I was invited to be on the Murnaghan programme on Sky News this morning – which I always find a great deal more intelligent than the Andrew Marr alternative on the BBC. I declined because I did not want to get up and get a 7.30am train from Ramsgate on a Sunday morning. I had a meeting until 11.30pm last night planning a conference on human rights in Balochistan [I still tend to say Baluchistan], and I have a newly crowned tooth that seems not to want to settle down. But I am still worried by my own lack of energy, which is uncharacteristic. Is this old age?
I also have some serious work to do on my Burnes book, and next week I shall be staying in London to be in the British Library reading room for every second of its opening hours. So there may be a bit of a posting hiatus. I have in mind a short post on an important subject on which I suspect that 99% of my readership – including the regular dissident commenters – will strongly disagree with me.
This is a peculiarly introspective post, perhaps because my tooth is hurting, but I seem to have this curmudgeonly spirit which wishes to react to the huge popularity of this blog by posting something genuinely held but unpopular; a genuine view but one I don’t normally trumpet. The base thought seems to be “You wouldn’t like me if you really knew me”.
Similarly when I wrote Murder in Samarkand I was being hailed as a hero by quite a lot of people for my refusal to go along with the whole neo-con disaster of illegal wars, extraordinary rendition and severe attacks on civil liberties, sacrificing my fast track diplomatic career as a result. My reaction to putative hero worship was to publish in Murder in Samarkand not just the political facts, but an exposure of my own worst and most unpleasant behaviour in my private life.
I am in a very poor position to judge, but I believe the result rather by accident turned out artistically compelling, if you don’t want to read the book you can get a good idea of that by clicking on David Tennant in the top right of this blog and listening to him playing me in David Hare’s radio adaptation.
Anyway, that’s enough musing. You won’t like my next post, whenever it comes. Promise.
Jemand, no one has argued for conventional PWR or BWR solid fuelled water cooled nuclear reactors on this thread.
The Molten Salt Reactor Experiment in the 1960s was a 7.4 MW(t) reactor. It was designed and built in four years, and was operated on U235 and then on U233. This second run with U233 validated the concept of a molten salt thorium reactor, as thorium can be bred within the reactor into U233 for use as a nuclear fuel.
Also, later in this second run, plutonium was added and used as a fuel, validating the concept of burning up weapon core material, and possibly the burning up of “spent fuel” from solid fuel reactors.
This was all back in the ’60s. I think the next step should be the construction and operation of 50MW(t) or 100MW(t) prototypes. If they could design and build the MSRE in four years way back in the ’60s, it should be fairly straightforward now, with fifty more years of experience with power reactors, and 1GW(t) power stations now being commonplace.
Look; three different fuels in the same reactor. The molten salt reactor concept is versatile. I’m convinced that given sufficient funding these reactors could be producing serious power within a decade, and disposing of our nuclear “waste” in two decades or so.
Iran:Sumeria?
Scary thought, that.
@Thatcrab Your posts are getting more and more personal, more angry and more vituperative. I’ll have one more go at persuading you to look before you leap. Example: before the Iraq war started, apparently all the “experts” at the Pentagon, almost the entire UK cabinet, almost the whole of parliament, all but a handful of independent media, two thirds of the US population and around half of the UK population were “convinced” that WMDs existed in Iraq and that Europe was likely to be 45 minutes away from armageddon.
All the experts were proved utterly wrong and an appalling war which resulted in perhaps 1.5 million deaths and many more maimed, starved and dispossessed was the consequence of rushing into something that was a lie.
There is no doubt that there has been some warming. The question is what is responsible for it and whether the proposed policies to stop it are effective, equable or even sensible and necessary. On balance there is no evidence to suggest current cap in trade policies or CO2-based taxes would make the slightest difference. However, I think it is virtually undisputed that, for example, if China and many other nations burned coal in a cleaner way (which is perfectly possible and PRACTICAL, that would make an enormous difference to regional and global pollution levels.
The obsessive focus on CO2 is literally sweeping away many other far more serious environmental issues which hardly get a mention. Moreover, CO2 is just a tiny proportion of many other influences on climate, most of which are completely beyond our control. You interpret that view as complacency. It isn’t. Furthermore, even if the IPCC and other bodies are correct about anthropogenic warming, the carbon tax regimes they propose are a disaster for the third world and the energy alternatives so far proposed are lamentably inadequate and hugely expensive, while at the same time not nearly reliable enough to abandon more proven methods of energy production. Cleaner burning of existing and abundant fossil and other fuels would make a huge difference to the quality of life of those very people you undoubtedly wish to protect.
I will concede that restriction based on carbon targets might have a positive side effect on other much more relevant environmental issues, but those issues would be better addressed directly, and would be far far cheaper, than the current anti-CO2 legislation which merely creates a vast tax, the proceeds of which are going into the pockets of the wrong people, amongst whom are the very advocates that you so embrace.
I’m afraid this is what is so sad about the whole warming panic fest. It IS now a virtual religion in which those dissenting or even mildly questioning are cast as deniers, heretics and bonkers. I am always suspicious of anyone who wants to invent a new faith system based on mindless panic, bullying and emotional blackmail, especially when its self-appointed messiahs have their grubby hands in the treasure-chest which such a belief creates for them.
21st scent tree, I have a little experience with Wikipedia. My username there is Clark42. I have helped to correct some of the bias in this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raed_Salah
and I persuaded more senior members to add an “NPOV” tag (disputing the neutrality) to this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alisher_Usmanov
The Usmanov article is an interesting case. If you look back through the article’s history, you can see that an unregistered user has repeatedly deleted large amounts of well referenced material from it. The deleted material was all unfavourable to Usmanov. But the material is still there, in the history. You have to know how to look for it.
There is a huge amount of referenced material regarding climate change and global warming on Wikipedia. This index gives you an idea of how many articles there are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_climate_change_articles
There is an article about “global warming controversy”, with links to articles about the “hockey stick” and the Climate Research Unit e-mails:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_controversy#See_also
You can look at the “Talk” page for each article, and see the way decisions are made. Participating in Wikipedia can feel quite daunting. There is so much material and so many people, so many of them more knowledgeable than myself. But I can feel involved to some extent, which is more than I can say for the Daily Telegraph, which is obviously favours the political Right.
Get yourself a Wikipedia account and get involved, if you haven’t already. This is how it is done; as a community, we can all contribute and overcome bias, eventually, which is more than can be said for the corporate media. But you do need to adhere to the Wikipedia disciplines.
@Clark. Thank you. Yes I have seen the reports on acidification. This is yet another subject which has as many detractors as proponents, but perhaps the detractors have a harder time being heard. Link here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/09/scripps-paper-ocean-acidification-fears-overhyped/
As Suhayl (where is he these days when we really need him?) often says, a cup of tea would do all of us a lot of good. While we drink it, ponder on some relatively ancient hip-hop:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x45siJha3Q
We surely can be agreed on the sentiment therein.
@Clark – 25 Sep, 2012 – 2:43 am
Clark, you didn’t read the transcript of the link, did you?
1. ALL nuclear facilities, whether standard or exotic, have MASSIVE lead times to construction and production of electricity. Your belief that we can get it happening in 10 years is ridiculous. Imagine how many people are involved in the construction of one plant – now multiply that by 600 all over the world. Again, please read the transcript. The devil is in the numbers.
2. Construction of literally HUNDREDS of nuclear facilities will result in a spike in CO2 emissions and modest reductions in the long run. To understand this, think of the massive amounts of fossil fuels used in the mining process and production of concrete.
3. Water for cooling towers wastes massive amounts potable water at a time when population growth is putting strains on water resources and when the availability of water in a disrupted climate is uncertain. Are we producing electricity to run desalination plants?
4. (This is just my own view) Why are we expanding the industrial-consumer society? What great leap of humanity is achieved by multiplying billions of useless-eaters into many more? What wonderful utopian world do you envisage will be created by constructing a thousand high powered energy plants? I think a fundamental problem here is our inability to cope with the inevitable ageing population in circumstances of controlled population decline. Then add to that our selfish disregard for future generations and the terrible problems they will need to solve. So let’s forget about population and stick with the current goal which is to plunder the world’s resources, trash the environment, bomb the shit out of each other and continue to worship our invisible friend in the sky. Boy, am I on the wrong thread here.
LeonardYoung, you wrote this, but it is not true, and I note that you have qualified it with the word “apparently”:
Subsequent testimony shows that the security services knew full well that “the intelligence was being fixed around the policy”, and the policy was coming from the highest politicians, Bush and Blair, who had made their decision two years previously. Enough of the world’s population knew it was untrue to bring millions out onto the streets in cities all over the world. Most of the corporate media were baying for blood, but they always do. There was always majority opposition to the war in the UK population.
The “experts” were proven to be liars. The real experts, the weapons inspectors, were withdrawn from Iraq by the warmongers. Dr David Kelly’s name will live on, because people honour his memory for his honesty.
So, LeonardYoung, the warmongers continue to send young people to fight and die for the oil, the people who live above it die, are displaced, or lose their livelihoods. And the likes of you fight for the right to burn that oil. Very little of that oil will benefit the poor of this world.
Yeah, water is the new oil. Like everything else, long-range planning these days is like what, 6 months? Shoulda been gearing up as Barry Commoner advised in his book Politics of Energy (1978)
The fossil fuels were a bridge, not an inexhaustible resource of cheap convenience, as it’s been so, successfully sold. We have squandered another generation without making the hard decisions necessary for advancement as a species. Now, we’re being told we can’t build a new infrastructure/Grid because water is in short supply. Shall I mention desalination plants powered by Nuke/Solar? Nah. It’s too late for that.
Jemand, sorry, I’m looking into LeonardYoung’s claims.
LeonardYoung’s reference at wattsupwiththat quotes the following section as its blockbuster defence of lower pH (increase CO2, ocean acidification or OA) in ocean water:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/09/scripps-paper-ocean-acidification-fears-overhyped/
However, note that calcification is the main concern, hence my emphasis.
The Watts article also stresses that large variations in ocean pH have been recorded in coastal locations. However, it also points out that this is not the case for open ocean. There, the variation is much lower, though still considerably more than the expected change from increased atmospheric CO2 levels, the implication being that human-induced pH change is insignificant by comparison.
So I followed a link to the original paper. Mostly, it is concerned with interpretation of results obtained by the deployment of a new type of “autonomous sensors” which gather far more detailed data than previously available. The following gives some idea of the contribution to the debate:
You can read the first half of the paragraph to mean that the variations are less significant than thought, but the second half suggests that these scientists are working to better understand the possible effects by studying the variations revealed by their new instruments. The article points out why such study is important:
Got any more like this, Leonard? It’s much quicker for you to pull them off Watts than it is for me to examine them for their significance, so I’m sure I’ll drop dead before you do.
Jemand, I have now scanned through your link. It isn’t really applicable to the molten salt reactors, nor to my argument, as at this stage, I’m just arguing for a few 100MW(t) prototypes.
MSRs run at atmospheric pressure and thus require no pressure vessel. They are inherently safe and thus do not require multiple redundant safety systems. The require no fuel rod fabrication, and they effectively incorporate their own reprocessing. All this saves on cost. They also extract about 100 times as much energy from unit fuel, which greatly reduces transport and associated security costs.
And they may be able to burn up nuclear waste. If prototypes prove this to work, all the money and resources that we have already committed to spending on secure, long-term disposal can be diverted into building waste-burning power stations instead.
The main obstacle to such new reactors is safety licensing rules that are suited to the current crop of reactors. Vested interests make their money mainly from fuel rod fabrication and reprocessing oppose any change in the licensing. Taxpayers pick up the bill for construction, security and waste management. Government subsidies have fattened this cosy arrangement.
Another thing that causes delays and cost overruns when building new power stations is overcoming local opposition. I think that prototypes would help overcome this if they demonstrated a good safety record, and I think the public would be far more supportive of reactors that turned existing waste into electricity rather than making yet more of the damn stuff.
Besides, we should build nuclear waste burners as our duty to future generations.
@Clark
Sorry, I must have misunderstood the purpose of your discussion of Thorium reactors. I thought they were being advocated as a significant partial/whole solution to the immediate problem of AGCC – of course, I don’t think they are.
As a solution to cleaning up nuclear waste, it sounded good but I can only go by what physicists argue and there are some who have a problem with Thorium in the link here.
http://ieer.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/thorium2009factsheet.pdf
The link doesn’t discuss the vital issue of water usage which is a major problem for all large power stations that use steam turbines. I am referring to the water that is lost in the process of removing excess heat in the power cycle. MSR should be no different to coal-fired and standard nuclear in terms of cooling requirements for the steam turbine generators.
But I have my own objections to nuclear of any description that burns irreplaceable material, born in the stars, to power a dead-end consumer society. This material has extraordinary properties that other materials do not. I fail to see why we should blow it on running plasma TVs.
Ben Fraklin seems pleased about Abu Hamza and four others being extradited.
‘Hamza loses his appeal. Will probably join savory types like Michael Swango @ADX Supermax prison in Forence Colo.’ The link provided described Hamza as ‘hook handed’ and reading on you would think he was the very son of Satan.
Has their guilt been established? Have there been any fair trials? How long has Babar Ahmad been in prison without charge?
Babar Ahmad (born in London, England, May 1974) has been held in custody in the UK since August 2004. He has never been convicted of any criminal offence, but is held fighting extradition to the United States on ALLEGATIONS of involvement in websites supporting Chechen and Afghan insurgents.
In March 2009, he was awarded £60,000 compensation at the High Court in London after an admission by UK anti-terrorist police that they subjected him to “grave abuse, tantamount to torture” during his first arrest in December 2003.
He also appeared in the media in February 2008, when it was discovered that his conversations with Sadiq Khan MP had been monitored by the police during prison visits. An investigation of the monitoring found no impropriety.
He remains in prison awaiting extradition to the United States.
We are on the slippery slope again where we are submitting to the will of the
US government without even trying to pretend that we are a ‘sovereign nation’. Unfortunately, the current ‘government’ (remember it has no mandate) is happily following along as it is instructed to do.
Meanwhile Agent Canmeron is over in the US getting briefed up with his new instructions and sparing time to go on the Letterman show. Vile.
With or without this closing of the loop and the purported ability to re-use spent fuel, and wasn’t that a justification too for high risk fast breeders like Dounreay too?. Your waste must be handled still, stored short and medium term, converted into new fuel assemblies, a process creating a great deal of irradiated waste, containers, materials, tools. So your recycling tackles the high-level stuff and increases the already considerable medium and lower level waste. Clark this is all faith-based nonsense again, scary shiny-eyed enthusiasms, those phantoms still haunt you, that technology will save us, just trust in uncertainty and hope some smiling benevolent guide exists.
Untypically good post from Jemand at 4:11am.
@Clark – “LeonardYoung, you wrote this, but it is not true, and I note that you have qualified it with the word “apparently”:
“before the Iraq war started, apparently all the “experts” at the Pentagon, almost the entire UK cabinet, almost the whole of parliament, all but a handful of independent media, two thirds of the US population and around half of the UK population were “convinced” that WMDs existed in Iraq and that Europe was likely to be 45 minutes away from armageddon.”
Subsequent testimony shows that the security services knew full well that “the intelligence was being fixed around the policy”
Yes that’s right, but the point is we were taken to war BEFORE (if my memory is clear)the security service doubts emerged into the public domain. Please correct me if I got this wrong.
@Leonard “I’ll have one more go at persuading you to look before you leap. Example: before the Iraq war started….”
That example simply reconfirms that you will illude to a connection between arguments where no actual connection has been shown, other than your framed conclusion, which you also displayed is beyond normal criteria of discernability. You only stated more elaborately; that because people can fooled, we are fooled here. That this complex situation might simply be like that complex situation. That because plausible conspiracy theories have been dismissed as hair brained, no conspiracy theory can ever be dismissed as hair brain again, etc.
Your criteria has been damaged Leonard and your reasoning has been damaged, like others here, in exactly the way anticipated by the most calculating of those who must arrange false information in the world intend.
I expect you could easily be a better one than i Leonard -in most important respects. I riddicule were i see fit for relief and stimulation and to signpost nonsense for what it is. And of course i do also project quite a lot, so fair play and good luck to you and your best sense.
Jemand and Cryptonym,
regarding thorium2009factsheet.pdf note the following in the final paragraph:
“Fuel rods”; ie. solid fuel. It doesn’t consider MSRs at all. The UK fast breeder program was also all about solid fuelled reactors. The advantages of MSRs are not connected with the choice of fuel; they’re about doing fission in the liquid phase with ionic compounds rather than covalent compounds.
Please folks, don’t dismiss this without consideration; half a century is a long time between prototypes. This technology may well be our route out of the mess that’s already been made.
Come on Jemand. I read your links. Now you read mine.
Clark (and others) regarding “peak energy” and the solution (albeit to this non-problem from my perspective), you might be interested in this documentary:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKWPht3fU-o&feature=related
This made me laugh ..
Climate Change 2012
Security, resilience and diplomacy
15-16 October 2012
{http://www.chathamhouse.org/climatechange2012/sponsors}
Notice please – the BBC is a Major Corporate Member of Chatham House (as in Chatham House Rules)
You’ll find most of the suspects listed here: –
{http://www.chathamhouse.org/membership/corporate/corporate-list}
These are the true “alarmists” and profiteers. Like Mrs Thatch, I don’t think they are really that bothered about the planet.
Clark; v useful info – will read & digest when I manage to take a break from killing poor people – so time consuming, darling… 🙂
The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 by the billionaire David Rockefeller and the Morgenthau Group at his estate at Bellagio, Italy. This is the same Rockefeller family, that donated the land for the UNO building in New York. Two decades later, disappointed at how weak UNO is, Rockefeller tried to invent a new global religion. Because he realised that a global empire (United Earth run by UNO) cannot be built without a global religion.
Communism, fascism, Islam, Christianity… these worked only regionally. But the green religion can work on global scale.
In 1976, the United States Association of the Club of Rome (USACOR) was formed for the purpose of shutting down the U.S. economy gradually.
The Club of Rome and its financiers under the title of the German Marshall Fund were two highly-organized bodies operating under cover of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and that the majority of Club of Rome executives were drawn from NATO.
They were able to split NATO into two factions, a political (left wing) power group and its former military alliance.
The Club of Rome is still one of the most important foreign policy arms of the elite bankers with the other being the Bilderberg Group.
The Club of Rome marries Anglo-American financiers and the old Black Nobility families of Europe, particularly the so-called “nobility” of London, Venice and Genoa.
It is the key think tank of the United Nations and the elite environmental movement.
Members include such NWO fixtures as George Soros, Henry Kissinger, Bill Gates, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. Prince Charles, Princess Anne, David Cameron and Tony Blair are also members of the Committee of 300.
Experts from a wide variety of disciplines (academia, religion, government, business and the media, etc) all meet at the Club’s headquarters in Winterthur, Switzerland. They generate the global warming hysteria that saturates our media and write legislation that bypasses national governments.
On their website, the Club admits authoring policy for, ‘GLOBE International, an organization of senior legislators from the G20 countries.’
Their manifesto is a 1972 book, The Limits of Growth. The book argues that because of dwindling resources, the world needs to embrace zero growth in economy and population. The book was given enormous media coverage and reportedly sold 12 million copies worldwide.
The Limits to Growth has been blasted as foolishness or fraud by almost every economist who has read it closely or reviewed it in print. (See Professor Julian Simon ).
Even Club members admit their findings are fraudulent. In his Book, Science Under Siege, Michael Fumento quoted Club of Rome member Timothy Wirth as saying, “We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”
The real purpose of the establishment environmental movement is to build the structures (political, economic, ideological etc) of the ultimate monopoly: a corporate-communist world government.
Membership of the Club of Rome
http://www.clubofrome.org/?p=2419
Cryptonym at 25 Sep, 8:14 am, I object to this:
“Faith based”?
http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/purl/1018987-OjLVsA/1018987.pdf
I’m fully in agreement with reducing humanity’s energy requirements. I also want a solution to the “waste” problem.
Zoologist, your 25 Sep, 1:54 pm comment; is it a copy-and-paste job? I really think you should attribute.
“The greatest hope for the Earth lies in religionists and scientists uniting to awaken the world to its near fatal predicament and then leading mankind out of the bewildering maze of international crises into the future Utopia of humanist hope.”
Club of Rome, Goals for Mankind
“Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time.”
Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution
“Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.”
UN Agenda 21
“We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis…”
David Rockefeller, Club of Rome executive member
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” –
Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
Tech, I’ve liquidated five or six hundred useless eaters today, and I haven’t even had lunch yet. It’s nice to see you here, but we each have several million to get through if we want to keep up with our quota. Foot to the floor, back to the grindstone, eh?
Zoologist, that isn’t proper attribution either. I can’t easily place those quotes into context.
Clark, I have sent you links to the sites direct.
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/
http://www.clubofrome.org/
http://www.chathamhouse.org
Please feel free to do your own research. You have to read things you don’t agree with if you want to get a balanced view.
“The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.”
Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsiblity to bring that about?”
Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme
“One America burdens the earth much more than twenty Bangladeshes. This is a terrible thing to say. In order to stabilize world population,we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it’s just as bad not to say it.”
Jacques Cousteau, UNESCO Courier
“I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”
John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
@Clark
I’m not against continued development of nuclear technology, I’m all for it. And if Thorium reactors burn existing waste, then even better. I came into this conversation quite late so there might be some misunderstandings. I’d be happy to read the links when I have time (am breaking my own curfew just posting here).
There is discussion of MSR on NPR. It’s between two scientists, one is author of the pdf above, so I think posting this link is a good compromise. I’m sorry to dump more reading on you but then, it is your baby.
http://www.npr.org/2012/05/04/152026805/is-thorium-a-magic-bullet-for-our-energy-problems