California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

Why We Must Go Nuclear Now

by John Lawrence

If we have a hope for combating climate change, we must convert electrical power generation to nuclear. Nuclear power generation does not release greenhouse gasses, is always on (in contrast to wind and solar) and has the potential capacity to fulfill most of our energy needs. The latest generation of nuclear reactors has solved most of the problems of previous generations involving safety and nuclear waste. Alan Boyle wrote:

BELLEVUE, Wash. — TerraPower, the Bellevue-based nuclear power venture co-founded by Bill Gates, has won an $8.55 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to work on safer methods to recover uranium from used nuclear fuel.

TerraPower’s recycling process is among 11 projects that will receive a total of $36 million in federal funding from the department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, or ARPA-E. The grants are aimed at supporting technologies that would limit the amount of waste produced by advanced nuclear reactors.

““Developing novel approaches to safely manage nuclear waste will enable us to power even more homes and businesses in America with carbon-free nuclear energy,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said today in a news release. “ARPA-E is doing just that by supporting companies and universities that are working on next-generation technologies to modernize advanced reactors and strengthen the nation’s clean energy enterprise.”   

TerraPower’s grant is the largest of the 11 announced today for ARPA-E’s ONWARDS program. The acronym stands for “Optimizing Nuclear Waste and Advanced Reactor Disposal Systems.”

TerraPower is working with GE-Hitachi on a demonstration nuclear reactor that’s due to be built in Wyoming and go into operation by 2028, producing up to 500 megawatts of power. The latest designs feature all digital technology which brings nuclear reactor design up to the current state of the art. France gets 70% of its power from nuclear. We need to take a page out of their book. Nuclear can co-exist and support renewable energy generation on the power grid. The most important thing is to replace fossil fuel power generation which now powers about 60% of US energy needs. The question is can this be done in the time frame that we have to work with before it's too late. We need to make huge strides before 2025. That's only 3 years away. Not enough time to prevent global warming to reach problematic levels. However, better late than never. If we proceed post haste, we can prevent the worst effects of climate change. But we have to start now, and consider this effort at the level of a world war which it literally is.

Off the Top of My Head

Good on President Biden for Using His Visit to the Flood Zones to Give a Tutorial on Climate Change

by John Lawrence

Previously, after a natural disaster no one mentioned climate change. There was much bemoaning and commiserating, but Biden took a different tack. He lectured the American people about climate change and how it contributed to the disasters that had befallen the unfortunate. What's more he said they would continue and get worse unless we undertake to do something about it. No more attributing the disasters to one in 500 year events. That language is totally out the window. No more statements like "I've never seen anything like this my entire life." Get used to it. People are going to see a lot more of these climate disasters from now on. As President Biden said, we can't prevent these disasters from happening on a regular basis, but we can do something about them getting a lot worse. Meanwhile the fossil fuel industry is running ads on TV about how wonderful the oil and gas industry is, and they are lobbying their evil little hearts out to get politicians on their side.

“The nation and the world are in peril,” President Biden said after touring storm damage in New York and Jersey. “And that’s not hyperbole. That is a fact.”

"Folks — and we have to take some bold action now to tackle the accelerating effects of climate. If we don’t act — now I’m going to be heading, as Chuck knows, as the senator knows, I’m going to be heading from here to Glasgow, Scotland, for the COP meeting [United Nations Climate Change Conference], which is all the nations of the world getting together to decide what we are going to do about climate change. And John Kerry, the former secretary of state, is leading our effort, putting it together.

"We are determined, we are determined that we are going to deal with climate change and have zero emissions, net emissions by 2050. By 2020 [sic] (he meant 2030), make sure all our electricity is zero emissions. We’re going to be able to do these things. But we’ve got to move. We’ve got to move. And we’ve got to move the rest of the world. It’s not just the United States of America.

"And so, folks, this summer alone, communities with over 100 million Americans — 100 million Americans call home — have been struck by extreme weather. One in every three Americans has been victimized by severe weather. The hurricanes along the Gulf, the East Coast, up through this community. And I saw the human and physical cost firsthand, as I said, in Louisiana.

"And, folks, the evidence is clear. Climate change poses an existential threat to our lives, to our economy, and the threat is here, it’s not going to get any better. The question: Can it get worse? We can stop it from getting worse.

"And when I talk about building back better — and Chuck is fighting for my program, for our program on the Hill — when I talk about building back better, I mean you can’t build to what it was before this last storm. You got to build better so that if the storm occurred again, there would be no damage. There would be.

"But that’s not going to stop us, though, because if we just do that, it’s just going to get worse and worse and worse. Because the storms are going to get worse and worse and worse. And so, folks, we’ve got to listen to the scientists and the economists and the national security experts. They all tell us this is code red.

"The nation and the world are in peril. And that’s not hyperbole. That is a fact. They’ve been warning us the extreme weather would get more extreme over the decade, and we’re living in it real time now."

Biden is telling it like it is. The American people are in for a lot more of these climate disasters, and we can't stop them immediately. It's going to take decades to get this problem under control, and that's only if we go full steam ahead by taking measures to get it under control. Meanwhile, there are measures which can be taken to mitigate the costs both human and financial from these climate disasters. People must move out of flood plains and areas prone to forest fires. We must underground utilities so that the power doesn't go out during hurricanes and wildfires. That goes for cell phones and cable TV too. People have to have secure means of communication even during a climate disaster. Building codes need to be upgraded. Water management needs to improve so that torrential rains do not just become runoff that turns into floods. That water is precious and needs to be transported to parts of the country that are in more or less perpetual drought. The power grid needs to be hardened. Transportation needs to be electrified. Power generation needs to use renewable sources, and advanced nuclear needs to be developed. Ways of making steel and concrete need to be developed that don't use fossil fuels and the methods of doing so need to be scaled up and spread throughout the whole world. Agriculture needs to be made organic and factory farms eliminated. It's not enough for the US and the developed world to do the right things. Green infrastructure must be developed and spread to the whole world. We must partner with China in a Green Belt and Road Initiative. They are very advanced in building infrastructure throughout the world. While the US has been fighting needless wars, China has been building infrastructure albeit not green infrastructure. From now on coal fired power plants in India and China need to be eliminated and replaced with renewable energy and advanced nuclear power generation.

Off the Top of My Head

Digital Nuclear is the Best Hope for Saving the Planet from Global Warming

by John Lawrence, March 16, 2020

France derives about 75% of its electricity from nuclear. France is the world's largest net exporter of electricity due to its very low cost of generation, and gains over EUR 3 billion per year from this. At the same time it's becoming clear that solar and wind are not the solutions capable of providing the energy needed to replace fossil fuels. They provide only intermittent energy and require large amounts of fossil fuel energy for their construction and deployment. Like most infrastructure they also have a rather small shelf life and must be replaced frequently. There are also big problems with natural gas and biofuels. France has a track record with nuclear which has proven to be cheap and reliable. The latest generation of nuclear reactors incorporates advanced digital technology which solves the problems of waste storage and blow ups. It is the best bet for solving the global warming problem in the time frame needed for it to be solved.

France's President Emmanuel Macron said: "Our energy and ecological future depends on nuclear power; our economic and industrial future depends on nuclear power; and France's strategic future depends on nuclear power." I think Macron is on to something. He seems to be in complete agreement with Bill Gates. Advanced nuclear holds the promise of cheap non-polluting energy without the dangers represented by Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and also with the problem of nuclear waste solved. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change points out, nuclear energy is a non-intermittent energy source that emits the least CO2. To produce 1 kWh, a coal-fired power plant emits 1000g of CO2, while a nuclear power plant emits only a negligible 6g.

According to Gates, the operation of nuclear power plants produces no greenhouse gas emissions. New innovations in nuclear technology (in which he is an investor) are making nuclear energy safer and more affordable, and countries around the world are starting to adopt nuclear power. Since 2006, Gates has also served as chairman of TerraPower, a company he helped launch in 2006 that aims to provide the world with a more affordable, secure and environmentally friendly form of nuclear energy. With TerraPower's advanced research and France's track record with nuclear, it seems obvious that this is the solution for clean energy which is non-intermittent and non-greenhouse gas emitting. The fact that a track record combined with advanced digital methods already exists, the build-out of advanced reactors all over the world in the shortest period of time is the best bet for combating global warming.

Gates tried to build a demonstration advanced nuclear plant in China to prove out the concepts involved. Popular Mechanics reported in 2019:

At least for now, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates is pulling back on nuclear power. He hasn't changed his mind on the science—he puts his blame on the Trump Administration's bitter relationship with China.

Gates invested in TerraPower in 2011 with the hope of helping to prove the company's core concept: a so-called traveling-wave reactor (TWR) which would run on depleted uranium, as opposed to the enriched uranium commonly used in nuclear plants. The concept is appealing on several levels—not only would its small design lower the currently rising price of nuclear energy, it would actually consume the trash pumped out by today's modern reactors.

Long story short, the Trump administration put the kibosh on the billion dollar project thus setting back development on this advanced nuclear reactor out of concerns for rivalry with China. This is at a time when cooperation with China to combat climate change is crucial. It could happen in the US now that we have a progressive Biden administration that is concerned about climate change rather than the denial of it by Trump. In his year-end letter for 2018, Gates notes that "we had hoped to build a pilot project in China, but recent policy changes here in the U.S. have made that unlikely." It seems clear that the US should go full steam ahead with a demonstration project followed by a build out worldwide in cooperation with China which is the world's leading greenhouse gas emitter. The US is second with India and Russia, third and fourth. It's clear that cooperating with countries that are traditional "enemies" is important if the planet is to survive climate change. Emerging countries in Africa also need to adopt nuclear and not coal fired energy generating plants. The need help from the rich countries of the world to do it.

 

Denuclearize the United States? An Unthinkable Thought

JUNE 18, 2018, From The Guardian

by PAUL STREET

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Photo by rottinam | Public Domain

An early challenge to the United States’ self-declared right to manage post-World War II global affairs from the banks of the Potomac came in 1950, when Korean forces joined by Chinese troops pushed back against the United States’ invasion of North Korea. Washington responded with a merciless bombing campaign that flattened much of the country. U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay boasted that “we burned down every town in North Korea.” LeMay proudly guessed that the gruesome U.S. assault killed a fifth of North Korea’s population. The attack included napalm and chemical weapons and the bombing of dams – a war crime for which Nazis were hanged at Nuremberg. The scale of the devastation was soul-numbing, enough to disgust even many veteran U.S. military observers. As Korea expert John Feffer has written:

“The U.S. used massive bombardments to erase North Korea from the map, destroying  75 percent of all physical facilities and using napalm on a large scale for the first time…Three million civilians fled south to escape the saturation bombings…In June 1953, the United States bombed irrigation dams and the retaining wall of the Toksan reservoir, flooding cities and undercutting the capacity of North Koreans to grow food, acts considered war crimes when the Nazis did much the same to the Dutch.”

These monstrous transgressions went down the United States’ “memory hole” even as they took place – and even as the leading public U.S. military journals of the day exulted over how the bombing of Korean dams sent “Asians” scurrying to survive. As far as most U.S.-Americans know, they never occurred and therefore hold no relevance to current U.S.-North Korean tensions.

Things are different in North Korea, where every schoolchild learns about the epic crimes committed by the U.S. “imperialist aggressor” in the early 1950s.

With the southern portion of the Korean peninsula retained for development within the Western-ruled order, the shattered north ripened into a crypto-Stalinist family dictatorship and paranoid garrison state that became the closest thing on Earth to a living example of the nightmare totalitarian regime depicted in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty Four– hardly a shining role model for Third World peoples’ revolution even as it achieved significant economic growth with Chinese and Soviet bloc assistance through the 1970s .

“It’s the only Third World country where everyone has good food, good housing, and good education,” a left Peruvian writer claimed in 1981, “but it is the saddest, most miserable country I’ve ever been in in my life.”

The madness of the North Korean regime (and no doubt the sadness of its people) deepened in coming decades with no small help from harsh economic decline, famines, lost Soviet backing, U.S.-led economic sanctions, and hundreds of U.S. nuclear weapons and U.S.-South Korean military exercises (including simulated bombing and missile attacks) menacing North Korea up close. The North Korean dictatorship has long used the sanctions and military encirclement to rally North Korea’s subject populace around the flag.

George W, Bush’s bizarre post-9/11 identification of North Korea as part of an “Axis of Evil” linking Pyongyang to Iraq and Iran provided no small justification for Kim Jong Il’s February 2005 announcement that North Korea had successfully developed a nuclear weapon. Just two and half years before this announcement, the world had seen Bush use blatantly false pretexts to invade defenseless Iraq, a criminal regime change operation that would lead to the premature death of at least half a million Iraqis (by one conservative estimate) between  2003 and 2013.