Tag: science

There is a better green new deal. And this one will work and save the environment

We have immense environmental problems. CO2 is not one of them. There is a great need for a green new deal, but that involves cleaning up the earth, not destroying it even further. Cleaning up the earth requires a lot of electric energy. There is only one solution to this dilemma, renewables alone will not even begin to solve it, only Liquid Fluoride Thorium nuclear reactors, and in the future fusion power will have a chance to carry us through the next ice age, which will come when we have used up all available fossil fuels. We must save the bulk of it for our great grand-kids.

My suggestions for the green new deal are quite different from what is commonly proposed. Here are some suggestions:

Do harden the electric grid so it can sustain an electro-magnetic-pulse, either from a nuclear EMP-bomb or from a solar storm like the Carrington event of 1859. Make the grid safe from malicious hacking.

Do not build more wind-turbines except in areas where there are no raptors. The allowable kill of bald eagles per year is 4200, and if we build many more we risk to eliminate the bald and golden eagles as well as other rare birds. More here.

Do fill up fully the strategic petroleum reserve, taking advantage of the low, below cost crude oil prices due to lack of demand. This will be important and avoid price spikes and shortages should the strait of Hormuz be cut off. By eliminating that threat it will ensure that it will not be cut off. Peace is the final goal. (Note: This is already happening, at $10 a barrel)

Make all dams producing profitable hydroelectric power fully equipped to pump up water from a pool downstream to refill the dam during low power demand and provide extra power during peak demand. This is important, since that peak demand otherwise would be satisfied by burning coal and natural gas, and even using diesel-powered generators.

Do plant trees where-ever practical, especially in urban environments. They help immensely to alleviate the urban heat island effect, and are good for mental health, and provide habitat for birds and squirrels. They have to live too. In rural areas abandoned farms, like in upstate New York should be planted with managed forests.

Encourage protection and reforesting of the tropical rain forests. Plant a few billion trees worldwide. The Arbor Day Foundation operates worldwide and is reasonably efficient.

Do serious research on how to clean waste water including removing antibiotics and hormones such as birth control medicine. This is necessary in arid areas, water must be reused since the aquifers are already exhausted in much of the arid west. It will require a lot of energy  to implement and run water recycling plants, but it is necessary to secure clean water, not only for ourselves, but also for aquatic life downstream.

Do not build any more large solar power installations until our dependence on Chinese rare earth metals is eliminated.

Do eliminate  the regulation that Thorium is a source material and subject to nuclear regulations for mining. With this regulation eliminated we can again be independent from China on rare earth metals mining and refining.

Do not build any more Uranium based nuclear power stations. Even before we sold 20% of our uranium mines to Russia we were the world’s biggest importer of Uranium, and vulnerable to supply disruptions.

We must start immediately a large research and development effort into Liquid Fuel Thorium Reactors. China, India and Russia are way ahead of us, and China is grabbing IP rights as fast as they can. There is a million years supply of Thorium available, far more than anything else we are mining, and enough Thorium is already mined! Thorium reactors produce one ten-thousandth of the nasty TRans-Uranium waste products compared to a Uranium reactor, and the TRU it produces is Plutonium-238, used in space travel. Thorium waste products cannot be used for nuclear bombs, only dirty bombs, and the waste products radiation lasts only about 300 years, rather than 100000+ years. It is a good isotope producer for medical treatment and research.

Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors are inherently earthquake safe, operate under atmospheric conditions, have a large negative temperature coefficient, making it very stable and easy to control, and  they can never have a meltdown, the salt is already molten!

LFTR reactors can be placed nearly anywhere, does not need an evacuation zone because of its inherent safety, uses very little cooling water, produces very little waste, scales beautifully from very large power plants to small portable plants for small communities, can be run at variable power output with a small reaction time, all of this lessens the need for an expanded power grid.

The U.S was once the leader in Thorium reactor technology, but bombs were more important, and so we lost out on safety. Nuclear accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima could not have happened with Thorium reactors.

LFTR can produce electricity at about 4c/kWh, a very competitive cost.

And lastly, it can, in a slightly different configuration be used to eliminate spent nuclear fuels and nuclear bombs. They will have to be placed away from urban areas, not because of safety, but because nobody want to transport spent nuclear fuel or nuclear bombs through city streets.

This is a tall order, but it can eliminate all fossil fuel used to produce electricity.

About four years before all fossil fuel is eliminated as electricity producer, then and first then is the time to move over to electric cars and trucks. Before then, you are really using fossil fuel anyway, putting additional pressure on the national power grid with all its inefficiencies.

This is but a short list of the opportunities for a real green new deal, but these are the most important parts.

A perfectly preserved tunic from Roman times uncovered from melting glacier proves the climate was warmer then. A Limerick.

The tunic at Lomseggen pass

a garment of very high class

got preserved in the ice

glaciers grew, then demise

the climate change sure shows pizzazz

This tunic was made in the third or fourth century A.D. It is made of wool, and like all good tunics of that time it was never washed. The original sheep tallow in the wool made it a very good water repellent, so it was warm enough to wear when going over the short pass in snow in the winter. The oldest artifacts found, stone arrow points are about 6000 years old

and the newest are from viking times around 1200 A.D.

The Landbreen Glacier in central Norway grew, and from about 1400 to 2000 A.D. the pass was under the ice pack of the glacier. This proves that the climate was warmer  in roman and viking times than it was up till the 20th century. To prove this point we can see the temperature records from the Greenland icecap, at about the same latitude. (The temperature is in degree Celsius)

As we can see, there is a negative correlation between CO2 and temperature. This is counter-intuitive, but far more important than the amount of CO2 to affect the climate is the amount of clouds, the amount of snow they contain and when and where they occur. It turns out that clouds are the main temperature regulator for the climate, and we are eventually and slowly entering another ice-age. The recent rise in CO2 from 280 ppm to 405 ppm will delay the onset of the next ice age, surely arriving in the next 10000 years. Right now we are almost back to the conditions of the Medieval warm period, but still much below the ideal conditions during the Roman warm period. The climate is getting better.

Why models fail when developed with political as well as pure scientific motives

The corona virus has given us all an education on why models fail. Everybody in any form of management have to make forecasts, plan for the future as they stare an uncertain future in the face. It is time to remember the old saying in the Army: “No plan ever survived contact with the enemy”. And so it is, the corona virus is the unseen enemy that will affect our future, and our plans will have to change on an almost daily basis as it initially worked by doubling every 3 days. No disease since smallpox or measles in the American Indian population has been that infectious. So it was time to panic when it broke out in the Wuhan city in China. The city was sealed off except for international flying which was allowed to continue. The SO2 over the city was strong from all the cremation ovens going full blast. Over 40000 cremations was paid for by the Chinese government if the descendant agreed to ask no further questions, so they were never counted. How many more cremations? Who knows, but the size of the SO2 clouds, which by the way was only over Wuhan and Chongqing indicates it could have been ten times as many. But back to the models. These rumors prompted Trump to close all air travel to all non U.S citizens that had recently been in China. The official line was that there was no human to human transmission. As the death toll mounted in Italy with a 10+ percent death rate among the infected, the models indicated that U.S would have 2.2 million deaths. The models have since been adjusted more than once a week, but has now stabilized at 60000 deaths or fewer. While this is good news, why did the models fail us so badly?

The answer is obvious. Models are only as good as the input data and the assumptive relationships. In this case the big unknown was the denominator, how many will have it and yet show no symptoms? They may even be carriers.

We now have some of the answers. The death rate will be between 0.2 and 0.3% and will affect the normal risk categories, the old, diabetes, asthma, smoking, marijuana use, other drugs, overweight, and a compromised or overactive immune system. Properly handled, early diagnosis, and protecting the most at risk will reduce the death rate even lower.

It is time to get back to work.

The other models hat has failed us badly are the climate models, but the time scale is decades, not days. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has given out projections five times, beginning in 1990 on what happens to global temperatures if the amount of the greenhouse gas CO2 released in the air is increased, held steady or decreased. The result is always alarming with predictions a high as a temperature increase of up to 8,5C globally by the year 2100. Every new assessment show a decreasing number with the IPCC5 prediction being that temperature increase will be 2.2 C or thereabout if all reductions proposed will be made. IPCC6 will show a larger increase, mostly because of the rapid increase of CO2 emissions by China, India and other developing countries (Yes China is considered a developing country by U.N.)

There is one major problem with all these models. The trends shown by the models do not match with reality. The increased CO2 already occurred since industrialization would show a substantial hot spot in the tropical troposphere. There is no such hot spot. What do IPCC do with that troublesome fact? They ignore it, because it is mostly politically, not scientifically driven. Yes the scientists are sincere and contribute their parts, but the conclusions are politically driven. Is climate change a hoax? Not at all, it is changing, and long term we will have another ice age, but until then the increasing CO2 will stop the oncoming ice age, and even increase it  by as much as 7C in the arctic and antarctic, but only in the winter. In the summer there is no increase in temperature!

Why is that? To get the answer we must study molecular absorption spectroscopy and explain a couple of facts for the 97% of all scientists who have not studied molecular spectroscopy. IPCC and most scientists claim that the greenhouse effect is dependent on the gases that are in the atmosphere, and their combined effect is additive according to a logarithmic formula. This is true up to a certain point, but it is not possible to absorb more than 100% of all the energy available in a certain frequency band! For example: If water vapor absorbs 50% of all incoming energy in a certain band, and CO2 absorbs another 90% of the energy in the same band, the result is that 95% is absorbed, (90% + 50% * (100% – 90%)),  not 140%, (90% + 50%).

Even in Barrow, Alaska water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas. Only at the South Pole (And North Pole) does CO2 dominate (in the long winter).

All Climate models take this into account, and that is why they all predict that the major temperature increase will occur in the polar regions with melting icecaps and other dire consequences. But they also predict a uniform temperature rise from the increased forcing from CO2 and the additional water vapor resulting from the increased temperature.

This is wrong on two accounts. First, CO2 and H2O gas are nor orthogonal, that means they both absorb in the same frequency bands. There is three bands where CO2 absorb much more than H2O in the far infrared band, but other than that H2O is the main absorbent. If H2O is 80 times as common as CO2 as it is around the equator, water vapor is still the dominant absorbent.

And one more thing. Water vapor is a condensing gas, and it matters greatly whether it is in the atmosphere as a gas or in the form of a cloud. Clouds warm by night and cool by day and the cooling by day is much more than the warming by night, so it also matters greatly when clouds appear. People living in rural America know this instinctively even if they have not done the calculations. They look up and discern the sky and thank God for the clouds when they appear in the summer. In the winter that may mean even more snow. Clouds are the major temperature regulators of the earth. On the other hand people living in urban heat islands go from their air conditioned offices to their parked cars heated up in the sun so much that they get blisters when they touch the steering wheel. They are experiencing the worst of climate change, don’t look up and don’t thank God for the blisters.

We have immense environmental problems. CO2 is not one of them. There is a great need for a green new deal, but that involves cleaning up the earth, not destroying it even further. All of this takes a lot of energy. There is only one solution to this dilemma, renewables alone will not even begin to solve it, only Liquid Fluoride Thorium nuclear reactors, and in the future fusion power will have a chance to carry us through the next ice age, which will come when we have used up all available fossil fuels. We must save the bulk of it for our great grand-kids.

 

 

Does lockdown work to flatten the curve? Look at Sweden versus Great Britain.

Conventional wisdom told us in the Coronavirus pandemic that the only way to stop the hospitals from being overrun and the healthcare system collapsing was to enforce “social separation” between people and shut down the ecnomy, allowing only “essential workers” to go to work. Initially Italy, Spain and France had their hospitals overrun with people and their death rate from COVID19 is over 10%. This made all European countries enforce draconian rules to protect what was left. All countries except Sweden that is. They let people go to work, encouraged working from home, limited gatherings to less than 50 people and practiced “social separation” at restaurants, but kept them open. United Kingdom locked down their country on March 23. How much worse did Sweden fare? They both have about the same number of tests per capita, about 1/2%.

They both seem to have the same rate of increase, and are leveling off

The death rate, a lagging indicator also seem to come down for both countries.

There is one country, Norway, which is similar to Sweden that is doing much better. They took the approach of early testing and contact tracing, and their death rate per person is one quarter of Sweden’s. But the early outbreak occurred in the ski areas and traveling hubs, a younger and fit segment of the population.

Belgium on the other hand has a death rate of over three times as many as Sweden, a country having about the same population as Sweden, and they tested nearly twice as many people! The big difference there was that nearly half of all deaths so far has occurred in nursing homes.

The conclusion: Go back to work, start up the economy again, test and protect the most vulnerable. Most people will get it anyway, and most of them will not even know they had it, and for most of the rest it will be about the same as the regular flu. Give Hydroxychloroquine and Z-pack and Zinc for 5 days to all that want it, including all in the risk zone. It  must be under a physician’s supervision, not because of the Hydroxyxhloroquine, that has never killed anyone when taken in approved doses, but the Z-pack can make heart arrhythmia more severe.

 

Clinical trials take too long. With the COVID-19 virus acting on a time scale of 3 days, not 3 years, allow unlimited trials now!

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!

 

 

 

 

How to bend the corona-virus curve: Treat patients with Hydroxychloroquine

The recent chart on the corona-virus infection is really scary:

It is better to plot the Corona-virus cases on a logarithmic scale. It is less scary, but more serious. It shows the same thing. the virus cases double every 3 days. This is never seen before in pandemics history. Even worse, CDC is set up to develop and approve new medications with a time-frame of months, or even years, not 3 days.

Like they say in the military, even the best laid plans never survive contact with the enemy. That is why the Presidential task force wss forced to act with unprecedented speed and approve drugs that have not been subjected to double-blind clinical trials, which sometimes take years to validate. No, here speed is of essence, and President Trump is a man of immediate action, reacting on instinct rather than established scientific studies. Somebody showed him this study:

He got so excited he shared it in one of the daily briefings. The result was predictable. Three Democratic governors forbade its use in their state. They have since then all modified their stance and allow it under strict control of a licensed Physician or Licensed Practitioner, but Governor Cuomo was still insisting it could only be done in a hospital, not as an outpatient.

Then yesterday more information got out, so he tweeted this:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump
I agree with this. Watch!
@WashTimes
·
Hydroxychloroquine rated ‘most effective therapy’ by doctors for coronavirus: Global survey bit.ly/2xKne7I
11:17 AM · Apr 4, 2020
The survey was large and international. 37% overall surveyed suggested that Hydroxychloroquine was the most effective treatment. It is interesting that the U.S. doctors had the lowest recommendation rating for this drug of all the nations surveyed.
There are some possible side effects when using the drug as with every medicine you take. That is why it should be taken after consulting a physician, but for over 95% it is perfectly safe. What are the side-effects? For people with arrhythmia it can worsen the condition, as with vision problems, but otherwise they are few severe side-effects.
Doctors in areas of mitigation should offer the drug to anyone who is a candidate for it, but we live in a free country, so you cannot force the drug on anyone that would rather die than use a remedy that has been strongly advocated by President Trump.
In the other areas, not in mitigation the drug should be offered to anyone testing positive for COVID-19 and their contacts! This is what China did after they had cremated the evidence in Wuhan and Chongqing, and the new infection rate went to nearly zero, only affecting foreigners visiting China, or so their recent statistics show.

Chinese COVID-19 deaths vastly under-reported, air pollution data shows.

There are many satellites in the air, monitoring air quality around the world. They were put up to monitor Climate Change. One picture can tell a lot, this picture measured the level of SO2 on February 8 of this year:

The map looks pretty good, except for two yellow spots, one over Wuhan, China and one over Chongqing, China. The one over Wuhan had a SO2 concentration of up to 1700 µg/m3 , corresponding to 0.65 ppm and the one over Chongqing  750 µg/m3 corresponding to 0.286 ppm, tolerable, except for sensitive people. There are no such clouds in any other area of the world, including the rest of China.

These two SO2 clouds can only have come from one source, cremations. A person contains about 0,3% Sulfur, and a 120 lb person generates about 3/4 lb of SO2 gas when cremated. SO2 is a gas heavier than air, so it stays close to ground until it is dispersed. The cloud over Wuhan is large, about 100 km in diameter with an average concentration of 200 µg/m3 up to a height of 3 m, a wild guess. The number cremated during that time snapshot could be about 13500 in Wuhan alone. Add to that about a quarter as many in Chongqing making the total about 17000 cremations going on simultaneously. A cremation takes about 3 hours, add about 2 hours for preparation and collection of the remaining ashes, so let us assume they did 4 cremations in a 24 hour period. That will bring us to about 70000 cremations in a 24 hour period. It is reasonable to assume that nearly all these cremations was from COVID-19 victims, since a normal rate of cremation for a city of Wuhan’s size, (11,000,000), a death rate in China of 7 per 1000 people would be about 210 cremations per day.

The clouds tell the story.

 

China and rare earth metals. Can China be trusted? Consider COVID-19 and pharmaceutical supplies.

In early May, 2019, President Xi and Vice Premier Liu He, China’s top trade negotiator, visited a rare earth metals mine in Jiangxi province. This has led to the rumor that China is seriously considering restricting rare earth exports to the US. China may also take other countermeasures in the future. The trade negotiations between U.S. and China got a lot more serious. It extended far beyond tariffs and intellectual property, it began to involve strategic materials.

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.

Related image

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 the regulatory agencies decided to make rare earth metal ore subject to nuclear regulations with all what that meant for record keeping and control. This made mining of rare earth metals 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.

Rare Earth Element Production

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 just announced they will start up refining again late 2020. Meanwhile China is slapping on a 25% import tariff on imported ore starting July 1. Rare earth metals may be in short supply for a while.

So, why is this important? Just take a look at all the uses for rare earth metals. The most sought after pays all the cost of mining and refining, and the rest are readily available at nominal cost.

The Chinese almost got away with it, and that is but one reason the trade negotiations are so complicated and hard fought, but necessary. Donald Trump fights for reciprocity and fair competition.

For example, according to a 2013 report from the Congressional Research Service, each F–35 Lightning II aircraft requires 920 pounds of rare–earth materials. Who is making the most critical parts to this airplane? You guessed it – China, from our drawings and according to our specifications.

But it is getting worse. the COVId-19 virus hit China bad, probably in November or so, nobody knows and China won’t tell. Then they told us there was a small outbreak, but it is not contagious from person to person. Then on January 10 the first case of the Wuhan virus hit the U.S.A. Late January President Trump halted entry into the U.S. from foreigners having been in China recently. At one of the daily COVID-19 briefings President Trump got excited about a potential treatment. He had been shown the result of a french study. Here it is:

To make matters a little more complicated, China has stopped export of one of the ingredients in making this medicine, and they are the only source, until we have started up production of our own. We have to do it in days, not weeks.

It turns out that China had been, and is treating their COVID-19 patients with this medicine, both as a preventive, and as a cure for months, but they never told the world until now.

Why did China stop this medical export? There are at least two possibilities, either they are lying through their teeth about the COVID-19 cases and they need it for their own consumption but didn’t tell us, or, which is even worse, they do want to maximize the damage in the rest of the world.

This is the real China. The people are wonderful, but their government is evil.

Nevada governor Sisolak, in a snit of Trump-hate forbids the use of two promising treatments for covid-19, later recanted. A Limerick.

An intrigue in old Carson City

Gov. Sisolak showing no pity

For his Trump-hate is great

but the virus won’t wait

no time to delay and be snitty.

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.

 

Climate change is real and positive for the environment. The real challenge is clean and available water in the 10-40 region.

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.

As I have explained in a previous post: https://lenbilen.com/2020/02/28/climate-change-is-real-and-is-caused-by-rising-co2-levels-leading-to-less-extreme-weather-this-is-on-balance-good-for-the-environment/  global warming is real, but it only occurs in temperate regions, and predominantly in the winter. Summertime maxima are actually decreasing slightly, so the net effect of climate change is that it is positive for the environment.

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.

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.