Oldies
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In Obama's January 25 "WTF" (Winning The Future) teleprompter reading he stressed borrowing more money to "invest" in windmills, sunshine collectors and passenger trains. Two weeks later on February 8, the Obama regime announced a new $53 billion borrowing plan to begin a program to hopefully enable 80% of Americans to be able to ride on trains within 25 years. Sarah Palin aptly described this Obama fantasy as a "bullet train to bankruptcy".
As part of the Obama and the Democrats plan for America's energy future, they have and made licensing requirements in the US so difficult that most new coal-fired and nuclear power plant construction in the US has ground to a halt. More recently Obama and the Democrats have halted all offshore oil and gas drilling in the US and they have just announced onerous new environmental regulations which will cripple coal mining. Meanwhile, the Obama regime is pouring billions of borrowed money into building and subsidizing expensive windmill and sunshine electrical power plants. Obama has announced that he wants to double the amount of electricity generated from windmills and sunshine by the year 2020. In 2010 the US generated about 0.6% of its electricity with windmills and 0.09% from sunshine, so that doubling the amount of power from them will be almost impossible to notice, since it is less than the normal variability of electrical line voltage. The efforts by Obama and the Democrats to strangle US energy electrical production are already evident. Recent cold weather caused rolling power black-outs in Texas where requests to build coal-fired power plant have been blocked. Power black-outs, common in third-world banana republics will also become common here.
At approximately the same time as Obama's WTF teleprompter reading, the Chinese Academy of Sciences was announcing a new program to develop liquid salt thorium nuclear reactors.
Thorium is one of the three practical fuels for nuclear power reactors, along with plutonium and uranium. However, thorium offers many advantages. Firstly, thorium is about 4,000 times more abundant in the earth's crust than uranium-235. In fact, on average each cubic meter of the earth's crust contains enough thorium to provide the energy needs for one person for 15 years. The United States has more thorium deposits than any country on earth. One metric tonne of thorium has the energy equivalent of 3.5 million tons of coal and the US has 440,000 tonnes of proven reserves of thorium. The US also has the world's largest coal deposits, enough to supply US energy needs for 700 years, but our thorium deposits have enough energy to supply our energy needs for over 45,000 years.
The US led the development of liquid salt thorium reactors and we had a liquid salt thorium reactor running at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. This reactor worked safely and efficiently, producing power from 1965 to 1969. But, it was shut down under pressure from California Democrat Congressman Chester Hollifield who was on the Energy Subcommittee and favored uranium for nuclear power. I could not find any evidence that Hollifield, a powerful long-term Democrat, ever went beyond the 12th grade in government schools, but he was instrumental in killing thorium research in the US.
The Chinese are not going to include the US or any other country in their thorium reactor program and have announced that they intend to keep all the intellectual property rights for themselves. The head of program, Dr. Jiang Mianheng traveled with a group of Chinese scientists to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the fall of 2010 to learn what they could from the US thorium reactor program.
Perhaps when the Chinese are powering their country with cheap and abundant thorium power, US citizens, as debt slaves to the Chinese, can work in the thorium mines.
As part of the Obama and the Democrats plan for America's energy future, they have and made licensing requirements in the US so difficult that most new coal-fired and nuclear power plant construction in the US has ground to a halt. More recently Obama and the Democrats have halted all offshore oil and gas drilling in the US and they have just announced onerous new environmental regulations which will cripple coal mining. Meanwhile, the Obama regime is pouring billions of borrowed money into building and subsidizing expensive windmill and sunshine electrical power plants. Obama has announced that he wants to double the amount of electricity generated from windmills and sunshine by the year 2020. In 2010 the US generated about 0.6% of its electricity with windmills and 0.09% from sunshine, so that doubling the amount of power from them will be almost impossible to notice, since it is less than the normal variability of electrical line voltage. The efforts by Obama and the Democrats to strangle US energy electrical production are already evident. Recent cold weather caused rolling power black-outs in Texas where requests to build coal-fired power plant have been blocked. Power black-outs, common in third-world banana republics will also become common here.
At approximately the same time as Obama's WTF teleprompter reading, the Chinese Academy of Sciences was announcing a new program to develop liquid salt thorium nuclear reactors.
Thorium is one of the three practical fuels for nuclear power reactors, along with plutonium and uranium. However, thorium offers many advantages. Firstly, thorium is about 4,000 times more abundant in the earth's crust than uranium-235. In fact, on average each cubic meter of the earth's crust contains enough thorium to provide the energy needs for one person for 15 years. The United States has more thorium deposits than any country on earth. One metric tonne of thorium has the energy equivalent of 3.5 million tons of coal and the US has 440,000 tonnes of proven reserves of thorium. The US also has the world's largest coal deposits, enough to supply US energy needs for 700 years, but our thorium deposits have enough energy to supply our energy needs for over 45,000 years.
The US led the development of liquid salt thorium reactors and we had a liquid salt thorium reactor running at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. This reactor worked safely and efficiently, producing power from 1965 to 1969. But, it was shut down under pressure from California Democrat Congressman Chester Hollifield who was on the Energy Subcommittee and favored uranium for nuclear power. I could not find any evidence that Hollifield, a powerful long-term Democrat, ever went beyond the 12th grade in government schools, but he was instrumental in killing thorium research in the US.
The Chinese are not going to include the US or any other country in their thorium reactor program and have announced that they intend to keep all the intellectual property rights for themselves. The head of program, Dr. Jiang Mianheng traveled with a group of Chinese scientists to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the fall of 2010 to learn what they could from the US thorium reactor program.
Perhaps when the Chinese are powering their country with cheap and abundant thorium power, US citizens, as debt slaves to the Chinese, can work in the thorium mines.
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