google ehtanol midwest ADM big agra is the only real benefactor from ethanol use. do ADM and Monsanto need more money from me and you? I don't think so

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With a new interest from much of the world in global warming, the nuclear
industry is making a comeback, because nuclear is a clean, safe, plentiful and
renewable source of energy.

Everything, including yourself, is made of atoms. All atoms have nuclei. You
have many atomic nuclei inside yourself since you are made of atoms. The
simplest nucleus is one proton. That would be a hydrogen atom. An oxygen
atom has 8 protons and either 8, 9 or 10 neutrons in its nucleus. All other nuclei
also have neutrons. Uranium has 92 protons and either 143 or 146 neutrons. If it
has 143 neutrons it is U235. If it has 146 neutrons, it is U238. Nuclear fuel is
only 2% to 8% U235, the kind that fissions/divides, providing energy. The rest is
U238 that doesn't fission. A nuclear reaction happens when a neutron is captured
by a nucleus. If a U235 nucleus captures a neutron, the nucleus and the atom split
approximately in half and 3 more neutrons are released because the 2 smaller
nuclei don't need so many neutrons. If a U238 nucleus captures a neutron, it
ejects an electron and the neutron becomes a proton. The U238 thus becomes
Plutonium 239. Plutonium is fissionable, which means that plutonium is a good
fuel. If you add Thorium to the fuel, you can make more fissionable uranium. If
a Thorium atom nucleus captures a neutron, it ejects an electron and the neutron
becomes a proton. The Thorium atom thus becomes U233. U233 is fissionable.

Depending on the design of the reactor and the mix of the fuel, the fuel % in the
reactor can either grow or shrink. It is kind of like the fuel gauge can go either up
or down, but it is more like the reactor can run hotter or cooler over time. The
temperature is kept constant by adjusting the control rods. A breeder reactor is a
reactor designed to make the fissionable part of the fuel load grow rapidly.
Normally, fuel is left in the reactor for about 10 years, or 10% of the fuel is
replaced each year. The reprocessing step sorts out the fuel and puts the
percentage of fissionable fuel back to the starting percentage. In the process,
plutonium may be removed and either wasted or used as fuel. If we add thorium
to the fuel, we can make more uranium than we put in. Since the earth contains
more than twice as much thorium as uranium, it would be wise to make thorium
into uranium. By reprocessing nuclear fuel, we get an enormous, many centuries
long fuel supply. The products of fission are also removed when fuel is
reprocessed. These are just other ordinary atoms that are no longer useful as fuel.
The quantity is very small. We should reprocess fuel to keep the fuel load at the
correct percentage of fissionable fuel for the particular reactor design. Instead, we
go through the expensive process of making more "virgin" fuel for each new fuel
load. This greatly increases the price you pay for electricity. We are not
reprocessing nuclear fuel for political reasons.

I have zero financial interest in nuclear power, and I never have had a financial
interest in nuclear power. My sole motivation in writing this is to avoid extinction
by H2S gas. H2S is how global warming kills everybody if we don't act.

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Reference the book: "Break Through" by Ted Nordhaus and Michael
Shellenberger, 2007.

I am on page 227. The message so far is: "Environmentalists have the wrong
STRATEGY." Nordhaus and Shellenberger recommend changing from a
message about limits and separating people from nature to a message about growth
of clean energy and seeing people as part of nature. Clearly humans are part of
nature. We ARE clearly part of our Universe and we cannot be separate from it.
On the good side, we are the only organism capable of spreading earth life to other
planets and defending Mother Earth from giant asteroid impacts. On the bad side,
we are capable of causing our own extinction by means of global warming. A
total global warming of 11 degrees Fahrenheit will cause H2S to bubble out of the
oceans and kill everybody and almost all of the other life forms that we care about.
We have already caused one degree Fahrenheit of global warming and natural
positive feedbacks may kick in soon.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger recommend working WITH human psychology rather
than fighting it. Human psychology is illogical from the previous philosophy of
environmentalism, but can be taken advantage of by changing philosophies. The
old philosophy is getting us nowhere. Suppose we agree with George W. Bush
but with the stipulation that carbon sequestration has to be PROVEN to be safe and
eternal. If they have to prove that ZERO CO2 will leak out, even under terrorist
attack, for 1 Million years, they will never succeed. In other words, use the
strategy that most of you have been using against nuclear, against coal instead.
Reverse your attitude on nuclear power because nuclear power is the only thing
that can be agreed on by both the electric power companies and the
environmentalists who want to reduce CO2. In fact, nuclear is the only realistic
replacement for base load power. Wind, solar, bio and geo energy are pipe
dreams without major investments in research that we don't have time for.

"Between 2007 and 2020, China will invest $128 billion in coal." This is on page
117 of the referenced book. The US has 112 Gigawatts of coal fired power plants
on order. That is 112 standard unit coal fired power plants. The US, China and
India are building nearly 900 coal fired power plants. Nuclear power is clean, safe
energy as coal will never be. Nuclear technology is something that the US can
sell and something that can be a growth industry. Nuclear power can save us from
extinction by global warming and provide good high paying jobs. What is needed
is education on the subject of nuclear power. People who understand nuclear
power are in favor of it. It is ignorance that makes people protest against nuclear
power. "Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy", by B. Comby is a good textbook
for a high school level course in nuclear power, or for a non-science majors'
short course.

I have zero financial interest in nuclear power, and I never have had a financial
interest in nuclear power. My sole motivation in writing this is to avoid extinction
by H2S gas.

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Coal fired power plants that put 14.7 MILLION TONS of CO2 into the air every
year for each 1000 Megawatts generated for one year. Nuclear plants put ZERO
CO2 into the air. The CO2 cost of building coal vs. nuclear is the same and
negligible. The CO2 cost of mining and transporting coal is large and not
included in the 14.7 MILLION TONS of CO2. The mining and transportation
cost of nuclear fuel is zero since Yucca Mountain is full of fuel that needs to be
reprocessed and put back into reactors. Each 1000 Megawatts of nuclear power
needs so little uranium that you could easily carry an equal weight in a suitcase.
Burning 4 MILLION TONS of coal makes 14.7 MILLION TONS of CO2. As I
have pointed out many times, burning 4 MILLION TONS of coal puts enough
U235 into the air and cinders to fuel a nuclear plant, or enough uranium +
thorium to fuel hundreds of nuclear plants if breeding is allowed. There is no
way to win without nuclear power, like it or not.

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The complete list of impurities in coal includes every element in
the periodic table. The important impurities are: URANIUM,
ARSENIC, LEAD, MERCURY, Antimony, Cobalt, Nickel,
Copper, Selenium, Barium, Fluorine, Silver, Beryllium, Iron,
Sulfur, Boron, Titanium, Cadmium, Magnesium, Thorium,
Calcium, Manganese, Vanadium, Chlorine, Aluminum,
Chromium, Molybdenum and Zinc. There is so much of these
elements in coal that cinders and coal smoke are actually valuable
ores. We should be able to get all the uranium and thorium we
need to fuel nuclear power plants for centuries by using cinders
and smoke as ore. Remember that, to get a given amount of
energy, you need about 100 MILLION TIMES as much coal as
uranium. That means the coal mine has to be 100 million times
larger than the uranium mine, not counting the recycling of
nuclear fuel. We can keep our mountains and forests and our
health by switching from coal to nuclear power.

Chinese industrial grade coal is sometimes stolen by
peasants for cooking. The result is that the whole family
dies of arsenic poisoning because Chinese industrial grade
coal contains large amounts of arsenic.

I have zero financial interest in nuclear power, and I never have
had a financial interest in nuclear power. My sole motivation in
writing this is to avoid death by H2S gas.

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See "The Long Summer" by Brian Fagan. Climate change has caused the collapse
of dozens of civilizations, and is well on the way to causing the collapse of our
civilization. See: "Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" by Jared
Diamond. "Collapse" extends and amplifies what was said in "The Long
Summer." No government be able to prevent the collapse of world
civilization if global warming continues. In the US, the problem is that the
population has been thoroughly propagandized by the coal industry and is now
paranoid of all things nuclear. The building of coal fired power plants continues.

We don't recycle nuclear fuel because spent fuel is valuable and people steal it.
The place it went that it wasn't supposed to go to is Israel. This happened in a
small town near Pittsburgh, PA circa 1970. A company called Numec was in the
business of reprocessing nuclear fuel. I almost took a job there, designing a
nuclear battery for a heart pacemaker. [A nuclear battery would have the
advantage of lasting many times as long as any other battery, eliminating many
surgeries to replace batteries.] Numec did NOT have a reactor. Numec "lost"
a large amount of enriched uranium. I don't believe it was bomb grade as the
newspaper report claimed because Numec was not in that business. It was
reactor grade high level "waste" probably with the plutonium still intact. It
wound up in Israel. The Israelis have fueled both their nuclear power plants and
their nuclear weapons by stealing nuclear "waste." It could work for any other
country, such as Iran or the United States. It is only when you don't have access
to nuclear "waste" that you have to do the difficult process of enriching uranium,
unless you have a Canadian "Candu" reactor that runs on unenriched uranium.

Numec is no longer in business. The reprocessing of nuclear fuel in the US
stopped. That was the only politically possible solution at that time, given that
private corporations did the reprocessing. My solution would be to reprocess the
fuel at a Government Owned Government Operated [GOGO] facility. At a
GOGO plant, bureaucracy and the multiplicity of ethnicity and religion would
disable the transportation of uranium to Israel or to any unauthorized place.
Nothing heavier than a secret would get out.
See for more on Numec:
http://www.pittsburghlive.
com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/
specialreports/buriedlegacy
/s_87948.html
Government agencies investigated missing uranium, NUMEC
By Mary Ann Thomas and Ramesh Santanam
VALLEY NEWS DISPATCH
Sunday, August 25, 2002
Editor's note: This the first of three parts on the history of the Nuclear Materials
and Equipment Corp.

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Great damage has been done, but we still have 8 years before natural positive
feedbacks lead to our extinction. Sea level will continue to rise even if we
disappear right now, but that is "minor" compared to poison gas bubbling out of
the ocean and killing almost everything including all of the people.
See the chart on page 274 of "Six Degrees" by Mark Lynas. We have until 2015
to BEGIN REDUCING our total CO2 output and we have until 2050 to actually
reduce our CO2 output by 90%. The curve has to start down by 2015, not we
have to think about it by then. The peak of our CO2 production has to happen in
the next 8 years. That means stopping the building of coal fired power plants
world wide immediately. It means replacing coal fired power plants with nuclear
power plants world wide with ZERO interference from paranoid protesters.

How are YOU going to do it? Go ahead and invest YOUR money if your answer
is anything other than nuclear power. I don't want to waste my money on pie in
the sky like wind, solar, bio and geothermal. Too much research is still needed.
If we don't follow the schedule in Six Degrees, we will encounter positive
feedbacks which will take the control of the climate out of our hands.
Civilization may fall anyway well before 2050, but we can avoid going extinct by
2100. We have to hold the CO2 level to 400 parts per million to have a 75%
chance of avoiding the positive feedbacks. The natural positive feedbacks are
explained in Six Degrees.

I have zero financial interest in nuclear power, and I never have had a financial
interest in nuclear power. My sole motivation in writing this is to avoid extinction
by H2S gas.

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Let me refer all Nuclear Enthusiasts TO: Richard Smalley ‘The Terawatt Challenge’

Reversing Current Energy Trends
By 2050, if we have solved the problem, the world’s energy breakdown will probably look like a reverse of what it is today. Oil, hydroelectric, coal, and gas (in that order) would supply the least amount of energy, with fusion/fission and biomass processes being somewhat larger players, and solar/wind/geothermal resources providing the majority of the world’s energy. This new breakdown represents a revolution in the largest enterprise of humankind, an energy industry that currently runs about $3 trillion per year.
Getting there will be incredibly difficult.
If we knew today how to transform the makeup of our energy mix by exploiting fission/fusion, solar, or wind, it would take an inordinate amount of time. If I could go out tomorrow and turn on the switch of a new power plant that would produce a thousand megawatts of power from some new, clean, carbon-free energy
source, I would have to turn on a new plant every day for 27 years before I generated even 10 terawatts of new power

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I don't want to waste my money on pie in
the sky like wind, solar, bio and geothermal. Too much research is still needed.

On the subject of Solar energy; its NOT unproven, its just expensive, in first cost of investment BUT its running costs are so low as to be functionally ZERO.

Concentrated Solar Power has been running for 30 years, Mojave, Spain Portugal EVEN Germany.

The paper (R Smalley) I refer to above is an absolutely riveting read. PLEASE TRY IT, before continuing on your crusade for nuclear.

He offers a very realistic scenario of using both photovoltaic & CSP for electricity generation in the high solar energy parts of the planet, then transmission by DC high voltage lines. Its good science, do-able technology

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Solar power doesn't work at night and the needed research
includes dividing the price by 10 to 100 and energy storage. Is
there enough lead in the world to make enough lead-acid
batteries? At what price? Solar power is excellent for peak load
in the middle of the day, but solar power is not there at all at night
and is limited during most of the day. Solar power isn't there for
the base load.

There are few places where the wind blows constantly. For other
places, a multi-continent-spanning superconducting web of power
lines has been proposed. This is a good idea, but hardly a proven
technology.

Geothermal is great where feasible, but again, that isn't
everywhere. There are very few geothermal sites and they are not
where we need them.

We need 2 or 3 more Earths to make biofuel work. If we had
more planets already, we wouldn't have global warming yet.

Nuclear power is well proven, safe and abundant. We have been
improving it for 60 years. Nuclear power is excellent for base
load application, which is what is required. Nuclear power saves
14.7 Million tons of carbon dioxide per year per 1000 megawatts.
112 COAL fired power plants are on order in the US. Building
nuclear power plants to replace them and the coal fired power
plants we already have is not such a big task that the US cannot do
it. We certainly can. Not providing electricity is not an option.
Just try the no electricity option and see how fast you get a
revolution. Nuclear power is the only option that actually works
NOW. All others except coal need research to get them to work
providing base load. Coal will kill us all if we keep using it.

As I have said many times, invest YOUR money in wind, solar,
etc. Get rich or go broke. I'm betting you will do the latter.

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We may make hydrogen fusion work economically in that span of time. I hope
so. We may make a lot of things feasible by 2050, but coal will not be one of
them. The point is, what to do between now and 2015? It has to be something
we have already made a commercial success of. It has to work for base load. It
has to fit infrastructure we already have. It can't be coal because coal is the
problem. It has to work at night when the wind isn't blowing. That leaves only
one choice and that is nuclear. So sorry you don't like it. Desertification, not
drought, is already affecting agriculture at about 37 degrees from the equator. If
agriculture fails, civilization falls. Yes, the project is large, but not compared to
giving a completely pointless war in Iraq and not compared to the fall of
civilization.

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