"When misguided public opinion honors what is despicable and despises what is honorable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is harmful and discourages what is useful, applauds falsehood and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns its back on progress and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe." … Frederic Bastiat


Evil talks about tolerance only when it’s weak. When it gains the upper hand, its vanity always requires the destruction of the good and the innocent, because the example of good and innocent lives is an ongoing witness against it. So it always has been. So it always will be. And America has no special immunity to becoming an enemy of its own founding beliefs about human freedom, human dignity, the limited power of the state, and the sovereignty of God. – Archbishop Chaput

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Monday, March 7, 2011

China Plays Chess - The US plays Checkers

While the US diddles about developing a 21th century energy policy, refuses to drill and tap the resources in it own backyard and has the administration telling its citizens that they should check the air pressure in their tires instead of making a serious effort to wean us off dependence on foreign oil (let me add here that corn-based ethanol is not the answer), China forges ahead boldly going where no man has gone before.

Give credit to the far-thinking and realistic Chinese who view the volatile Mid-East as no place in which to put all of one's eggs.

China Initiates Thorium MSR Project

Published in Coal Strategy Thorium Uranium-233 by Kirk Sorensen on January 30th, 2011

You can read the entire story here:
http://energyfromthorium.com/2011/01/30/china-initiates-tmsr/

9 comments:

  1. Actually, thorium reactor is an old idea and has little advantages (if any):
    http://www-pub.iaea.org/mtcd/publications/pdf/te_1450_web.pdf

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  2. Actually.....

    sounds like the feedback I get from my kids

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  3. We just bought a Prius and I'm currently ordering some batteries to turn it into a plugin. This will give me 50 miles electric range before the gasoline engine turns on. $20,000 for a nice 2008 Prius, $9000 for the batteries, $5000 for taxes and extras etc., that is $35,000 for an electric car! When everyone's lining up at the gas station to buy $10 gasoline, I'll be waving and smiling as I drive by!

    Next step is to get some solar panels for the roof of our house to charge the car. Maybe even a wind turbine too. The solutions are very easy, it's just that our governments and the oil industry are making way too much money off everyone's addiction to oil, so they do everything they can to keep the alternatives from coming to market. They actually try to convince us (and largely successfully, sadly) that getting off oil is going to cost us money!!! Ludicrous!!! Has anyone checked the price of gasoline lately?!?!?

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  4. I believe the point is that China is proactive in it's pursuit of alternate energy while the US Administration really has no effective solutions to deal with an impending energy crisis which is illustrated by their penny ante conservation advice to consumers. China is searching which speaks to their forward or superior think tanks (in chess you have to plan several moves in advance to be sucessful) while the US takes a simple minded approache to a serious and complex problem. (checkers)

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  5. The US is playing chicken with a supernova

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  6. Glad to see someone with a similar feeling about ethanol, Dan. Here in Florida that has become a bane for boaters. It is reeking havoc on boat engines with and finding fuel without the stuff is difficult. I spoke with a auto mechanic too, and he's seen some issues related to the stuff in autos as well. I really wish we would get away from it as a fuel source and get back to dirty work and actually drill.

    I am definitely not an electric car fan either, as MarkBC appears to be. No one seems to be considering the impact of those batteries long term on the environment - though it's a heck of a business opt for heavy and rare-earth metals miners. Plus an electric car is a fair weather car. They won't fair well in cold environments and it still takes fossil fuel or radioactive fuel to power them.

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  7. Ho, ho, ho, whoa, whoa, whoa, Dan! Hold up!

    There IS a reason why the US is not drilling so much in our backyard as using up the reserves of other countries, especially the hostiles before touching our own. We learned early on that if you use up the reserves of hostiles or any country for that matter, then you'll be the last ones to have reserves and thusly the remaining power with military capability. The US is trying to run the other countries out of their oil. You figure out why.

    SE

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  8. Goldtracker, electric cars are better than regular cars in (just about) every way.

    The batteries will be recycled because of the metals they contain. They will be too valuable to throw away, unlike regular car batteries made of lead acid.

    The new AC induction motors do not use rare earth metals.

    The batteries will work fine down to minus 30, they aren't lead acid. Plus their temperature will be managed in their compartments unlike a regular battery under your hood.

    http://www.toshiba.com/ind/data/tag_files/SCiB_Brochure_5383.pdf

    Regarding powering EV's, here is an interesting stat. It takes about 1/2 to 1 times as much energy just to extract and refine tar sand into gasoline as the gasoline contains itself. It is a very inefficient process. We could instead just take that external energy (in the form of natural gas, and a lesser extent electricity) and use this to charge our EV's directly and be able to drive about the same distance as the gasoline would take us, that we are no longer making. Then we wouldn't need any oil, at least for driving!

    So when people say we have so much domestic oil in the shales and tar sands, well that doesn't take into account the energy needed to get it out and turn it into something useful. That mostly comes form natural gas. We are running out of the easy sources of natural gas. We have lots more reserves but these need to be liberated with fracking, which is not a benign process and leads to problems with groundwater. Not to mention GHG emissions.

    The easiest and best solution is EV's charged by solar panels on your roof and if suitable, wind turbines in your yard. The powers that be really don't want this solution to be adopted mainstream because there's no way they can tax you making your own energy. They don't want us to become energy independent.

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  9. markbc, Thanks for the info. You've given me a few things to think about and actually put forth some arguments I had yet to hear in regard to the battery issues. Thanks for that. :-)

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