[Synapsid]

Rune:

The US made a U233 fission bomb in the 1950s. Yield was low because of premature ignition caused by radiation from U232 daughter products, which were impurities. The paper in Nature I referred to outlined several methods to produce U233 without those impurities, yielding pure U233.

A commercial or a research reactor can be used for the activation of Th232 by neutron bombardment, and the separation protocols (which are standard ones) in the Nature paper can be used to isolate the Pa233 parent that will decay into pure U233. The bomb would be a standard gun-type fission bomb. The US, in World War II, didn't even test the first U235 gun-type bomb before deployment because they knew it would work. The test took place in Japan.

Iran, Pakistan, North Korea could all do this, and there is a lot of thorium in the world as you've pointed out.

But the point I've been making is simply that the risk exists, and thorium reactors should not be described as safe from allowing nuclear proliferation. That's all. Really. The key part is "...should not be described as..."

[ROCKMAN]

Yep...there is a readily available alternative to oil. Perhaps the reports of the death of coal are a tad exaggerated:

Reuters - Coal will surpass oil as the key fuel for the global economy by 2020 despite government efforts to reduce carbon emissions, energy consultancy firm Wood Mackenzie said on Monday. Rising demand in China and India will push coal past oil as the two Asian powerhouses will need to rely on the comparatively cheaper fuel to power their economies. Coal demand in the United States, Europe and the rest of Asia will hold steady. Global coal consumption is expected to rise by 25 percent by the end of the decade to 4,500 million tonnes of oil equivalent, overtaking oil at 4,400 million tonnes, according to Woodmac in a presentation on Monday at the World Energy Congress.

"China's demand for coal will almost single-handedly propel the growth of coal as the dominant global fuel," said William Durbin, president of global markets at Woodmac. "Unlike alternatives, it is plentiful and affordable."
China - already the top consumer - will drive two-thirds of the growth in global coal use this decade. Half of China's power generation capacity to be built between 2012 and 2020 will be coal-fired, said Woodmac.

[KaiserJeep]

Coal is indeed present in quantities that will last decades longer than oil.

But coal also has an environmental downside when burned. I remain a skeptic about carbon dioxide changing our climate on a global scale, but I remember acid rain. I recall the pictures of North American forests taken from altitude, and how you could relate the number of dead trees to the amount of coal burned over the years.

Then the EPA mandated standards for stack effluents from coal burning power plants, and stack scrubbers came about. The hard Eastern coals could be efficiently scrubbed, the soft and brown Western coals could not - so the US West switched largely from coal-fired steam to oil and natural gas diesel generation for the electric grid.

So 5 railroads were constructed in the Western US and Canada, and those Western coals that were too dirty for US power plants are being exported and burned in China. Acid rain from this is lowering the pH of the Pacific, and enough pollution blows all the way over the Pacific to increase the number of Federally-mandated "spare the air" days in seven Western states.

What goes around, comes around, I guess.

[englishrose64]

Hi I am new to this site and would like to get an opinion on the use of gas in our houses. There a few gas companies fitting over the lowest price, the overall prices are getting higher. People, especially the younger generations, are not aware of how much gas they are using, even if it is just that extra five minutes in the shower.
I believe that the main reason we use so much gas is because the general public is used to having as much gas as they want as it is at their disposal. I grew up in Spain and the thing that is most noticeable about the differences between England and Spain is the fact that in every petrol station there are gas bottles. For an average family that do not have the money to spare for an extra gas bottle, they use one at a time to heat the water, the house and to cook food. You could not use up the gas too quickly as there would not be any left over for a hot shower or to cook dinner until the next wages came in. This is a problem that many people face where they do not have gas on tap, so to speak. However, here we may call it a problem but it may be one of the solutions to help lowering the use of gas. Some places have a pay as you go system where you have to keep topping up in order to use more gas.
Do you think it would be worth all the trouble these changes would cause to use a system such as this or is it just going back in time and we need to come up with a brand new system?

[KaiserJeep]

It's very different in the US. Most cities and towns have natural gas piped into individual buildings and metered for each user. I have a natural gas meter on the side of my house which is hooked up to a cellular modem. I can go to a web page and monitor my gas and electricity usage for each hour of the day. This is very usefull information for electricity in particular, since we have a "time of day" electric rate system to encourage you to conserve by postponing power-intensive tasks to off-peak hours when power is cheaper. With gas usage there is little incentive to conserve, since it is so cheap.

Rural consumers typically have large refillable gas bottles that a gas truck periodically fills with propane or butane or a mixture of the two. I live in a suburb but I also exchange 20 pound refillable propane cylinders on my backyard grill at a local hardware store. Then small 14-ounce or 16-ounce disposable gas cylinders are sold for use on portable appliances. Bottled gas costs more than piped natural gas because of transportation costs.

[Timo]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('englishrose64', 'H')i I am new to this site and would like to get an opinion on the use of gas in our houses. There a few gas companies fitting over the lowest price, the overall prices are getting higher. People, especially the younger generations, are not aware of how much gas they are using, even if it is just that extra five minutes in the shower.
I believe that the main reason we use so much gas is because the general public is used to having as much gas as they want as it is at their disposal. I grew up in Spain and the thing that is most noticeable about the differences between England and Spain is the fact that in every petrol station there are gas bottles. For an average family that do not have the money to spare for an extra gas bottle, they use one at a time to heat the water, the house and to cook food. You could not use up the gas too quickly as there would not be any left over for a hot shower or to cook dinner until the next wages came in. This is a problem that many people face where they do not have gas on tap, so to speak. However, here we may call it a problem but it may be one of the solutions to help lowering the use of gas. Some places have a pay as you go system where you have to keep topping up in order to use more gas.
Do you think it would be worth all the trouble these changes would cause to use a system such as this or is it just going back in time and we need to come up with a brand new system?

[KaiserJeep]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Timo', '-')snip-
Energy is much more costly and is harder to get than here in the modern world. Our advanced civilization has no idea how muchy energy we actually use to do anything.

[Loki]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Timo', '
')
Nice context, and very important for people to have the proper context on their own, personal energy use. I used to live in Chile, and on a daily basis, someone from nearly every home in the nation would aquire a bottle of natural gas for their daily use in heating their water and for cooking. No house that i ever entered had either central heat or central air conditioning, and there was (30 years ago) zero public infrastructure to supply all of the houses in any city their needs for this heating fuel. I also remember (nostalgicaly) the sound of the men on their cargo bikes selling and exchanging the cans of gas early in the mornings in the street. To take a shower, you'd take a match and light the gas burner that ran underneath the coil of water pipes as it flowed into the shower or tub. It was pathetically miserable in the middle of winter running out of gas to heat the water for your shower, with soap all over your face. But, more to your point on quantifying each individuals use of energy, most of the 3rd world gets it. Energy is much more costly and is harder to get than here in the modern world. Our advanced civilization has no idea how muchy energy we actually use to do anything.

[SeaGypsy]

The stuff in bottles is not NG (Methane) but Propane (LPG). Very different products with different sources and different storage and transit methods.

[KaiserJeep]

The piped natural gas is indeed methane. The biggest problem is it is odorless, so in the US a stinky chemical called mercaptan is added for safety.

In the US, the bottled gas is either propane or butane, or a mixture of both, depending on the state you are in. Butane tends to be found in the South-Eastern states, and the name refers to a mixture of n-Butane and iso-Butane molecules, both by-products of oil refining. Butane is a heavier gas with a much higher boiling point in liquid form under pressure, making it suitable for exposed steel above-ground tanks in hotter climates. Propane boils at a lower temperature and safe storage requires that you dig the larger propane tanks into the ground or build a building around the tank to shelter it from the sun.

I have used all three and Butane is the best fuel for cooking, being heavier and burning slower. Propane is a better fuel for torches and lanterns because it has a hotter flame. However since we replaced lead/tin solder with higher melting point lead-free alloys in plumbing and electronics, even hotter MAPP gas has been popular in small torches for soldering, and MAPP/oxygen is used for brazing/welding. True MAPP gas (methylacetylene/propadiene), itself a safer acetylene substitute, has been replaced with still safer LPG/propylene mixtures, still marketed as MAPP.

We had to adapt the wave-solder machines at work from lead/tin to lead-free solders as part of the RoHS initiative in 2006. This involved replacing the propane burners with MAPP burners. Then when the MAPP composition changed, we had to tweak them again.

[SeaGypsy]

Thanks for the more detailed response KJ Yes blends vary by area and season, and tend to get tagged by the local moniker with no thought of what the actual blend is or where it came from. I was simplifying mainly because lots of peeps misunderstand that NG can simply be pressed into the same kind of container as LPG, Propane type blends. Butane is great for it's low pressure storage capability, that's why it's used for cig and kitchen lighters, but most places there's not enough of it to be a major product in the way NG is or LPG type byproducts of oil production. (I was a glass blower- we used a 4 ton load every 10 days or so for several years and the blend was often tweaked for various reasons. We never had the option of NG for the main heating source as it doesn't burn quite hot enough to efficiently make and work glass>)

[EdwinSm]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('hedwig', 'S')econdly, how can we get people to take action and use these reusable sources rather than simply just talking about making changes?

[KaiserJeep]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('hedwig', '
')
Secondly, how can we get people to take action and use these reusable sources rather than simply just talking about making changes?

[Rune]

Below is an excerpt from the last chapter of Superfuel: Thorium, The Green Energy Fuel Of The Future by Richard Martin.

Martin outlines two future scenarios. One based on what is likely to happen if the US does NOT take steps towards clean, carbon-free baseload energy infrastructure. The other future is more optimistic.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

WHAT WE MUST DO

SO, LET US ASSUME THAT A NUCLEAR POWER transformation program is fully funded. The goals are to:

•Build a prototype LFTR within five years
•Commercialize LFTRs starting in 2020
•Bring LFTRs on line at a rate sufficient to replace fossil fuel plants with clean energy sources by 2050

How much power would that be? The United States consumed about 3.8 million gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2010. Coal accounted for 44 percent of that, nuclear for 20 percent. Total U.S. electricity-generating capacity is about 1,000 gigawatts.

Under an optimistic scenario for renewable energy production from wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, and so on, let’s say that, to reduce carbon emissions enough to stave off catastrophic climate change, by 2050 we must increase the portion of our electricity generated by nuclear power to 50 percent. One half of 1,000 gigawatts is 500 gigawatts, or 500,000 megawatts.

Electricity demand will grow in the next four decades, of course, by as much as 50 to 60 percent in some forecasts. But I’m being optimistic. So let us say that improved conservation technology and changing consumer habits will limit the increase in demand, and we must build enough new nuclear power plants to generate 500 gigawatts by 2050. That’s the equivalent of 500 thousand-megawatt nuclear reactors. Between 2020 and 2050 that means building about 17 LFTRs a year. Let’s be ambitious and call it 20 new thousand-megawatt thorium plants a year, for a total of 600. One of the beauties of LFTRs is that they can be mass-produced. Small, modular LFTRs can be built as 250-megawatt machines and assembled into larger plants. Boeing builds about one $200 million jet a day. A modern airliner has many, many more moving parts and greater overall complexity than a 250-megawatt LFTR. If we build, say, four LFTR manufacturing plants a year with each plant producing 20 250-megawatt reactors (five 1,000-megawatt plants) a year (think of the jobs and spillover technological benefits each plant would bring to the state in which it’s located), that would just  about do it.

And from 2050 to 2100 we can build another 400 plants, until we have created 1,000 gigawatts of thorium power. By the end of the century, we will have built a safe, clean energy infrastructure based on a mix of offshore and land-based wind farms, big solar arrays in the West, geothermal, and natural gas plants, layered on top of a baseload power-generating sector of thorium reactors. Particularly in the Southwest, these plants will use excess heat energy to desalinate seawater. How much will this cost? Technology advances will bring the cost of thorium reactors down rapidly after commercialization, potentially to the cost of a new jet. Call it $1 billion per thousand-megawatt plant. The cost of building 600 thousand-megawatt LFTRs (or twenty-four hundred 250-megawatt machines) would come to $600 billion. Add 15 percent for start-up costs and financing and round up: $700 billion.

In comparison, the 2010 budget for the U.S. Department of Defense was $685 billion. In other words, for about what we spend in one year on defense in wartime (which, by the way, is almost as much as all other countries spend on defense combined), we can lay the foundation for a thorium-based, carbon-free energy economy that could last a millennium. And most of that construction cost will be borne by private industry, which, thanks to the expedited licensing and speedy construction of LFTRs, will generate profits from this construction boom in a short timeframe. Consider the costs, direct and indirect, of building any other thousand-megawatt power plant (coal, conventional nuclear, solar, natural gas)—or of doing nothing and allowing climate change to run rampant by midcentury. Building a couple dozen LFTRs a year starts to sound like a bargain. Alvin Weinberg’s vision of a nuclear-powered world running on molten salt reactors will become a reality a couple of generations later than he foresaw. These are ambitious goals.

What, then, must we do to pull them off? To create a thorium energy economy in the next decade, three things must happen at once: funding, licensing reform, and R&D. I have already described the funding mechanism that must be put in place quickly, by the end of 2013. Licensing reform and R&D—including the development and procurement of the needed materials and fuel—must occur in parallel. The president should order the NRC to expedite its licensing process so that the period from application to final approval is no more than five years. That means that by 2015, while a prototype LFTR is being built (at the Savannah River Site, Idaho National Laboratory, or Oak Ridge), companies will begin submitting applications. At the same time, you must have fuel to start up all those reactors. Two kinds are required: fissile fuel to ignite the chain reaction and transmute thorium into uranium-233, plus the thorium itself. Luckily we have plenty of both.

The Department of Energy (DOE) has more than a ton of U-233, produced by past thorium reactor experiments, on hand. Foolishly, the DOE planning to spend half a billion dollars to blend the U-233 with U-238 and throw it away in the desert. That plan must be scrapped and the U-233 put to good use as starter fuel for LFTRs. As for thorium, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that total thorium reserves in the United States are about 440,000 tons, mostly in Montana and Idaho. If we assume that future LFTRs will achieve an energy efficiency of 50 percent (half the available energy in a given unit of thorium is actually converted to electricity), then a single ton of thorium would produce about 12.1 billion kilowatt-hours (or 12.1 million megawatt-hours) of electricity. About 1,650 tons of thorium would satisfy all the electricity needs of the entire world for a single year. Since LFTRs can be run as breeder reactors, producing more fuel than they consume, 440,000 tons is effectively a limitless supply of nuclear fuel.

THE NEXT STEP, once a prototype reactor has been built and tested, is to build a series of liquid fuel reactors to burn up the plutonium and fission products from existing spent uranium fuel. Kirk Sorensen has proposed a type of liquid chloride thorium reactor, a cousin to LFTRs, that will consume transuranic fission products and use plutonium to create uranium-233. The U-233 will be used to start up new LFTRs.

Next we must create the infrastructure to manufacture LFTRs. The expertise to build these machines is dispersed among a cadre of start-ups described in chapter 9, including Flibe Energy, DBI, and so on, as well as among the big nuclear suppliers like GE and Westinghouse, which already, in some cases, have R&D programs for liquid-core reactors. As has happened in the electric vehicle market, the actual manufacturers would likely include established companies (GE), start-ups (Flibe), and joint ventures combining the two. States will compete to host the new plants with tax incentives, university-based R&D support, and training programs to provide the skilled workers. (Here it’s worth noting that the Navy has for years been training recruits with only high school educations to be shipboard nuclear engineers. The new thorium power industry will create thousands of skilled, high-paying  jobs that do not require a Ph.D. in nuclear physics.) It does no good to build carbon-free thorium reactors if you don’t get rid of the existing nuclear and coal-fired plants.

Decommissioning nuclear reactors is a long, involved, and costly process. A typical decom costs $300 million and takes a decade; an extreme case, like the Hanford Weapons Reactor, can cost billions and take many decades. Ways must be found to bring down that cost. One way would be to build new LFTRs on the sites of old nuclear plants and use the new thorium reactors to consume the fission products from the old machines. As for coal plants, new regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will lead to the retirement of dozens of aging facilities in the next few decades, regardless of what type of new plants come on line. In July 2011 the consulting firm ICF released a report saying that, while shutting down existing coal plants will take longer than foreseen in the EPA deadlines, 30 to 50 gigawatts of coal-fired electricity production will be retired in the coming decade.17 Total coal-fired generating capacity in the United States is about 314 gigawatts. Shutting down 50 gigawatts of that every decade, and replacing it with safe, clean thorium power, will eliminate coal from the U.S. electrical portfolio by 2070.

These are achievable goals. Remember: the obstacles to creating a thorium power economy in the next 40 years are not technological or even economic. They are political and perceptual. If we don’t do it, it will be because we  chose not to—not because it was impossible.

HERE IS WHERE THE CURRENT nuclear power establishment—the nuclearati— guffaw and roll their eyes. There are a hundred reasons why the scenario I’ve laid out will not happen, they say. Uranium is inexpensive (for now), the existing reactor population is safe (except when it’s not—see Fukushima), plenty of new reactor designs are less radical than LFTRs (which is why they won’t make enough of a difference), and so forth. We can’t do it because we’ve never done it before. They are right about one thing: the United States is not likely to be at the  center of the thorium power revolution. Here’s a more likely scenario.

Discovering the advantages of thorium technology, the Chinese accelerate their program to build a dozen LFTRs in the next 15 years. They recruit the top thorium talent in the world and co-opt the nascent Japanese program, signing lucrative contracts with the top nuclear suppliers in Japan and South Korea, thus compressing further the R&D timeline. By 2030 China is the leading source of LFTR technology—and of raw thorium fuel—in the world.

India, watching its Asian rival move rapidly to the fore in advanced nuclear power, shifts its three-stage program to a more accelerated development schedule based on solid fuel technology from TerraPower and Lightbridge. Using its huge reserves of thorium as leverage with other emerging thorium power nations, such as the United Arab Emirates, India builds a thriving thorium power sector, building reactors at a slower pace than China but, by 2030, becoming a leader in its own right. Enhanced energy security, and the economic power and diplomatic prestige that come with it, allow India to reach a lasting détente with its perennial foe, Pakistan.

Farther east, on the Pacific Rim, both Japan and South Korea rapidly build thorium reactor technology sectors, supplying China and India with the advanced materials and components they need while starting to build thorium reactors of their own. By 2030 the fastest-growing source of electricity in Asia is thorium power; by 2050 liquid fluoride thorium reactors are supplying a significant fraction of the power not only in China, India, Japan, and Korea but also in secondary, technology-importing countries like Vietnam, Taiwan, Singapore, and Indonesia. Watching this transformation unfold in Asia, the nations of Western Europe—led by France, Norway, and the Czech Republic, already in 2012 the home of significant thorium R&D efforts—belatedly underwrite their own thorium power programs. While the European Union attempts to establish its own thorium power technology sector, low-cost equipment and fuel from Asia prove irresistible, and China becomes the Saudi Arabia of the new nuclear-powered world.

And the United States? Saddled with debt, paralyzed by wooden-headed political opposition to taking action to reverse climate change, and bound to  powerful fossil fuel and nuclear power sectors and their well-funded lobbyists, the United States enters an irreversible cycle of declining living standards, diminishing international stature, and ravaged cities. Civil unrest ensues, and the collapse of our political institutions accelerates. Our top graduates, unfulfilled by their professional prospects at home, emigrate to booming technological centers like Shanghai, Singapore, and Seoul. Our vaunted military, unable to procure energy for its far-flung overseas missions, contracts. As in fourth-century Rome, the roads decay, harbors silt up, the legions become disaffected, and the elite retreat into their marble palaces. All because we failed to capitalize on a technology that we once held in our hands. 

THAT’S A WORST-CASE SCENARIO. And it’s hardly inevitable. So what are the chances that Congress will back a technology that, though proven and tested decades ago by American scientists, is seen today as a radical new system? What is the likelihood that the American public will support a new form of nuclear power so soon after Fukushima? How plausible is it that Silicon Valley venture capital funds will provide billions to thorium power start-ups?

One answer to all those questions is: no more likely than it was, in August 1939, when Albert Einstein wrote President Roosevelt to urge development of atomic weapons, that the United States would design, build, test, and detonate a nuclear warhead within six years. The Manhattan Project, which mobilized vast intellectual, material, and technical resources in a short amount of time, is often cited as the paradigm for solving big and complex problems. General Groves’s list of essential requirements, born out of his Manhattan Project experience, has become famous in management theory circles: “Put one man in charge, give him absolute authority, keep the chief outside the bureaucracy, use existing government organizations whenever possible, create a small advisory committee,” and so on. To that list, based on the experience of the nuclear power industry, I would add, “Keep military concerns separate from economic and energy-related goals.”

One main lesson of the thorium power debacle is that for too long we have polluted  nuclear power policy with rationales and missions produced in the Pentagon. What a disgrace it would be if the United States—the cradle of nuclear physics, the country that first designed and built liquid-fuel thorium reactors, the greatest source of technological innovation the world has ever known—failed to muster the resources and the will to create the energy source for the twenty-first century and beyond. Forests have been consumed to produce books wondering whether we, as a nation and as a people, are still capable of Manhattan Project–sized achievements and, if not, why not. The declinist school, it must be said, is in ascendance, exemplified most clearly in books like The End of Influence by the Berkeley economists J. Bradford DeLong and Stephen Cohen: “The American standard of living will decline relative to the rest of the industrialized and industrializing world. . . . The United States will lose power and influence.”

My middle-aged, well-educated American friends unquestionably have a waning confidence that they will pass on to their children and their grandchildren a world as clean, safe, peaceful, and full of promise as the one we grew up in. Unimaginable budget deficits; rising competition from populous and dynamic Asian countries; declining educational, moral, and cultural standards; the rise of seemingly insurmountable environmental crises; the coarsening of public discourse; and the disappearance of inspirational, admirable leadership have all contributed to our sense that we now live in a Spenglerian era of Western decline. A New York magazine cover line actually referred to this as the era of “Post-Hope America,” the same week Foreign Policy magazine’s cover headline asked, plaintively, “What Ails America?”

So, when I think about what I’ve seen reflected in thorium’s glossy surface in my three years of research, it’s simple: hope. Hope that technology can lead us out of the mess into which technology has gotten us. Hope that through divine Providence or intelligent design or the random workings of quantum mechanics, Earth has been granted an inexhaustible energy source that will not destroy the systems and balances that sustain life. Hope that my son, now 12 and a gifted mathematician, may help engineer a thorium power revolution that will solve the energy crisis, dissipate the threat of nuclear annihilation, restore a sense of higher purpose and collective endeavor, and keep the lights on for another few millennia at least.

In about a century and a half, the Age of Hydrocarbons delivered us a world of shrinking ice caps, resource wars, mass extinctions, and creeping drought. It could take us less than a century to reverse those trends and usher in the Age of Thorium. For millions of years, thorium has been there, awaiting the right time, the right circumstances, and the right minds to bring it to light and enable it to provide thousands of years of clean, safe, affordable energy. Alvin Weinberg was right. The time is now. The technology exists, the economics are favorable, and the need is urgent. The choice is ours. 

[Rune]

If for no other reason, I think the development of LFTRs should be pursued and developed simply to burn up the existing stockpiles of nuclear waste, the manufacture of medical isotopes (quite a fair-sized market) and, indirectly, for the preservation of a US rare earths industry.

It turns out that whenever you find Thorium, you find rare earths; whenever you find rare earths, you find Thorium.

Superfuel contained an excellent discussion on proliferation risks. I can't see why anyone would not want to reduce those existing risks brought on by the continued use of the Uranium Fuel Cycle and light-water reactors.

But, as I have posted before, the political atmosphere in the US is so poisoned to anything with the word "nuclear" in it, that we will probably abdicate our nuclear relevancy as a nation to China and India. It's a shame.

On goes The March of Folly.

[SeaGypsy]

Back to where we started on our first debate Rune- the same side.

My suspicion is that if you are correct and a few places move this and show it makes a real dint economically- the rest of the world will shift consensus sooner than later.

[Rune]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SeaGypsy', 'B')ack to where we started on our first debate Rune- the same side.

My suspicion is that if you are correct and a few places move this and show it makes a real dint economically- the rest of the world will shift consensus sooner than later.

[SeaGypsy]

I think you are on the money, 350 mil for a trial in the single country capable of rapid expansion at scale capable of influencing the global tide- a decent start to what could be a world changing course in a 10 year time frame- my most optimistic assessment of the current global oil plateau.

Just say resistance continues in the west. China gets this prototype up and in 3 years decides on and begins to implement a massive rollout. in 10 years time half of China's total energy needs could be as much as their now total and be 50% Thorium derived with a fractional cost and no supply demand horizon- a massive investment magnet to the country and huge reason for other countries to follow suit. A time period which could see education and public awareness, a proper risk assessment analysis awareness, shift dramatically the public opinion on nuclear energy. Simultaneous to ever increasing 'pump pain'- there will be ever more increasing reason for an alternative of huge potential and significance on the world stage. 'Interesting times' for the USA.

[Loki]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SeaGypsy', 'J')ust say resistance continues in the west. China gets this prototype up and in 3 years decides on and begins to implement a massive rollout.

[Loki]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('hedwig', '
')Firstly, what reusable energy resources do people think are the best and most sustainable when considering alternatives to oil?

Secondly, how can we get people to take action and use these reusable sources rather than simply just talking about making changes?