An Optimistic Look at the Future of Vital Resources

Back in 1980, the great libertarian economist, Julian Simon, and the prepetually wrong Malthusian biologist, Paul Erlich, entered into a little wager regarding population growth and resource scarcity. They decided on using the inflation-adjusted prices of five metals to decide the bet. Simon allowed Erlich to pick the five metals. If the 1990 prices were higher, Erlich would win. If they were lower, Simon would win. With the help of a fellow perpetually wrong Malthusian, John P. Holdren, Erlich selected chromium (Cr), copper (Cu), Nickel (Ni), tin (Sn) and tungsten (W). Julian Simon won the bet. _WattsUpWithThat

The article linked above proceeds to look at price and production trends for these 5 metals, in order to determine whether Julian Simon was lucky, or good.

All images via Watts Up With That!?!

Prices of the metals appear remarkably stable when adjusted for inflation. But there is more to the story than this.

Over time, production of these 5 metals continues to rise. Even more interestingly, the price to production index of the metals has declined consistently. This is an indicator of expected stability of production.

Not only are the prospects for future economical metals production quite good, but the same is true for the crude oil and liquid hydrocarbons sectors. Proved crude oil reserves continue to go up, despite sustained high production rates.

But here is the bad news for peak oilers and other doomers: Technologies which will provide substitution liquid fuels such as bitumens to liquids, gas to liquids, coal to liquids, and even biomass to liquids, etc, are developing much more quickly than most prognosticators would have though possible.

Finally, world food supply is rising step for step with world population. This is logical, since the planet Earth has an incredibly expandable capacity for biological production, which has barely been tapped to this point.

Overall, this is a fairly optimistic look at the future of planetary resources. For a more extensive look at the thinking behind economist Julian Simon's famous bet with doomer Paul Erlich, go to the free online book, The Ultimate Resource II.

There you will learn that human ingenuity is the ultimate resource which determines the scarcity or abundance of the other important resources necessary for an abundant future.

Obama a Terrible Venture Capitalist! President Backs 12 "Green Energy" Failures With $Billions of Taxpayer Dollars

Play CBS News Video

CBS News counted 12 clean energy companies that are having trouble after collectively being approved for more than $6.5 billion in federal assistance. Five have filed for bankruptcy: The junk bond-rated Beacon, Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt, AES' subsidiary Eastern Energy and Solyndra.

Others are also struggling with potential problems. Nevada Geothermal -- a home state project personally endorsed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid -- warns of multiple potential defaults in new SEC filings reviewed by CBS News. It was already having trouble paying the bills when it received $98.5 million in Energy Department loan guarantees.

SunPower landed a deal linked to a $1.2 billion loan guarantee last fall, after a French oil company took it over. On its last financial statement, SunPower owed more than it was worth. On its last financial statement, SunPower owed more than it was worth. SunPower's role is to design, build and initially operate and maintain the California Valley Solar Ranch Project that's the subject of the loan guarantee.

First Solar was the biggest S&P 500 loser in 2011 and its CEO was cut loose - even as taxpayers were forced to back a whopping $3 billion in company loans.

Nobody from the Energy Department would agree to an interview. Last November at a hearing on Solyndra, Energy Secretary Steven Chu strongly defended the government's attempts to bolster America's clean energy prospects. "In the coming decades, the clean energy sector is expected to grow by hundreds of billions of dollars," Chu said. "We are in a fierce global race to capture this market."

Economist Morici says even somebody as smart as Secretary Chu -- an award-winning scientist -- shouldn't be playing "venture capitalist" with tax dollars. "Tasking a Nobel Prize mathematician to make investments for the U.S. government is like asking the manager of the New York Yankees to be general in charge of America's troops in Afghanistan," Morici said. "It's that absurd." _CBS_via_MJPerry

The Obama administration is reckless and corrupt with American taxpayer's money. At the same time that Obama is throwing taxpayer dollars at his campaign supporters in the green energy sector, he is actually killing energy ventures in time-tested areas such as coal, offshore oil, Canadian oilsands pipelines, nuclear energy, and more.

It is time for Mr. Obama and his band of energy starvationist zombies to be sent on their way.

Fusion Energy: The Big and the Small

The general principle behind fusion is relatively simple. If you can fuse together lightweight atoms, you can create a heavier atom plus lots of energy. The trick becomes that in order for the atoms to fuse together, enough energy needs to be provided to heat atoms into the range of 150 million degrees (Celsius). _Thomasnet

Los Alamos National Lab
The current approaches to large scale fusion power have not been successful. Neither the large tokamak approach -- magnetically confined plasmas -- nor the laser inertial confinement approach as practised by Lawrence Livermore Lab, have provided significant returns for all the money that has been spent on them.

That is why the Los Alamos National Labs are trying a different approach, magnetised target fusion:

“We built a plasma injector, and they built a can-crusher, and you put the plasma into that aluminum canister, and then you crush the aluminum can, with the huge current produced by the capacitor bank,” Wurden began.

“”You put 11 million amps of current, and that produces a big magnetic field on the outside; that crushes the can very smoothly and uniformly.

“We put a magnetic field inside the can, we then inject the plasma from the magnetic field into the can; if the plasma’s in there and you do it right; we crush it by a factor of 10.”

Wurden then explained how the process works further.

“If you take a can from 10 centimeters in diameter to 1 centimeter of diameter; when you change the area by a factor of 100, the magnetic field in the can gets 100 times stronger than it was. This gives you a magnetic field of 5 million Gauss; and we have that plasma supported by this incredibly large magnetic field.

“We can hold the plasma together for 1/millionth of a second, at this incredible density and incredible temperature; we take the energy of motion in the can.
We’ve merged the technology of crushing a can, fast and smooth, with the plasma injector we have.”

Wurden, who has been working on fusion since 1977, said that the Magnetized Target Fusion approach is something in between the strictly magnetic fields approach, and the inertial compression approach used at the Livermore Lab in California. _Thomasnet

More from Los Alamos Labs:

MTF is intermediate between magnetic confinement and inertial confinement fusion (ICF) in time and density scales. In contrast to direct, hydrodynamic compression of initially ambient-temperature fuel (e.g., ICF), MTF involves two steps: (1) formation of a warm (e.g., 100 eV), magnetized (e.g., 100 kG), wall-confined "target" plasma prior to implosion; (2) subsequent quasi-adiabatic compression by an imploding pusher, such as a magnetically driven imploding liner. In many ways, MTF can be considered a marriage between the traditional magnetic and inertial confinement approaches, which potentially eliminates some of the pitfalls of either. In particular, MTF requires simpler, smaller, and considerably less expensive systems than either magnetic confinement or inertial confinement ("laser") fusion. The instabilities which plague traditional approaches to fusion are potentially mitigated in MTF due to wall confinement, shockless acceleration and relatively low velocity (e.g 1 cm/m sec) of the pusher, and low required convergence ratios (e.g., 10:1). Similar to inertial confinement fusion (ICF), MTF relies on an implosion to compress a DT fuel to ignition conditions. Yet, also similar to magnetic fusion energy (MFE), MTF relies on a magnetic field to reduce the thermal diffusion of energy to the walls of a chamber. _LANL MTF

The LANL article goes on to describe the benefits obtained from their "hybrid" approach to fusion. But even with all the benefits of MTF, the researchers do not actually expect to achieve reliable fusion for at least 50 years.

That is where small fusion approaches come in: By trying so many different things, there is always the chance that one of the small fusion startups might create a winning technology. Here is a picture gallery of small fusion startups, borrowed from Al Fin Energy blog:

Bussard IEC Fusion
Bussard inertial electrostatic confinement fusion (EMC2 Fusion) involves an electrostatic plasma confinement to achieve fusion. The history and development of the concept is explained in a video reached via the link above. The Bussard IEC has been financed almost entirely by the US Navy. EMC2 is based near Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Dense Plasma Focus Fusion
Lawrenceville Plasma Physics is based in New Jersey. The dense plasma focus approach uses a special pulsing "spark plug" to ionise a gas, and to form a plasmoid "pinch," with the emission of high energy photons, ions, and fusion neutrons.

HyperV
Hyper V Technologies utilises a spherical array of mini railguns to accelerate plasma beams into a central target of deuterium or deuterium-tritium, to achieve fusion (hopefully).

TriAlpha
TriAlpha is an Irvine, California venture, which has been fairly successful in the venture capital game. TriAlpha is a bit secretive with non-investors, but you can read their patent for yourselves. The concept seems to involve the highly sophisticated evolution from an earlier colliding beam fusion approach.

General Fusion
General Fusion is a small startup headquartered near Vancouver, BC. The compression of plasma to achieve fusion is accomplished by a coordinated spherical plasma compression, using pneumatics and advanced switching.

Helion
Helion Energy is located in Redmond, Washington. It is based on a principle of "colliding plasmas," and like all the rest of the small fusion approaches, it is a long shot.

Brave New World of Unlimited Food and Fuels c/o Craig Venter

Microbes will be the (human) food- and fuel-makers of the future, if J. Craig Venter has his way. The man responsible for one of the original sequences of the human genome as well as the team that brought you the first living cell running on human-made DNA now hopes to harness algae to make everything humanity needs. All it takes is a little genomic engineering.

"Nothing new has to be invented. We just have to combine [genes] in a way that nature has not done before. We're speeding up evolution by billions of years," Venter told an energy conference on October 18 at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. "It's hard to imagine a part of humanity not substantially impacted." _SciAm

La Jolla Algal Growth Facility Synthetic Genomics
Craig Venter wants to tweak algae and other microbes, so that humans can get most of their food, fuel, chemicals, plastics, medicines, and other high value items from microbial production. It is a matter of understanding the language of biology to a depth never before mastered. It is a difficult goal. But the payoff is almost inconceivably large.

Given algae's multibillion-year track record with photosynthesis and genetic experimentation Agradis's purpose is to turn that genetic cornucopia into improvements in agricultural crops, whether corn or canola—as well as use algae as a model for testing various new genetic combinations. A similar partnership between Monsanto and algae company Sapphire Energy will "use our algae platform that we developed to mine for genes that can transfer into their core agricultural products," explained Tim Zenk, Sapphire's vice president for corporate affairs in a prior interview with Scientific American. "When you do genetic screening in algae, you get hundreds of millions of traits in the screen and that accelerates the chances of finding something that can be transferred."

If that's not enough, Venter sees a role for synthetic biology in food beyond crops and livestock—specifically the growing hunger for meat around the world. "It takes 10 kilograms of grain to produce one kilogram of beef, 15 liters of water to get one kilogram of beef, and those cows produce a lot of methane," another potent greenhouse gas, Venter observed. "Why not get rid of the cows?" The replacement: meat grown in a test tube from microbes thanks to synthetic biology.

...look at the potential output from algae, and it's one to two orders of magnitude better than the best agricultural system. If we were trying to make liquid transportation fuels to replace all transportation fuels in the U.S. and you try and do that from corn it would take a facility three times the size of the continental U.S. If you try to do it from algae, it's a facility roughly the size of the state of Maryland. One is doable and the other's just absurd, but we don't have an algae lobby.

...We need three major ingredients: CO2, sunlight and seawater, aside from having the facility and refinery to convert all those things. We're looking at sites around the world that have the major ingredients. It helps if it's near a major refinery because that limits shipping distances. Moving billions of gallons of hydrocarbons around is expensive. But refineries are also a good source of concentrated CO2.

It's the integration of the entire process. [Synthetic Genomics] is not trying to become a fuel company. You won't see SGI gas stations out there, we're leaving that to ExxonMobil. We will help them shift the source of hydrocarbons to material recycled from CO2. _SciAm

Venter takes the "food vs. fuels" debate and turns it on its head: Why not make both, using the same type of platform?

A scientist at the University of Maastricht is not waiting for Venter's breakthroughs before beginning to grow meat in the lab. Mark Post is a vascular biologist at the university, who is in the process of growing multiple thin slices of meat which he plans to glue together with fatty substance. Such an approach would allow for a wide variety of programmed nutritional content -- perhaps food that is personalised to one's needs.

'Cultured meat' begins with stem cells harvested from slaughterhouse leftovers.

Dr Post nurtures the cells with a liquid feed containing sugars, protein building-blocks, fats, minerals and other nutrients.

So far he has produced strips of meat 2.5cm long. Like muscle, these need to be exercised to grow - by stretching them repeatedly between Velcro tabs.

"The first one will be a proof of concept, just to show it's possible," he said.

Dr Post argues that an alternative to livestock farming is needed to satisfy the world's growing hunger for meat.

Animals need to be fed 100g of vegetable protein to make 15g of muscle.

"Current livestock meat production is just not sustainable. Not from an ecological point of view, and neither from a volume point of view.

"Right now we are using more than 50% of all our agricultural land for livestock." _Sky.news

Most journalists, energy analysts, policy makers, and academics have no concept of the biological potential of the planet Earth. Having fed their intuitions and imaginations on a steady diet of scarcity, they are at a loss in the larger world of actual possibilities.

But don't let the shortcomings of your overlords and masters in the media, government, and academia keep you from understanding the world as it is and as it could be. There is a whole new level of thought and existence coming. We simply need to survive until it gets here.

In the meantime: Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

Adapted from an Al Fin blog article.

News From the World of Nuclear Fusion

A major upgrade to the DIII-D tokamak fusion reactor operated by General Atomics in San Diego will enable it to develop fusion plasmas that can burn indefinitely. Researchers installed a movable, 30-ton particle-beam heating system that drives electric current over a broad cross section of the magnetically confined plasma inside the reactor's vacuum vessel. Precise aiming of this beamline allows scientists to vary the spatial distribution of the plasma current to maintain optimal conditions for sustaining the high temperature plasmas needed for fusion energy production. _Eurekalert

Image Credit
Physicists in San Diego have removed a stumbling block to sustained plasma fusion in tokamak reactors. This development should allow plasma fusion specialists to move ahead in their quest for essentially infinite energy.

The so-called "H-mode" where turbulence ceases and a tokamak becomes much more efficient was discovered as long ago as the 1980s, but working out how to make it happen - and keep happening, sometimes a tokamak will flick in and out of H-mode hundreds of times a second - has been difficult.

... The problem was that, until work began in San Diego, nobody really understood how and when turbulence ceased as surface flow built up. But Dr Lothar Schmitz and his crew are pleased to report that their method of using microwave radar guns - not dissimilar to police speed guns aimed into the torus using focusing mirrors - has given them a good handle on what's going on.

"We found that the turbulent eddies on the surface of the plasma produced surface flows that eventually grow large enough to shred the eddies, turning off the turbulence," says Schmitz. "Much like the population of predators and prey find a balance in the wild, we find that the plasma flow and the plasma turbulence reach an equilibrium in the tokamak plasma." _Register

Alan Boyle provides a nice overview on the state of the art of various approaches to fusion, including laser ignition, magnetic confinement, and assorted other types

Brian Westenhaus looks at news from the Bussard IEC fusion front

Gamma ray laser fusion technology has even been novelised recently by a Los Alamos scientist

Ecatnews.net covers the unpredicatble developments in "cold fusion" or LENR -- low energy nuclear reactions

And Brian Wang's Nextbigfuture provides nice overall coverage of most large energy topics

The field of fusion is long past due for significant breakthroughs. When they begin coming, they may arrive too quickly to assimilate at once.

State of the Art in Energy Storage

The state of the art for energy storage leaves a lot to be desired at virtually every scale. Power grids and individual businesses, institutions, and residences are far too vulnerable to power fluctuations and unpredictable outages.

Images via ESA (ht NBF)
For those who are curious about the state of the art, the Electricity Storage Association provides a useful comparison for different methods for electrical energy storage (via Brian Wang).

One significant omission from the ESA list is "Cryonic Energy Storage," which may prove to be the best of the current crop of contenders for now, until "flow batteries" are perfected.

Large -scale stationary applications of electric energy storage can be divided in three major functional categories:

Power Quality. Stored energy, in these applications, is only applied for seconds or less, as needed, to assure continuity of quality power.

Bridging Power. Stored energy, in these applications, is used for seconds to minutes to assure continuity of service when switching from one source of energy generation to another.

Energy Management. Storage media, in these applications, is used to decouple the timing of generation and consumption of electric energy. A typical application is load leveling, which involves the charging of storage when energy cost is low and utilization as needed. This would also enable consumers to be grid-independent for many hours.

Although some storage technologies can function in all application ranges, most options would not be economical to be applied in all three functional categories.

... _ESA

More graphic comparisons from ESA below:

Read the entire ESA comparison sheet for more information.

Cryonic energy storage has far more potential than compressed air storage, given the phase change energies involved.

Among electrical battery storage methods, flow cell batteries are most scalable and versatile in application. Newer approaches to flow cells using more viscous electrolyte media should allow the technology to be used in vehicular power storage applications.

Adapted from an article at Al Fin Energy

With This Kind of Heat You Can Kill Peak Oil

With plentiful process heat provided at temperatures between 700 C and 950 C, a person could kill peak oil and have plenty of energy left to power industry and a broad spectrum of industrial processes.   Specifically, one could:

1. Unlock the trillions of barrels oil equivalent in oil sands (PDF)
2. Unlock the trillions of barrels oil equivalent in coal to liquids and gas to liquids (PDF)
3. Unlock the trillions of barrels oil equivalent in shale oil kerogens 
4. Provide abundant industrial process heat for production of fertilisers, refining fuels, making plastics, etc 
5. Split CO2 into CO to use as a hydrogen carrier 
6. Overturn conventional fears of EROEI and Peak Oil 

Those things, and many more, will be accomplished by next generation gas-cooled high temperature nuclear reactors. Helium gas coolant will run gas turbine generators at high temperatures, which provides electrical power at higher efficiencies than older steam cycle generation systems. And as mentioned above, the higher temperature process heat will find a wide range of practical uses in industrial processes and energy production.

Conventional fears about EROEI and peak oil will be overturned since the energy used to produce hydrocarbon fuels, fertilisers, plastics, and other products of industry and energy, will come from the high temperature heat effluent of nuclear reactions -- of which there is no conceivable near term shortage.  Unless political lefty-Luddite dieoff.orgy forces of faux environmentalism intrude even further than at present.  In that case, all bets are off, and the leftist inspired great human dieoff is put on the table by government planners.

But that would be political peak oil and political energy starvation.  Which is yet another reason why choosing your political leaders wisely can be a matter of life or death.

A Biological World: Sustainable Materials and Fuels

GCC
Global industry is looking for alternatives to fossil fuels, as feedstocks for the production of fuels, plastics, high value chemicals, lubricants, and other materials. The planet Earth is highly prolific in its biological output -- and it could be far more biologically prolific, given just a little help.

The image above depicts the scheme of Montana startup Blue Marble Biomaterials, which aims to ride a $multimillion grant from the US Advanced Manufacturing Program to successful bio-manufacturing.

The company is implementing novel recycling systems to eliminate waste and reduce cost: a photo-bioreactor containing algae purifies wastewater and waste gas from the fermentation system and their solid waste is dried and pelletized for use in wood-burning furnaces and stoves. The company has future plans to power its facilities using its own waste gas and pelletized solid waste in already on-site gasifiers.

Blue Marble Energy’s proprietary AGATE (Acid, Gas and Ammonia Targeted Extraction) system uses different bacterial consortia (“cassettes”) in an anaerobic fermentation process to produce carboxylic acids, esters, mercaptains / thiols, and terpenes. The system is feedstock flexible; for the Missoula plant, Blue Marble is using waste coffee grounds and spent grain from a major brewer, said Kelly Ogilvie, Blue Marble’s CEO.

(Blue Marble uses a supercritical fluid extraction process to remove the remaining lipids from the coffee grounds.)

The feedstock flexibility can manifest as price stability for Blue Marble’s chemical customers, Ogilvie noted. For example, the company has a stable price on the spent grain from the brewer; a waste product which otherwise would end up in landfills (i.e., the amounts above that which could economically be used for cattle feed, the other major disposal pathway for spent grain).

If we have fixed feedstock [such as the waste spent grain], we have price stability. We can hedge off the future price volatility of petroleum. Price protection is a huge issue right now.

—Kelly Ogilvie

_GCC

Blue Marble had better have its act together, because government grants run out very quickly -- no matter how well connected company founders may be to government administrators. Bio-manufacture of this range of materials, using these new technologies, is risky and cutting edge.

As long as petroleum prices remain relatively high, crafty uses of biomass and bio-products as substitutes for petroleum can make a profit. But to build a large-scale infrastructure of bio-manufacture and bio-refining, investors and participants will want to be sure the bio-approach can withstand temporary nose-dives of oil prices, such as occurred in 2008-2009 and multiple times throughout the 1900s.

Billionaires Who Are Pushing the Future Forward

"I've been rich and I've been poor, and rich is better."

hplus
Opportunity societies such as the US once was, allowed large numbers of relatively young (mainly) men to achieve great wealth. Some of these young and young-at-heart men are devoting a considerable amount of their wealth to drive future-oriented enterprises such as access to outer space, advanced nuclear fission and fusion, and more. Peter Thiel, for example, is backing life extension, seasteads, and a number of other futuristic game changing technologies.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com has backed space launch company Blue Origin for years, and is now backing unconventional nuclear fusion startup General Fusion. Bill Gates' investment in Terrapower advanced fission reactors appears to reflect a deep commitment to advanced abundant energy.

A fair number of these billionare drivers of the future were also school dropouts. Perhaps there is something about having succeeded without receiving the official seal of approval from the educational establishment, which gives a person the courage to push ahead -- risking part of a huge fortune on ideas that are ever further out.

Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX is the frontrunner in the private space launch race, having successfully orbited its Falcon 9 boosted Dragon capsule. Robert Bigelow's Bigelow Aerospace is likewise the frontrunning developer of privately built space habitats. Both companies are bringing private sector performance values to the space enterprise which had been hampered by a government sector mentality up until recently.

Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is the frontrunner for the exciting new industry of space tourism, due in large part to Branson's fortuitous partnership with pioneering aerospace engineer Burt Rutan. Billionaire Paul Allen also played an important role in that partnership.

The imagination, drive, and careful focus on important future industries and technologies sets these men apart from less imaginative billionaires. But it is the ability to invest large amounts of cash -- and inspire others to do so -- combined with their intelligent and energised future orientation, which gives them power to drive the future.

Although these men do not possess nearly the qualifications of a next level human, perhaps they can be seen as prototypes of next levels. And it is likely that persons very much like these will back the projects which lead to the transitioning of the first next level humans.

It is very fortunate that these large fortunes are under the control of such men as these, rather than under the control of men such as US President Obama and other government officials who have never done an honest day's work or had a truly productive thought in their lives.

The best way to make life better for most people is to make as many countries as possible into lands of opportunity -- where even high school and college dropouts can become billionaires and help bring about a more abundant future.

How Quickly Can the World Move from Coal to Nuclear?

Elliott Morse takes a look at the issue here:

Table 1. – [IEA] Energy Projections, Current Policies

Fuel	2007	2030	07-30 % Change
Oil	4,090	5,104	25%
Coal	3,248	4,934	52%
Gas	2,526	3,743	48%
Nuclear	722	851	18%
Hydro	241	340	41%
Other	1,203	2,042	70%
Total (MTOE)*	12,029	17,014	41%

Source: IEA

* Million tons of oil equivalent (MTOE), is a standardizing measure for energy; one million tons of oil equivalent is the energy generated by burning 1,000,000 metric tons of crude oil.

To meet this growth in demand, fossil fuels (oil, coal, and gas) are expected to grow most rapidly. Coal use is projected to grow by 52%, with its share increasing from 26.5% to 28.8%, unless major policy changes occur. Under this scenario, the number of railroad cars loaded with coal leaving mines every day would increase from 225,687 to 343,044.

Table 5. – China Electricity, by Fuel, 2007

China	Electricity (GWh)	Share %
Production from:
- coal	2,656,434	81%
- hydro	485,264	15%
- nuclear	62,130	2%
- oil	33,650	1%
- gas	30,539	1%
- wind	8,790	0%
- biomass	2,310	0%
- other	116	0%
Total Production	3,279,233	100%

Quadrupling its nuclear capacity would mean being able to produce 248,520 GWh per year. That increase, 186,390 GWh, would require increasing its capacity by 21GWe. Using US$2 billion as the GWe cost (some estimates for 1 GWe in China are as low as US$1.5 billion), this will cost only US$42 billion. This should be no problem for China.

But let’s consider something somewhat more ambitious: could China replace half its electricity generated by coal with nuclear? That would mean increasing nuclear production by 1,328,217 GWh annually. That would take an additional 151 GWe of capacity. At US$2 billion per GWe, that would cost US$302 billion. With a GDP of US$5 trillion annually, this investment would also seem feasible over a couple of decades.

The joint study.....by the Nuclear Energy Agency of the OECD and the International Energy Agency gave the impression that most of the concerns with nuclear are manageable. But there are extraordinarily complex logistical and regulatory problems that still must be faced. China is in a much better position to deal with these problems than is a democracy.


Source: SeekingAlpha

China has already begun building new nuclear reactors. But then, China finds it easier to deal with its trial lawyers and political activists -- it executes them if they cause trouble. In the US, trial lawyers and political / environmental activists can tie a multi-billion dollar project up in the courts for years, draining the resources of investors dry.

In other words, the faux environmentalists who are blocking nuclear power are making it necessary to continue mining and burning coal! But no one ever said "environmentalists" were very intelligent. Dogmatic, pompous, corrupt, self-serving, yes. Intelligent? Not so much.