Russia has an active Thorium program.This used to be true, but it was decided that for the Arctisc buildup this barge (below) would be outfitted with regular nuclear power the same type that are in Russia’s nuclear powered ice breakers.
This is a self-contained 7m MW electric or 200 MW heat cogeneration Nuclear Reactor on a barge. Coolant readily available. Hoist it a couple of cables and the town to be serviced will have all the power and heat it needs. This is especially useful in the Arctic. Russia is trying to establish Arctic domination, both commercially and militarily. They have over 30 ice breakers, about half of them nuclear. U.S. has two conventional ice breakers, of which only one is operational.
Now for the good news: Russia is also trying to commercialize hybrid fusion-fission reactors:
Nuclear Engineering International: 29 May 2018
Russia develops a fission-fusion hybrid reactor. A new fission-fusion hybrid reactor will be assembled at Russia’s Kurchatov Institute by the end of 2018, Peter Khvostenko, scientific adviser of the Kurchatov complex on thermonuclear energy and plasma technologies, announced on 14 May. The physical start-up of the facility is scheduled for 2020.The hybrid reactor combines the principles of thermonuclear and nuclear power – essentially a tokamak fusion reactor and a molten salt fission reactor. Neutrons produced in a small tokamak will be captured in a molten salt blanket located around tokamak. The facility will use Thorium as a fuel, which is cheaper and more abundant than uranium. Moreover, unlike a fusion reactor, a hybrid will not require super high temperatures to generate energy.
Thorium has benefits compared with uranium reaction and has been endorsed by Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang.
In the reactor, plasma fusion generates neutrons that fuel subsequent fission.
Hybrid reactors reduce the impact of the nuclear fuel cycle on the environment. The concept combines conventional fission processes and fusion reactor principles, comprising a fusion reactor core in combination with a subcritical fission reactor. The results of the fusion reaction, which would normally be absorbed by the cooling system of the reactor, would feed into the fission section, and sustain the fission process. Thorium in a molten salt blanket will enable breeding of uranium-233.
Some of the expected advantages include:
Utilization of actinides and transmutation from long-lived radioactive waste;
An increase in energy recovered from uranium by a large factor;
The inherent safety of the system, which can be shut down rapidly; and
High burnup of fissile materials leaving few by-products.
The hybrid fission-fusion reactor is seen as a near-term commercial application of fusion pending further research on pure fusion power systems.
This is very interesting, and I will follow up when I get more information.
It seems that with the Ukraine war, Russia is preoccupied with other things than to reduce nuclear waste. Ah well.
Finland has received 10% of its electricity from Russia. Because Finland refused to pay in Rubles Russia refuses to deliver any more. Big deal. This is spring season in northern Sweden and Finland. As they say: Spring is not a season, it is a natural disaster. The spring floods rush down the rivers and hydro-power is maxed out for up to two months. Sweden can easily replace the needed electricity. Finland relies on Russian natural gas is near 100%, and May 25 is the deadline to pay in Rubles, or it will be cut off too. In addition Russia has threatened Finland to not even think of joining NATO, or there will be unspecified military action.
This has led to unprecedented diplomatic communication between Finland, Sweden and NATO, and not only are they conducting joint Baltic military exercises right now, but both Sweden and Finland may apply for full membership in NATO as early as Monday. Finland is fully on board, and in Sweden only the true Socialists, “Vänsterpartiet” is against it, but they are only a small minority. With this, the Baltic Sea will be fully in NATO hands, fully encircling the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
For Finland this is the end of the Russian dependence and for Sweden this is the final death blow to the Olof Palme doctrine, alliance free at all cost.
When I emigrated from Sweden in 1968 Sweden had three major recipients for their foreign aid: North Vietnam, Cuba and for some reason Tanzania, one country on each continent.
In 1995 a girl was born with undeveloped optical nerves and mild cerebral palsy. She was not expected to live more than at most one year. But God had other plans for her. At age two she began to sing. Her love for singing praises to God has never ceased. And so, in God’s providence she was chosen to sing at the 2017 inauguration interfaith prayer service. And sing she did! Her name is Marlana VanHoose, a little girl, but with a voice.
Meanwhile, the media was busy tracking the protest rallies all around Washington that day. I watched all day and never saw it.
How did the audience that was privileged to watch react? It is worth to listen to it a second time, this time around watching the reaction of the public in attendance, notably Melania Trumps reaction.
After the song Melania led the standing ovation to acknowledge God’s grace, not only for the song, but for the whole day and for the whole presidency.
This is what give us evangelicals hope. She not only sang it, she also sang the third and fourth verses, so often omitted in public settings, especially in interfaith services. Why is that so important?
Let us look at the history of “O store Gud”, and how it came to be the most favored Hymn of at least three presidents before Donald Trump!
Clouds have always been my fascination. They come and go, form and disappear, cool by day and warm by night. But most impressive of all are thunderstorms, forming when the temperature and humidity are high, transport a lot of water vapor to higher elevations, there condensing as rain or ice, coming down, cooling and watering the earth. Clouds and thunderstorms are the thermostat of the earth. Without it the earth would respond like climate models, predicting a sharp temperature rise as carbon dioxide levels increase. The models are all flawed, since they predict a hot spot in the troposphere over the equator, but there is none. The thunderstorms in the tropical doldrums take care of that. “Settled science” instead has settled on ignoring the lack of the hot spot, for to acknowledge it would make the global warming claim invalid.
I thank God for providing us with a thermostat that protects the earth from overheating, and especially for thunderstorms!
Such was the case in July 1885, when Carl Boberg, a 26 year young pastor of a small congregation of the Swedish Missionary society was the honored guest of the ladies’ auxiliary annual picnic, held in a meadow near Mönsteråsviken, (a bay of the Baltic Sea in southeastern Sweden). The day was perfect, the sky was clear, pleasant temperatures, the cows were grazing on the meadow, the birds were singing, in short, a pastoral idyll. Then it happened. In a few short minutes thunderclouds appeared out of nothing. There was no time to go home, so they all sought shelter in a barn close by. The rain came down hard, and lightning struck a nearby tree. Then as suddenly as it started the rain stopped and all was calm. In Sweden it turns much cooler after a thunderstorm, and the birds sing like they got a new lease on life.
They all went home, and the young pastor pondered the events of the day. He
080419-11, digital 28,8 mb RAW, 12-00 Koltrast, Turdus merula Uppland
heard the Koltrast singing its melodic, beautiful drill
and in a distance he heard the church bells ringing from Kronobäck’s church. The bay was calm like a mirror, and inspired he started penning the song “O store Gud”. Here are the first four verses in Swedish:
O store Gud, när jag den värld beskådar Som du har skapat med ditt allmaktsord Hur där din visdom väver livets trådar Och alla väsen mättas vid ditt bord /: då brister själen ut i lovsångs ljud: O store Gud, o store Gud!
När jag hör åskans röst och stormar brusa Och blixtens klingor springa fram ur skyn När regnets kalla, friska skurar susa Och löftets båge glänser för min syn – /: då brister själen ut i lovsångs ljud: O store Gud, o store Gud!
När sommarvinden susar över fälten När blommor dofta invid källans strand När trastar drilla i de gröna tälten Vid furuskogens tysta, dunkla rand /: då brister själen ut i lovsångs ljud: O store Gud, o store Gud!
När jag i Bibeln skådar alla under Som Herren gjort sen förste Adams tid Hur nådefull han varit alla stunder Och hjälpt sitt folk ur livets synd och strid /: då brister själen ut i lovsångs ljud: O store Gud, o store Gud!
He continued to write and write of all the mighty works that God has made and what He has given us through His word, and continued long into the night. Before going to bed he had penned over twenty verses. The next Sunday he wove the poem into his sermon. The congregation loved it, but that was about it. Slowly the word got around that the poem was pretty good, and after much editing 9 verses were published in the local newspaper Mönsteråstidningen in 1886. Carl Boberg didn’t make any efforts to publish it further, and was surprised when he heard it sung a few years later to a Swedish folk melody (in 3/4 tempo). This was then published in the periodical “Sanningsvittnet” (witness of the truth) in 1891.
It was translated into German by an Estonian, Manfred von Glehn. Five years later it was translated into Russian by Ivan S. Prokanoff, the Martin Luther of modern Russia. It was published in a book with the title “Cymbals”.
Later, while in the Carpathian Mountains of what is now Western Ukraine the English Missionary couple Mercy and Stuart Hine heard the song sung in Russian, this time as a wandering song in march tempo. He got impressed by God’s great works in the Polish mountains, and as Stuart Hine heard the people singing it on their way to church he penned a translation. This became the first and second verse:
O Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder, Consider all the works Thy Hands have made; I see the stars, I hear the mighty thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed.
Refrain: Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee, How great Thou art, How great Thou art. Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee, How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
When through the woods, and forest glades I wander, And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees. When I look down, from lofty mountain grandeur And see the brook, and feel the gentle breeze.
Refrain:
From now on the English version is different from the Swedish original, and it is time to step back and look at a very brief history of Eastern Europe. Before World War I Eastern Europe was basically under the Russian Tsar. Finland was a grand Duchy under Russia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were separate entities but under Russia. Poland was under Russian rule. Belarus didn’t exist and what is now Ukraine was part Russian and part of the Austrian/Hungary empire. The Russians tried to stamp out the Ukraine language but were only partly successful. Then came the Great War and the world changed. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland and some more became independent states . During the Great War the Russian Revolution started and civil wars broke out. Nowhere was the fighting worse than in what was to become independent Ukraine. Up to six armies were fighting for control, and the corruption was unimaginable. Finally the Bolsheviks took control of Ukraine and Joseph Stalin “restored order”. One of the Bolshevik ideals was to control all production and that included all farming. Ukraine was then known as “the bread basket of Europe”. It was during this time the Hines started their ministry in Ukraine. The collectivization of the farms was disastrous to say the least. Farmers know the right time to sow and harvest, they look at the clouds in the sky, pray and go ahead. This is far more efficient than centrally planning when to sow and harvest by order from bureaucrats in a city far, far away, and so there was famine in both Russia proper and Ukraine. But the Ukrainians had put up a lot of resistance, so Joseph Stalin decided to punish the Ukrainians by taking away all their harvest and dole it out to the starving Russians. This resulted in the Holodomor (death by hunger) and at least 3.9 million Ukrainians died. This was in 1932-33 and the Hines were forced to evacuate to Poland, in what is now South West Ukraine.
This is the origin of the third verse: It was typical of the Hines to ask if there were any Christians in the villages they visited. In one case, they found out that the only Christians that their host knew about were a man named Dmitri and his wife Lyudmila. Dmitri’s wife knew how to read — evidently a fairly rare thing at that time and in that place. She taught herself how to read because a Russian soldier had left a Bible behind several years earlier, and she started slowly learning by reading that Bible. When the Hines arrived in the village and approached Dmitri’s house, they heard a strange and wonderful sound: Dmitri’s wife was reading from the gospel of John about the crucifixion of Christ to a houseful of guests, and those visitors were in the very act of repenting. In Ukraine (as I know first hand!), this act of repenting is done very much out loud. So the Hines heard people calling out to God, saying how unbelievable it was that Christ would die for their own sins, and praising Him for His love and mercy. They just couldn’t barge in and disrupt this obvious work of the Holy Spirit, so they stayed outside and listened. Stuart wrote down the phrases he heard the Repenters use, and (even though this was all in Russian), it became the third verse that we know today: And when I think, that God, His Son not sparing; Sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in; That on the Cross, my burden gladly bearing, He bled and died to take away my sin.
Refrain:
The second world war broke out, and the Hines were forced to return back to England, but they continued their ministry. The fourth verse was was added by Stuart Hine after the Second World War had ended. His concern for the exiled Polish community in Britain, who were anxious to return home, provided part of the inspiration for Hine’s final verse. Hine and David Griffiths visited a camp in Sussex, England, in 1948 where displaced Russians were being held, but where only two were professing Christians. The testimony of one of these refugees and his anticipation of the second coming of Christ inspired Hine to write the fourth stanza of his English version of the hymn. According to Ireland: One man to whom they were ministering told them an amazing story: he had been separated from his wife at the very end of the war, and had not seen her since. At the time they were separated, his wife was a Christian, but he was not, but he had since been converted. His deep desire was to find his wife so they could at last share their faith together. But he told the Hines that he did not think he would ever see his wife on earth again. Instead he was longing for the day when they would meet in heaven, and could share in the Life Eternal there. These words again inspired Hine, and they became the basis for his fourth and final verse to ‘How Great Thou Art’:
When Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation, And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart. Then I shall bow, in humble adoration, And then proclaim: “My God, how great Thou art!”
Refrain
The complete song was soon published, not in England but in the Soviet Union (in English). The famous Gospel singer George Beverly Shea got hold of it, liked it a lot, but he wanted to change two words in the first verse: Instead of works, he wanted to use worlds, and instead of mighty he wanted to use rolling. Very reluctantly Stuart Hine agreed, but only for use in the Billy Graham Crusades. It was first sung in Canada in 1955.
It became so popular that in Billy Graham’s 1956 New York Crusade it was sung at all 99 events, and from there the song spread throughout all the world, even back in Sweden where the new version became the popular one. One of the visitors to this Crusade was the little boy Donald Trump, who went with his Father and Mother and Brother (and Sisters?) to listen. God’s word never returns void.
Years have passed since Donald Trump was inaugurated. This is one exchange of views he had with Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of NATO:
The main stream media interpreted this as President Trump wanted to weaken NATO
Joe Biden is now President. Again Ukraine is the center of events, and Putin has decided to invade and subdue Ukraine because they decided to direct their corruption to the West rather than go along with the corruption of Russia. The battle of Kyiv is in its third day, and the people of Kyiv has decided to battle it out rather than surrender. It is beginning to look more like the battle of Stalingrad in WW II where the citizens fought and prevailed, so Germany could not get at the Russian oil in Baku. The Ukrainians hatred for Russia is that great. They remember the Holodomor as told them by their grandparents.
Putin seems to have miscalculated badly. He had his eyes on quickly absorbing Ukraine, then taking the Baltic countries, and maybe even Poland. He is getting more and more desperate and has begun to threaten Finland, and even Sweden to not even think of joining NATO.
The people of Ukraine are joining the military, all males 18 to 60 are forbidden to leave the country, forced to join the defense forces in one form or another, and even many women are joining. They are issued a gun, mostly AR 15 or equivalent and some ammunition. What they lack is military training, so the major purpose is to prevent an easy takeover of the cities. There will be many lives shed. When I saw on the TV the heart rendering farewells of the men separating from their loved ones, knowing full well they may never see each other again in this life, the fourth verse of “how great thou art” flashed back in my mind, and when Putin threatened even neutral Sweden, I realized the song had made its journey around the world, and I realized that after the thunder, the still small voice of the Koltrast singing: God is still in charge, but we must still do what we can, and above all, pray for a revival and a great awakening. As the song was sung in Billy Graham’s Crusades to about two billions all around the world, so will our prayers be a part of the greatest revival and awakening the world has ever seen.
Can deplete most of the existing radioactive waste and nuclear weapons stockpiles.
LFTR is a type of Molten Salt Reactor with equipment to convert plentiful thorium into uranium (U233) to use as fuel. It can also use plutonium from LWR (Light Water Reactor) waste. LFTR is not very efficient at using depleted uranium (need a Fast-Spectrum reactor to fission U-238 effectively; in a thermal-spectrum reactor like LFTR or LWR, would convert some U-238 to plutonium which is fissile).
Because a LFTR fissions 99%+ of the fuel (whether thorium, or plutonium from nuclear waste), it consumes all the uranium and transuraniums leaving no long-term radioactive waste. 83% of the waste products are safely stabilized within 10 years. The remaining 17% need to be stored less than 350 years to become completely benign.
“LFTR technology can also be used to reprocess and consume the remaining fissile material in spent nuclear fuel stockpiles around the world and to extract and resell many of the other valuable fission byproducts that are currently deemed hazardous waste in their current spent fuel rod form. The U.S. nuclear industry has already allocated $25 billion for storage or reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel and the world currently has over 340,000 tons of spent LWR fuel with enough usable fissile material to start one 100 MWe LFTR per day for 93 years. (A 100 MW LFTR requires 100 kg of fissile material (U-233, U-235, or Pu-239) to start the chain reaction). LFTR can also be used to consume existing U-233 stockpiles at ORNL ($500 million allocated for stockpile destruction) and plutonium from weapons stockpiles.”
FS-MSRs essentially avoid the entire fuel qualification issue in that they are tolerant of any fissile material composition, with their inherent strong negative thermal reactivity feedback providing the control necessary to accommodate a shifting fuel feed stream. Fast Spectrum Molten Salt Reactor Options,
See also point 17: Russia develops a fission-fusion hybrid reactor.
Some of the pictures are from a slide presentation given by David Archibald in Melbourne Feb 5 2011. He posted it “for the benefit of all” which I have interpreted as waving the copyright of the pictures
Russia has an active Thorium program This is a self-contained Thorium Nuclear Reactor on a barge. Coolant readily available. Hoist it a couple of cables and the town to be serviced will have all the power it needs. This is especially useful in the Arctic. Russia is trying to establish Arctic domination, both commercially and militarily. They have over 30 ice breakers, some of them nuclear. U.S. has two, only one of which are operational.
Russia is also trying to commercialize hybrid fusion-fission reactors:
Nuclear Engineering International: 29 May 2018
Russia develops a fission-fusion hybrid reactor.
A new fission-fusion hybrid reactor will be assembled at Russia’s Kurchatov Institute by the end of 2018, Peter Khvostenko, scientific adviser of the Kurchatov complex on thermonuclear energy and plasma technologies, announced on 14 May. The physical start-up of the facility is scheduled for 2020.The hybrid reactor combines the principles of thermonuclear and nuclear power – essentially a tokamak fusion reactor and a molten salt fission reactor. Neutrons produced in a small tokamak will be captured in a molten salt blanket located around tokamak. The facility will use Thorium as a fuel, which is cheaper and more abundant than uranium. Moreover, unlike a fusion reactor, a hybrid will not require super high temperatures to generate energy.
Thorium has benefits compared with uranium reaction and has been endorsed by Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang.
In the reactor, plasma fusion generates neutrons that fuel subsequent fission.
Hybrid reactors reduce the impact of the nuclear fuel cycle on the environment. The concept combines conventional fission processes and fusion reactor principles, comprising a fusion reactor core in combination with a subcritical fission reactor. The results of the fusion reaction, which would normally be absorbed by the cooling system of the reactor, would feed into the fission section, and sustain the fission process. Thorium in a molten salt blanket will enable breeding of uranium-233.
Some of the expected advantages include:
Utilization of actinides and transmutation from long-lived radioactive waste;
An increase in energy recovered from uranium by a large factor;
The inherent safety of the system, which can be shut down rapidly; and
High burnup of fissile materials leaving few by-products.
The hybrid fission-fusion reactor is seen as a near-term commercial application of fusion pending further research on pure fusion power systems.
This is very interesting, and I will follow up when I get more information.
Over the past few weeks, scores of statues of our founding fathers and Generals, Cristóbal Colón, Junípero Serra , and even the Pioneer and the Pioneer Mother have been toppled by rioters. They will not stop until all historic memorials are demolished, like what happened in the onset of theFrench Revolution, the Russian Revolution or the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
The death toll from the French Revolution was about 40,000, from the Russian Revolution 7 to 12 million, and from the Cultural Revolution up to 20 million, followed by the Great Leap Forward, which heralded in the Great Famine, killing another 30 Million.
In 2005 Dr. Anthony Fauci,the director of the (NIAID) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a position he still holds received the encouraging news that Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread. The SARS epidemic petered out, ao the clinical trial was never executed.
Now the news about the efficacy of HydroxyChloroquine is coming in hot and heavy. The results are very encouraging. This is from a recent study in Marseilles, France:
We retrospectively report on 1061 SARS-CoV-2 positive tested patients treated for at least three days with the following regimen: HCQ (200 mg three times daily for ten days) + AZ (500 mg on day 1 followed by 250 mg daily for the next four days). Outcomes were death, clinical worsening (transfer to ICU, and >10 day hospitalization) and viral shedding persistence (>10 days).
Results
A total of 1061 patients were included in this analysis (46.4% male, mean age 43.6 years – range 14–95 years). Good clinical outcome and virological cure were obtained in 973 patients within 10 days (91.7%). Prolonged viral carriage was observed in 47 patients (4.4%) and was associated to a higher viral load at diagnosis (p < .001) but viral culture was negative at day 10. All but one, were PCR-cleared at day 15. A poor clinical outcome (PClinO) was observed for 46 patients (4.3%) and 8 died (0.75%) (74–95 years old). All deaths resulted from respiratory failure and not from cardiac toxicity. Five patients are still hospitalized (98.7% of patients cured so far). PClinO was associated with older age (OR 1.11), severity of illness at admission (OR 10.05) and low HCQ serum concentration. PClinO was independently associated with the use of selective beta-blocking agents and angiotensin II receptor blockers (p < .05). A total of 2.3% of patients reported mild adverse events (gastrointestinal or skin symptoms, headache, insomnia and transient blurred vision).
Conclusion
Administration of the HCQ+AZ combination before COVID-19 complications occur is safe and associated with a very low fatality rate in patients.
Since then, prescriptions for the drug cocktail in Marseilles is up 7000%, and is also increasing in the rest of France, especially the Paris region.
But France is by no means the first country to go all out prescribing the drug cocktail. At least twelve countries are doing it, and Turkey and Morocco prescribe it to all with COVID-19 symptoms ( after first checking their heart). Russia joined six weeks later. Here are the results:
If we look at the results from onset to today, some interesting facts stand out
Turkey: Death rate 50 per million. ratio of recovered cases/death is 37
Morocco: Death rate 5 per million. ratio of recovered cases/death is 19.6
Russia: Death rate 19 per million. ratio of recovered cases/death is 19.6 and rising, but they started six weeks later and have not yet reached their infection maximum.
France: Death rate 433 per million. ratio of recovered cases/death is 2.2, but their new case maximum was 11 weeks ago and the maximum death rate was 9 weeks ago, way before any prescriptions increased.
U.S. does not do an even job of reporting recovered cases, so the results will only be valid for some states. Michigan seems to be one state that records recoveries.
Michigan: Death rate 492 per million. ratio of recovered cases/death is 5.7
The best state is South Dakota, but there Governor Kristi Noem conducted a semi clinical (not double blind) trial, and the results speak for themselves.
South Dakota: Death rate 50 per million. ratio of recovered cases/death is 63.27 !!
My suggestion is this: Give the HCQ+ AZT + Zinc +Vitamin D for 5 days as soon as symptoms occur. Give HZQ + Zinc + Vitamin D for 5 days to all the infected person’s contacts, then their quarantine is over, otherwise it is 14 days. Check for heart rhythm problems, but otherwise go ahead.
The results from Turkey + Russia + Morocco involved more than 170,000 recovered cases, far more than any clinical study, and showed the effect both before and after HCQ became the drug of choice, so the effect is real enough!
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.
China has reportedly reassigned over 60,000 soldiers to plant trees in a bid to combat pollution by increasing the country’s forest coverage. A large regiment from the People’s Liberation Army, along with some of the nation’s armed police force, have been withdrawn from their posts on the northern border to work on non-military tasks inland. The majority will be dispatched to Hebei province, which encircles Beijing, according to the Asia Timeswhich originally reported the story. The area is known to be a major culprit for producing the notorious smog which blankets the capital city. This is in addition to an earlier tree planting around Beijing. The initial results are puzzling.
Beijing’s massive tree planting campaign has worsened air pollution in thecity, 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:
We live in challenging times. while, in a previous blog it was pointed out that the” climate catastrophe” is not real and the scientific reasons why for a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration the average temperature rise would be less than 0.4C, almost negligible and well within the Paris accord without changing anything we are doing about CO2 emissions.
If increasing CO2 production is not the problem, then what is? Let us take a look at the sources from which U.S. generates electrical energy.
We live in challenging times indeed, with enormous environmental challenges. It takes a lot of energy to clean up the mess we have generated over the ages. It would be a shame to use up our remaining coal, oil and gas to produce the electricity needed to clean up. Oil coal and gas will eventually be depleted and we need to save some for our great grandchildren so they can enjoy flying like we have become accustomed to. Like the famous conservationist Sarah Palin once said: “for when it’s gone, it’s gone.”
Solar generation is about 4 times more expensive (without subsidies) to produce energy than coal and gas, but has important niche applications, such as on roofs for backup in case of short grid failures and for peak power assist. The Amish people have given many practical applications on how to live off the grid.
Wind power is cheaper when the wind blows, but the full generation capacity has to be there even when the wind doesn’t blow, so the only gain from wind power is to lessen the mining or extraction of carbon. In addition, wind power kills birds, the free yearly quota of allowable Bald Eagle kills was upped from 1200 to 4200 during the Obama administration. Golden Eagles and a few other rare birds have a quarter of a million dollar fine associated with their kills. If wind power is increased without finding a solution to the bird kills, whole species may become extinct.
Hydroelectric power is for all practical purpose maxed out, except one large untapped resource; the Kongo river in Africa. Some hydro electrical project do more harm than good, such as the Aswan Dam in Egypt, and some are waiting for the next big earthquake, such as the Three Gorges Dam in China.
Geothermal power is good but difficult and risky to utilize in geologically unstable areas.
Biomass should never be burned for electricity production but be used for soil regeneration to combat erosion. Only polluted biomass such as medical waste and plastics should be incinerated at high temperature, complete with scrubbers to eliminate poisonous gases.
All necessary cleanup and recycling consume a lot of energy, and it has to be generated somehow. We would like save some Coal, Natural Gas and Petroleum for our great grandchildren. This leaves us only
Nuclear power. After a nearly thirty year hiatus in building new nuclear power plants they are slowly being built again. The permit process is fraught with citizen opposition (NIMBY), very strict bureaucratic delay, first by the Three Mile Island incident, then by the Chernobyl disaster/unintended sabotage, and finally by the Fukushima catastrophe. In addition conventional nuclear power produces large amounts of transuranium waste products that has to be stored for a million years. The Obama administration ended reprocessing of spent fuel rods, so not only must the transuranium products be stored, but also some unused U235. This makes conventional nuclear power using enriched Uranium too expensive to compete against coal or natural gas. But there are powerful commercial interests to keep it this way. After the Westinghouse bankruptcy GE has a virtual monopoly on nuclear power. They are in no hurry to make any changes.
There is a better way: Thorium Nuclear power. The advantages are:
There is no time to waste. This is my suggestion list:
1. Immediately take Thorium off the list of “source materials”. While Thorium is radioactive slightly above background radiation no amount of Thorium can make it go critical, and it cannot be source material for making bombs.
2. Make separate regulations for Thorium based Nuclear plants apart from Uranium plants. One thing that goes away is the need for evacuation zones due to the inherent safety of Thorium Nuclear plants.
3. Declare Thorium Nuclear Power to be the preferred replacement for Coal or Gas powered electric plants.
4. Streamline the permit process, like Uranium powered plants enjoyed when there was a desire to build Nuclear Bombs.
5. Increase research and development into Liquid Fluoride Thorium reactors to speed up their development.
6. Develop hybrid Tokamak powered Thorium reactors like the one Russia is developing to burn off transuraniun nuclear waste products.
With all this done, I envision coal, gas and biofuel Power stations to be eliminated within ten years, and transuranium waste products to be eliminated within twenty years.
When Coal, gas and biofuel are eliminated as source for Electric Power, then it is time to switch most of the transportation to electric cars and trucks, but not before.
After that, maybe, just maybe it is time for Fusion Power to take over.
Len Bilén's blog, a blog about faith, politics and the environment. 
China has reportedly reassigned over 60,000 soldiers to plant trees in a bid to combat pollution by increasing the country’s forest coverage. A large regiment from the People’s Liberation Army, along with some of the nation’s armed police force, have been withdrawn from their posts on the northern border to work on non-military tasks inland. The majority will be dispatched to Hebei province, which encircles Beijing, according to the Asia Times which originally reported the story. The area is known to be a major culprit for producing the notorious smog which blankets the capital city. This is in addition to an earlier tree planting around Beijing. The initial results are puzzling.