national grid.

17. Russia has an active Thorium program.

18. China is having a massive Thorium program.

19. India is having an ambitious Thorium program.

20. United States used to be the leader in Thorium usage. What happened?

21. With a Molten Salt Reactor, accidents like the Three Mile Island disaster will not happen.

22. With a Molten Salt Reactor, disasters like Chernobyl are impossible.

23. With Molten Salt Reactors, a catastrophe like Fukushima cannot happen.

24. Produces electrical energy at about 4 cents per KWh.

25. Can deplete some of the existing radioactive waste and nuclear weapons stockpiles.

Penn State University Engineering Capstone Showcase, Fall 2019.

Thursday, two days before finals was the PSU Engineering Capstone showcase. Even though I have been a lecturer there for over seven years I didn’t realize it is the largest Capstone showcase of this type in the world.

The set-up began at 10:30 a. m. in the Bryce Jordan main Arena, with 84 senior Capstone projects displaying their results and 21 teams from the Cornerstone projects.

The success of the showcase is in part because of a large number of corporate sponsors, some who sponsor multiple projects. Some of these projects are at the very cutting edge of science and provide a real challenge for the students.

Some of the projects are international in character. This poses special challenges, for example: Singapore time is exactly 12 hours apart from EST. This is also giving the students a taste of what multinational cooperation entails.

My role as an instructor is quite simple: To convert the engineering students from students to world class engineers in 16 short weeks. One does what one can. The engineering students are organized in teams of 4 or 5 persons. All of my teams this year consisted of engineers from at least 2 engineering majors, so the teams must get to know each other, work together as a functioning team, do the research, build a series of prototypes or a final product as a team, with deadlines to meet. This is quite different from cramming for an exam.

The projects are quite different: This fall I had the opportunity to coach 5 teams:

The first team was tasked to make a knee brace for people recovering from knee replacement surgery. The object was to measure progress in the recovery of the patient in a consistent measurable way. To do this the team affixed four sensors, one for temperature, one sensing pulse, and two gyroscopes, sensing angles and motions. They are connected to a small Arduino Nano computer, collecting all data and storing it on a small SD card.

The next team was tasked to make an autonomous, industrial size vacuum cleaner to suck up lime dust in a lime packing facility. It was supposed to have an 8 hour continuous operating time on batteries, and after an 8 hour shift empty itself and go into recharging mode. By the way, lime dust is nasty. This turned to be over ambitious to accomplish on a 1000 dollar budget, which is the limit for the students, so they were left to make a model that did not accomplish anywhere near what the original specification had defined. These are nevertheless great learning experiences for the teams, how to scope projects right, so they are possible to accomplish the deliverables on time and under budget.

The third team got quite an ambitious task to fulfill.

The object was to automate a lime reactivity test procedure. They were given the exact specifications how it was to be done, fill a thermos with so much temperature controlled water, add a specified amount of lime, measure the temperature rise, document the results, empty the bucket, rinse and repeat. The team fulfilled all the requirements on time and only exceeded the allowable budget by less than 100 dollars, so there was no money left to transport the device to the showcase. Anyhow, this is how it looks:

This would have been a candidate for best project, but I could only nominate two, so I nominated the fourth and the fifth team instead.

The fourth team was charged with automate a leaf cutting procedure. There is a great need to discover diseases in orange groves as early as possible. The apparatus to do the forensic analysis of the leaf had already been developed and used successfully. Via a robotic arm they developed a claw to grab a leaf, cut it from the tree without damaging it and affix it onto the analysis window.

They won third prize for best project!

Saving the best for last. Penn State University is a world leader in 3D printing research and development, and the University of Texas Arlington is hosting the fourth annual 3D printed aircraft competition to leverage the design freedoms of 3D printing technologies to improve performance. The team was tasked by Penn State CIMP-3D to design an aircraft to compete in this competition. The aircraft will utilize a fixed wing to stay airborne as long as possible. The nature of 3D printing allowed the team to rapidly prototype and quickly iterate many different designs. This will result in some less conventional designs that push the limitations of aircraft design and 3D printing.

The team addressed the challenges with gusto, they bought two 3-D printers to facilitate doing as much printing as possible. During the showcase they printed a part of a wing. The printing speed, since the material printed should be as thin as possible, was so slow that the wing part gained only on inch an hour. The team had been printing around the clock for the last few weeks to test a large range of feed stocks suitable for printing model aircraft parts. In the spring another team will continue the project and participate in the competition. May the best design win!

It gained quite a lot of interest, and the team had to do one presentation after another, explaining the intricate 3D modeling and how to design lightweight, yet structurally sound devices. A couple of high school teams were in awe, and no wonder, so were the judges, the team won first prize for best project of the showcase!

Six years of global warming tourism ships getting stuck in the ice. A Limerick.

The “climate catastrophe” ship

got stuck, t’was the end of the trip.

They got rescued by air

in a state of despair.

Then Svalbard’s new ice lost its grip.

(The Arctic expedition ship Malmö ofGöteborg getting unstuck by its own power four days after the ecotourists/”scientists” got “rescued” by helicopter airlift)

16 personer blev evakuerade med helikopter, sedan MS Malmö fastnat i isen sydväst om Hinlopenstredet på Svalbard. Videobild.

It started innocently enough. A group of environmental researchers, led by a couple of film producers were going to retrace the Ahlmann expedition of 1931, where he examined the glaciers of Western and Northern Svalbard. The previous few years Svalbard had been ice free in September, so the conditions seemed ideal. Last winter nearly all winter storms went up the Atlantic from the Gulf of Mexico, dumping a lot of snow on Svalbard, avoiding Greenland. The loss of snow over Greenland is well publicized, but not the extra snow over Svalbard. This meant that the ice was still thick in the same waters where Ahlmann had no trouble navigating. Everybody “knows” that the ice is receding year by ear, and according to Al Gore, all Arctic ice has melted in September by the year 2015, and from then on it will be warmer still, so the sighting of new, healthy ice must be a mistake.

This is the sixth year a polar expedition with global warming “scientists” gets stuck in ice and has to be rescued.

Why is that?

They believe more in what their climate models have proven about global warming than what simple observations could have showed them. It is true that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and more CO2 make global temperatures rise unless something else changes as well. The thing that changes when temperatures rise is that the air can contain more water vapor before it condenses. Condensed water vapor in the atmosphere is called clouds, and clouds reflect back into the sky much of the incoming sunlight during the day which has a large cooling effect, and keeps the energy in during the night, which has a much smaller warming effect. The net result is that the clouds have a stabilizing effect on the earth’s climate, so much so that the tropics have found its temperature and there will be no further warming regardless of the level of CO2. Nearly all the warming will occur around the poles, and DanishMeteorologicalInstitute has the chart to prove it: These are polar temperatures above the 80th latitude

The winter temperatures have risen about 8 degrees, but there has been no corresponding rise in summer temperatures.

In the winter there are more clouds and it snows more, which keeps temperatures from falling, and in the summer there is all that extra ice to melt. This will be the new normal with the extra CO2. Some glaciers have started growing again.

What is hate speech?

Hillary Clinton put up this tweet on Saturday morning, just before the terrible shooting tragedy in El Paso that killed 22 people and wounded more than two dozen.

The El Paso shooter, Patrick Crusius of Allen Tx, was a registered Democrat, held anti illegal immigrant views since before Donald Trump became President, pointed out that one of his biggest fears was what illegal immigration did to the environment and climate change. His manifesto, published two hours before the shooting mentioned the massacre in Christchurch, NZ, which also defines him as anti Muslim. The interpretation of his manifesto has been that he is a white supremacist, but other parts seem to indicate that he believes in sustainability and has to reduce the overall population of the world.

It looks as though Connor Betts, the Dayton shooter, who killed nine people Saturday night, one of them his own sister, was a registered Democrat, Satanist, vehement anti-Trumper, and supporter of one of the Democratic presidential candidates. I do not mention her name, she has no personal responsibility for the shooting.

Now back to Hillary’s tweet. It mentions climate emergency as if it were a fact and only by voting Democrat can this emergency be averted. This is delusional at best and a flat out lie at worst. Let us take a look at what is happening to Greenland this year.

It is true that we are having a heatwave over Greenland the last four days, and there has been some ice-melt. See chart from the Danish Meteorological Institute

in 2011-2012 there was a much larger ice-melt. By contrast, the last 4 years the ice accumulation has been above normal and Greenland actually grew its glaciers. This year nearly all snow storms went between Greenland and Scandinavia so the snow did not accumulate as fast, which means it is old ice melting in the western parts of Greenland. This is perfectly normal and now the sun is so low on the horizon that melted water actually reflects the sun more than the ice, so the melting is about over for this year. Hillary is no climate scientist, and all this fear mongering does is trying to whip up a frenzy, so much so that us “climate deniers” (a term reserved for climate change realists) should be exterminated, or at least castrated. This too is hate speech.

The truth about rats and lemmings, Trump and Baltimore. A Limerick.

The truth about rats and lemmings.

The rats in the Baltimore port

are eating the “food” of all sort.

Where corruption abounds

it’s as bad as it sounds

for rats are Corruption’s cohort.

Everybody have heard about lemmingyears, when a large number of lemmings follow each other over a cliff, falls down into the sea below and drown. Political analogies abound, and so this has become common knowledge: That’s what lemmings do. But why? By the way, 2011 was a lemming year in Northern Sweden, it repeats itself every 20 years or so. Here is a video from BBC Nature.

To explain why, there is an even better example with rats. When food is plentiful they multiply fast and after about 4 years there are far too many rats for the food supply. No, they do not die of starvation, virtually all the rats get stressed out and die, all in short order, and the cycle starts anew. It used to be a fairly limited supply of food for the rats, people ate what the land produced, and the number of rats were kept below the stress level. Enter modern day landfills and cities with inadequate sanitation like Baltimore. There is an overabundance of food in a very limited area, so rats congregate there and multiply. Eventually they will hit the stress level die out and the cycle is renewed. Enter the division of rodent control. In their wisdom they put out rat poison to keep the population down. In so doing they manage to keep the rat population just below the stress level, thereby ensuring that every year is a year of plenty of rats rather than every fourth year.

The only solution to get rid of a rat infestation is to eliminate the food source!

To point that out is not racist.

Donald Trump pointed out the rat-infestation and was immediately labeled a racist. It is also not racist to point out that the three last mayors of Baltimore have resigned. None of them addressed the real problems of Baltimore, a once beautiful, vibrant City with a charming inner harbor.

Make Baltimore beautiful again!

50 year anniversary since the first moon landing. A Limerick.

I remember it like yesterday. We sat up late in the evening of July 20 1969 and watched the first landing on the moon, in real-time and transmitted over all 3 networks. Later President Nixon commented: “This is the greatest week in the history of the world since Creation.” Be that as it may, it was watched by about 500 million people world-wide and the future looked bright. Look at us since then:

Fifty years since “a small step for man.”

It seemed we lost sight of the plan.

Now it’s back to the Moon

with the Gateway, and soon

for with Thorium power, we can.

The ambition is to build a space colony on the moon, have a space station, the “Gateway”, and from there launch unmanned and finally manned Mars missions. A very ambitious program. The only way it is possible by utilizing molten salt Thorium nuclear reactors on the moon to cope with the 14 day nights on the moon. This 10 min video tells it well.

The red dragon of China. World dominance by 2025 averted? A Limerick.

Insane is to praise the Chinese

and say they go green, planting trees;

for they lie, cheat and steal,

human rights they repeal.

We must stand, no more time to appease.

Beijing’s massive tree planting campaign has worsened air pollution in the city, a new study by Chinese scientists suggests. The “Green Great Wall” prevented dispersion of as much as 15 per cent of PM2.5 – health-damaging fine particulates less than 2.5 micrometres in diameter – during a major smog episode in the capital in January 2014, according to researchers. At its peak during the period studied, the PM2.5 reached 350 micrograms per cubic metre of air – 14 times the safety level recommended by the World Health Organisation.

Man-made forest slowed down the winds that otherwise help to disperse smog and turned the city into an enormous trap for air pollutants, according to the scientists.

How can that be?

China burned 51.2% of the world’s coal in 2012, USA produced 12.5%. China’s production was more than four times larger. This has now stabilized and was in 2018 47%, because India and the real developing world are increasing their dependence on coal for electricity production, and also for cooking meals.

This of course is with the Paris accord in mind. U.S. and the European countries are to limit their emissions and slowly diminish them, down to a per capita emission comparable to the mid 1800’s, while China, being a “developing” country is allowed to increase their emissions until 2030, and then stabilize them, not decrease them.

How can they be burning nearly half the world’s coal mined?

One reason is they are the world’s state controlled manufacturing company. They are also responsible for half the world’s Steel production. China produced 50.3% of the world’s crude Steel in 2015, USA produced 4.9%. China’s production was over 20 times larger than the U.S.Some of this steel was dumped below production cost to crush our domestic low end steel industry. An example: Rolled steel to make steel cans were exported at about $200 a ton, the production cost in the U.S. is more like $400 a ton. They can do this, since their environmental regulations only pay lip service to pollution. Remember how Pittsburgh was 60 years ago? China is much worse.

Cement production. China produced 51.4% of the world’s cement in 2015, USA produced 1.8%. China’s production was almost 30 times larger.

It takes a lot of concrete to build artificial islands so they can take control of the South China Sea. But they are building many other things, Ghost Cities, but also an impressive infrastructure with high speed trains on elevated concrete tracks.

Worrisome as that may be, it isnothing compared to China,s dominance in Rare Earth Metals. Let me explain why rare earth metals are so important to our modern economy.

First, rare earth metals re not rare at all, they exist in small quantities together with Thorium and sometimes Uranium wherever other metals are mined.

The Lanthanides occur in quantity in Monazite, a byproduct of mining Phosphates, but also as a byproduct of mining Titanium, and even from some Iron ores. The rare earth metals are free to begin extraction if it was not for one thing, they also contain Thorium, and Thorium is radio-active, so in the mid 1980’s the NRC and IAEA reclassified Monazite and anything containing Thorium as a “Source Material” and after that it became too costly to comply with all the regulations for nuclear material, so all production of rare earth minerals ceased in the U.S.

China saw an opportunity to grab the world market for Rare Earth Metals and is now controlling about 94% of the supply of all rare earth metals.

So what are rare earth metals used for?

China now has a de facto monopoly on all usages of rare earth metals, and in the case of war or an embargo, not only are our precious cell phones and computers in jeopardy, so is our defense, night vision goggles, aircraft engines, navigation systems, laser guidance, just to name a few uses.

And not only that, we import the completed parts from China, even for our most sophisticated military equipment, such as the F35 aircraft, after telling the Chinese how to make the components. The very same components are now in China’s version of the F35, still under development, but in a year or so China will have their faithful copies made! A F35 aircraft contains about 935 pounds of rare earth metals.

This is clearly unsustainable, so in 2014 Congress tried to pass HR 4883 and S 2006 to remedy the situation, but the bills got killed in review by none other than the defense department, citing National Security! Our only major rare earth metals mine reopened, only to go bankrupt in 2015. It has since reopened, but the ore is shipped to China for refining! One good point is that the Mountain Pass mine is scheduled to reopen the processing facilities late 2020.

The idea was that we should change our electricity production into renewable sources, such as wind and solar.

Wind power uses a lot of rare earth metals to get the most efficient generators, all made by China. Wind power is about maxed out, that is, if you care about birds, especially eagles and raptors. The allowable bald eagle kill was upped from 1200 to 4200 a year for all U.S. wind turbines during the Obama administration. Killed golden eagles and storks has a S250000 fine, paid by the electricity users, and if we build it out more, we may exterminate some species.

Solar power looked promising until pollution was taken into consideration. China added 53 GW solar capacity in 2017. The forecast for this year i 45 GW, and for next year 35 GW.

The efficiency of solar panels are drastically reduced by the layer of soot accumulating daily from air pollution. They have to be cleaned daily with water, and water is in short supply in northern China. The yellow river no longer reaches the ocean during large periods of the year, all water is spoken for. In southern India a solar farm used up so much water that the wells went dry and there was no more water for agriculture and people, except during the monsoon season. Germany has given up on their solar program except for special needs.

Where it rains, China pollutes. The Yang -Tse river carries nearly half the plastic waste that is dumped in the ocean. It can be stopped, but it will mean a lot of energy, both man-power and electricity to do all the cleanup.

The solution is found in Thorium power. Here are 25 reasons why we shouls jump on the opportunity to solve the energy crisis:

1. A million years supply at today’s consumption levels.

2. Thorium already mined, ready to be extracted.

3. One ten-thousandth of the TRansUranium waste compared to a U-235 based fast breeder reactor.

4. Thorium based nuclear power produces Pu-238, needed for space exploration.

5. Radioactive waste from an LFTR decays down to background radiation in 300 years compared to a million years for U-235 based reactors.

6. Thorium based nuclear power is not suited for making nuclear bombs.

7. Produces isotopes that helps cure certain cancers.

8. Molten Salt Thorium Reactors are earthquake safe.

9. Molten Salt Thorium Reactors cannot have a meltdown, the fuel is already molten.

10. Molten Salt Nuclear Reactors have a very high negative temperature coefficient leading to a safe and stable control.

11. Atmospheric pressure operating conditions, no risk for explosions.

12. Virtually no spent fuel problem, very little on site storage or transport.

13. Thorium Nuclear Power generators scale beautifully from small portable generators to full size power plants.

14. No need for evacuation zones, can be placed near urban areas.

15. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors will work both as Base Load and Load Following power plants.

16. Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors will lessen the need for an expanded national grid.

17. Russia has an active Thorium program.

18. China is having a massive Thorium program.

19. India is having an ambitious Thorium program.

20. United States used to be the leader in Thorium usage. What happened?

21. With a Molten Salt Reactor, accidents like the Three Mile Island disaster will not happen.

22. With a Molten Salt Reactor, disasters like Chernobyl are impossible.

23. With Molten Salt Reactors, a catastrophe like Fukushima cannot happen.

24. Produces electrical energy at about 4 cents per KWh.

25. Can deplete some of the existing radioactive waste and nuclear weapons stockpiles.

Did I mention that Thorium based reactors do not produce CO2, and molten salt reactors do not use water?

Oh – and wish President Trump well in our negotiations with China. Pray, if you believe.

The Iranian nuclear deal null and void! A Limerick.

The Iranian Nuclear appeasement:

For Mullahs was quite an achievement.

In a year, give or take

there’ll be nukes, much at stake.

It’s time for a real peace agreement.

According to an article in Iran Watch (http://www.iranwatch.org/our-publications/articles-reports/irans-nuclear-timetable) Iran has enough Uranium to make a number of Nuclear bombs in a very short time.

Using their 6000+ centrifuges agreed to under this contract they can produce 1 nuclear bomb in 1 year assuming they only use the 5060 Ir-1 centrifuges allowed to be operated under the contract and use only natural Uranium as fuel (0.7% U235).

If they use all 9000 existing separators they can produce 1 bomb in 6.8 months. In fact, they have been running them since negotiations began and have now reached the limit of 300 Kg reactor grade Uranium (3.5% U235), enough to produce one Nuclear bomb.

Since they did break the contract Sunday July 7, they are free after 35 days to use all 9000 centrifuges to produce weapons grade Uranium at the rate of 1 bomb every seven weeks.

They also have 1080 IR-2 centrifuges currently not yet operating, far more efficient than the IR- 1 centrifuges ready to be started up.

In addition they have 20% enriched Uranium in the form of yellow cake. This used to be UraniumHexaFlouride gas, ready for further enrichment. According to the agreement it was “neutralized” into yellow cake so it couldn’t be further enriched. It takes less than two weeks to convert it back to gas, and another two weeks to enrich it to weapons grade Uranium. They have enough of this to make 1 bomb.

So, this is why the Mullahs exclaimed: We Won! Death to America!

After the contract is finally totally broken the first bomb will be ready less than 1 month, after that, 1 bomb every seven weeks!

And then again, who is to say that they do not already have nuclear bombs? Deep down in mountains are their military “research” facilities dug down, impervious to normal bombs, with radiation shielding doors so no external measurements can be made by nuclear inspectors. In a side deal, the Iranians are going to do the inspections themselves to assure all is above board and no cheating occurs.

Quite a negotiating feat for the Obama administration!

No wonder president Trump did not force congress to ratify it as a treaty, but declare it no longer valid!