miscellany

“ ... the greenhouse effect has been detected, and is changing our climate now.”
—James Hansen, testimony before the US Senate, June 23, 1988 / reviewed 30 years later in another video*

For us to halt and reverse climate change at our current level of energy use or higher requires us “to develop a new generation of nuclear-power plants, which use thorium-fueled molten salt reactors [an alternative nuclear technology] that fundamentally cannot have a meltdown.” James Hansen (Rolling Stone, 22 December 2016 )

A prototype reactor of this type was built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and ran continuously for 20,000 hours until the project was defunded. Alvin Weinberg was fired by the Nixon administration from ORNL after 18 years as the laboratory's director because he continued to advocate increased nuclear safety and molten salt reactors (MSRs). Weinberg’s firing put a stop to further MSR development.

starting at 10:11 in the following video, Norwegian nuclear physicist Sunniva Rose demonstrates on a marked-up segment of a table of nuclides that using thorium as a fuel avoids the highly problematic by-products of using uranium and generates only mildly radioactive by-products of little interest to anyone building nuclear bombs

Does a heap of coal contain an energy-equivalent amount of uranium? Yes. Coal is not just a mix of carbon and hydrocarbons but also contains smaller amounts of many minerals, some of them radioactive.

The radioactivity of fly ash passes without comment for the most part.

The two most populous countries have plenty of coal but almost no oil. China and India are each investing in thorium-based nuclear power. Take a look at thorium reactor development in India, for instance.

2019-04-29

As for Canada, in Truthdig today Chris Hedges says:

However, as James Hansen says at 2:02 in the video at top, “So long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy then we’re going to keep burning them, and we can’t solve the problem.”

What is needed to shut down all further carbon and hydrocarbon extraction is unbeatable price competition from alternative energy sources, including thorium-based nuclear power.

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