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Peak output for the Patriot Power Generator increased from 2,000 W (1500 model) to 3,048 W (1800 model). Continuous output is 1,500 W and 1,800 W, respectively. Storage capacity for DC devices increased from 600 Wh (1500 model) to 768 Wh (1800 model).

Today, shortly after giving expert testimony to Congress about energy policy, I had the startling experience of being smeared by sitting members of the United States House of Representatives.

The context was a special House Committee hearing to evaluate a Democratic proposal similar to the one proposed by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, which would spend $2 trillion over four years on renewables and other climate programs.

Congressional interest in my testimony stems in part from the fact that I advocated for a Democratic energy proposal very similar to Biden’s between 2002 and 2009. Back then, the Obama administration justified the $90 billion it was spending on renewables as an economic stimulus, just as Biden’s campaign is doing today.

But then, late in the hearing, Representatives Sean Casten of Illinois and Jared Huffman of California, both Democrats, used the whole of their allotted time to claim that I am not a real environmentalist, that I am not a qualified expert, and that I am motivated by money.

Had I been given a chance to respond, I would have noted that: I have been a climate activist for 20 years; my new book, Apocalypse Never, has received strong praise from leading environmental scientists and scholars; the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently invited me to serve as an expert reviewer; and that I have always been financially independent of industry interests.

But I wasn’t given the chance to say any of that. After Casten and Huffman lied about me, Rep. Garret Graves asked the committee’s chairperson, Rep. Kathy Castor of Florida, to let me respond. She refused and abruptly ended the hearing.

What, exactly, had I said that was so dangerous as to lead Democrats to engage in character assassination and undermine liberal democratic norms? Nothing I hadn’t already said last January when I testified before Congress about climate change and energy.

Back then, I testified that climate change is real but isn’t the end of the world nor even our most important environmental problem. I pointed to the inherent physical reasons renewables can’t power a high energy industrial civilization. And I noted that cheap and abundant natural gas and nuclear, not industrial solar and wind, have been the big drivers of emissions reductions.

I further made the case that climate change was distracting us from a far greater and more urgent threat, which is the global domination of nuclear energy by China and Russia, which could be disastrous for US interests and the future of liberalism and democracy around the world.

Nations that partner with Russia or China to build nuclear plants are effectively absorbed into their sphere of influence. The line between soft power and hard power runs through nuclear energy. On the one side is cheap and clean electricity. On the other, a stepping stone to a weapons program.

During today’s hearing, several Democratic members claimed that renewables today are cheaper than existing grid electricity. But if that were true, I replied, why do solar and wind developers require hundreds of billions of dollars from American taxpayers in the form of subsidies?

The Democrats are basing their climate agenda on what California did. But California’s electricity rates since 2011 rose six times more than they did in the rest of the US, thanks mainly to the deployment of renewables and the infrastructure they require, such as transmission lines.

Wind and solar are intermittent resources, so they also unlock the energy storage and transportation value in hydrogen. As an energy carrier, hydrogen can store renewable energy in bulk, for long periods of time. Hydrogen can also be transported by pipeline, truck, ship, or rail, which means that it can be deployed to overcome gaps or transmission bottlenecks in electricity infrastructure. ///

Hydrogen is a beast to store and transport. Seals are difficult because the molecule is so small. It is very bulky, even in liquid form, and liquid has to be super chilled to stay liquid.

ThorCon is a thermal spectrum, graphite moderated, molten fluoride fuel salt reactor. ThorCon implements a fully passive approach for Control (reactivity excursions and physics-based passive shutdown), Cool (decay heat removal) and Contain (radioactive material containment) to safely and economically handle possible casualty scenarios. As the molten fluoride fuel salt circulates, it continuously evolves as transmutations, fission product generation, structural material constituents dissolution, salt ingress into graphite pores, off-gassing, precipitation of insoluble species, temperature cycling, etc., occur. ThorCon fuel’s performance is, therefore, a function its current nuclear, chemical, and physical properties and fortunately, dynamic chemical equilibrium is achieved rapidly due to the high operating temperature effect on the kinetic processes. An adequate database of fuel salt property variances with temperature and composition is highly desirable. Measurements of fuel salt properties via sensors, even noncontinuous, will provide near real-time information on the physical and chemical state of the working fluid. Demonstration of the bounding values of the fluoride salt chemistry to include fission product solubility limits and purified salt acceptable impurity levels, facilitates reactor design for safe and economic operations. Similarly, measurements of the fuel salt oxidation state (represented in the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment as the ratio of U+4 to U+3 ions); and heat transfer parameters such viscosity, density, thermal conductivity, and heat capacity, and their rates of change (temperature and composition) are coveted.

The number of gasoline stations in the United States has been declining since 1994 when there were over 200,000 stations. From 2003 to 2006, those declines leveled off and in 2005, the number of stations increased slightly. However, since 2005, the number of stations has begun to decline again with a loss of more than 9,000 stations from 2010 to 2011.

Would you close down the oil industry?” Trump asked Biden.

“I would transition from the oil industry, yes,” Biden replied.

“Why would you do that?” Welker asked.

“Because the oil industry pollutes significantly,” Biden explained.

Biden said he would stop giving them federal subsidies.

Trump highlighted it for voters. “That’s maybe the biggest statement in terms of business … because basically what he said is he is going to destroy the oil industry. Will you remember that, Texas? Will you remember that Pennsylvania, Oklahoma?”

You could see Trump’s face, he knew that Biden had just committed electoral suicide with that remark, you could see him thinking, “I just won Pennsylvania with that remark.” Even the moderator Kristen Welker, couldn’t quite believe that Biden went there and actually said it.

A company racing to be among the first to operate a small nuclear reactor in the United States received a vote of confidence from the federal government Friday after encountering recent roadblocks.

The Energy Department approved a $1.4 billion grant to help defray costs for a group of utilities that are the first in line to buy power from the reactors produced by NuScale Power.

In this fray are two entrepreneurs with an updated design for a molten salt fast reactor (MSFR). They are Carl Perez and Ed Pheil, joint owners of Elysium Technologies USA.

Price is one of the big selling points, according to Perez and Pheil. Their 1,200 MWe reactor won’t be pressurized, but it will operate at high temperatures, cutting back dramatically on the balance of plant costs like a containment structure and fuel.

Additionally, and possibly the deciding selling factor, because it will be a fast reactor with a molten fuel, it will be able to use nuclear waste as a fuel and burn it up over time. A fast reactor has an unslowed neutron flux and needs no moderator, like the water in light water reactors.

According to Pheil and Perez, these are the principal selling points of their molten chloride salt fast reactor (MCSFR):

· Fueled with nuclear waste from weapons and other reactors

· Air cooling

· Process heat

· No downtime to fuel

· Lower reactor, fuel, and balance of plant costs

· Doesn’t have to be near a large water source

· A potential source of hydrogen generation at reasonable cost

Initial funding of just $7 million came from visionary angel investors. Now, Perez told me, Elysium’s next round of funding will enable the engineering and licensing of a small, 10MWt demonstration plant, the size determined by Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules.

Design work on neutronics and fuel production has been carried out at Argonne National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory with GAIN (Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear) funding from the DOE

How nuclear stacks up against other energy sources in terms of life-cycle emissions. IPCC Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change

This shows that despite the long list of stages at which greenhouse gases are emitted, and based on what researchers have been able to take into account so far, the overall life-cycle emissions for nuclear power are likely to be lower than for fossil fuels.

Pick up a research paper on battery technology, fuel cells, energy storage technologies or any of the advanced materials science used in these fields, and you will likely find somewhere in the introductory paragraphs a throwaway line about its application to the storage of renewable energy. Energy storage makes sense for enabling a transition away from fossil fuels to more intermittent sources like wind and solar, and the storage problem presents a meaningful challenge for chemists and materials scientists… Or does it?

Nuclear power is sometimes described as being free of greenhouse gas emissions, and that’s true of the nuclear fission reactions themselves. But here is a list of all the stages of the nuclear power cycle at which greenhouse gases are emitted: uranium mining, uranium milling, conversion of uranium ore to uranium hexafluoride, uranium enrichment, fuel fabrication, reactor construction, reactor decommissioning, fuel reprocessing, nuclear waste disposal, mine site rehabilitation, and transport throughout all stages.

During these stages, greenhouse gases are emitted directly (for instance, by trucks) but also indirectly (such as through the use of materials such as steel and cement, which are manufactured using emissions-intensive processes). //

Quantifying all these emissions is a complicated prospect, but we can attempt to do it using a method called “life-cycle assessment”. The result of one such estimate (with which I agree) is quoted in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (see pages 731-2).

http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report/IPCC_SRREN_Ch09.pdf //

My review of various estimates suggests that the greenhouse emissions from nuclear power vary from 10 to 130 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour of power, with an average of 65 g per kWh – or roughly the same as wind power. For comparison, coal power has emissions of about 900 g per kWh, and gas-fired power about 450 g per kWh. About 15-25% of nuclear’s greenhouse emissions come from building, maintaining and decommissioning the nuclear power plant.

Japan will use fuel to create electricity, Saudi Aramco says
Asian country wants to be a world-leader in hydrogen fuels
The world’s first shipment of blue ammonia is on its way from Saudi Arabia to Japan, where it will be used in power stations to produce electricity without carbon emissions.

Saudi Aramco, which made the announcement Sunday, produced the fuel, which it does by converting hydrocarbons into hydrogen and then ammonia, and capturing the carbon dioxide byproduct. Japan will receive 40 tons of blue ammonia in the first shipment, Aramco said. //

Blue ammonia is a feedstock for blue hydrogen, a version of the fuel made from fossil fuels with a process that captures and stores C02 emissions. Hydrogen from renewable energy that creates no emissions is known as green hydrogen.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, is increasingly trying to counter its reputation for producing dirty energy. In recent months, Aramco has highlighted the low volume of greenhouse gases emitted from pumping Saudi crude, programs to boost gas production and plans to grow carbon-absorbing mangroves.

A potential breakthrough: The United States Department of Energy (DOE) Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and the Nuclear Engineering & Science Center at Texas A&M have partnered with Clean Core Thorium Energy (CCTE) to fabricate a new type of nuclear fuel, called “Advanced Nuclear Energy for Enriched Life”, or ANEEL.

With a proprietary combination of thorium (Th) and uranium (U), particularly “High Assay Low Enriched Uranium” (HALEU), ANEEL fuel can address several issues that have plagued nuclear power – cost, proliferation and waste. Plus, this fuel, being made-in-America, positions it as a prime candidate for export to emerging nuclear markets. //

The CANDU (Canada Deuterium Uranium) reactor was developed in the 1950s in Canada, and more recently in India as the PHWR (Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor). These reactors are heavy water cooled and moderated pressurized water reactors. //

CANDU/PHWRs generally use natural uranium (0.7% U-235) oxide as fuel, so they need a more efficient moderator (the material that slows or moderates the speed of the neutron so it hits the next nucleus at the right speed to split, or fission, it). In this case, these reactors use heavy water (D2O). Deuterium is hydrogen with one neutron in its nucleus. //

So having a new fuel made in America that can be used in reactors in other countries brings the United States back into play in the nuclear supply chain, and allows us to reach more of the nations around the world. //

In an existing CANDU/PHWR using natural uranium, each fuel bundle weighs roughly 15 kg. After the first 150 days of operation, an average of eight such bundles would need to be replaced daily for the rest of the reactor’s operating life of 60 years.

With the ANEEL fuel, each fuel bundle weighs approximately 10.65 kg. After the first 1,400 days of operation, an average of only one such bundle would need be replaced daily for the remainder of the reactor’s operating life, leading to significantly less waste. ///

Another crony scheme to sell a product instead of a solution. (As opposed to molten salt reactor whick doesn't need special patented fuel and provides higher temps for more efficient output and process heat.)

As climate change becomes a focus of the US election, energy companies stand accused of trying to downplay their contribution to global warming. In June, Minnesota's Attorney General sued ExxonMobil, among others, for launching a "campaign of deception" which deliberately tried to undermine the science supporting global warming. So what's behind these claims? And what links them to how the tobacco industry tried to dismiss the harms of smoking decades earlier?

Prejudice towards nuclear power among some policymakers is preventing a fact-based assessment of its benefits, including the ability to cut global greenhouse gas emissions, Bohdan Zronek, chief nuclear officer at Czech utility ČEZ, told participants in World Nuclear Association's Strategic eForum last week. ČEZ was one of seven utilities that wrote to the European Commission in March, arguing that the nuclear industry ought to benefit from future sustainable financing.

Speaking on the high-level panel Driving investment towards nuclear projects on 10 September, Zronek noted the emission reduction targets suggested by the European Commission and the European Parliament of, respectively, 55% and 65%, by 2030. The forecast for 2040 by the European Nuclear Safety Regulators Group, however, suggests "big trouble" ahead, he said.

"Most countries in Europe will be hardly sufficient in power production and it will be very difficult to know where to buy or import from. Power production is now more a matter of ideology and policy than a technical issue, which creates a tough environment for construction and financing of any power source as we operate usually as stock market utilities, and we all have to meet our laws, regulations and corporate rules," he said.

Mini nuclear plants are almost here. Is the U.S. ready?

A former Extinction Rebellion (XR) spokeswoman left the environmental group to campaign for nuclear power because she says it is the only way to deal with the climate crisis.

Zion Lights, writing in the Daily Mail, also said that she had become unable to defend some of the group's claims.

XR "peddle messages of doomsday gloom that alienate" and offer "little in the way of positive solutions", she added.

The group calls on governments to take immediate action on climate change. //

Ms Lights wrote articles for both the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph on Thursday explaining her decision to leave behind XR and support nuclear power.

She told the Mail she initially joined XR because its message was "listen to the scientists" and the role of spokesperson gave her a platform "to talk about what I truly felt mattered". //

Ms Lights, who began campaigning about the environment as a student in the early 2000s, said she also had doubts about XR's approach of telling people "what not to do" and "peddling the notion that the solution to the climate crisis was to turn back the clock to a simpler time".

Writing in the Telegraph, she said the campaigners who argued that we needed to all live with less - as she once did - had to accept this was not going to happen "and look to solutions instead". //

Much of the green movement was "steeped in an anti-nuclear mindset", she said, "when any rational, evidence-based approach shows that a strategy including nuclear energy is the only realistic solution to driving down emissions at the scale and speed required".

She denied she was making a U-turn, instead saying it was a "logical next step" in looking for solutions rather than "shouting ever more loudly about the problem".

Ms Lights said she has since taken a role at campaign group Environmental Progress UK, whose campaigns include supporting the building of the Sizewell C nuclear power station in Suffolk.

Nuclear power is planned to be a key part of the UK's future energy strategy.

David MacKay's Map of the World

Showing countries' power consumptions, population densities, and areas;
and comparing power consumptions per unit area with the power production per unit area of various renewables

MONROVIA – The Minister of Mines & Energy has laid out the progress the country has made in overcoming constraints in the energy sector. Minister Gesler E. Murray said Liberia’s current energy infrastructures are in deficit, and as a result, have not been able to meet the load demand of the consuming public ... //

the area of generation, we have the Mount Coffee Hydro Power Plant which has been rehabilitated from a pre-war capacity of 65MW to 88MW.” Minister Murray disclosed; noting: “We also have the HFO Thermal generation of 38MW.” //

“In 2003, our energy infrastructures were in complete ruins, relating to all aspects of power systems: generation, transmission and distribution. We began to rebuild the system using 10MW high speed diesel generators, which was quite expensive. Now, we have HFO generation which is less expensive, and hydro generation.

“In 2004, there was zero demand, now in 2020, we have a peak of demand of 40MW, and in 2021, the load is expected to peak at 50 plus MW, and by 2022, we expect to domestically consume all of the generation from Mount Coffee.” //

According to him, the current access rate of 10 percent for Monrovia and its environs, and only 5 percent nationwide is very low, emphasizing “this is very unacceptable, considering that energy is the lifeblood for any economy.”

“We have wholeheartedly embraced the WAPP concept and the agreed ECOWAS Master Plan of which the CLSG and Mount Coffee are a part of. We are working along with WAPP and the World Bank to complete the Bankable Feasibility Study for a 44 MW Mount Coffee extension, a solar plant with the capacity of 90 MW, and the construction of a second Hydropower Plant within the St. Paul River Basin. We are also working along with WAPP to conduct a feasibility study for a 225KVA line extension from San Pedro to Buchanan and we are also considering a joint Tiboto Hydropower project with neighboring Cote D’ Ivoire within the Cavala River Basin.”

“We consider electricity to be a poverty alleviation and wealth creation facility. So it is our desire that everyone should have it as much as possible. It is incumbent on this government to expand the access rate.”