Uranium and thorium are two of nature’s most incredible clean energy storage assets. If completely fissioned, a handful of nuclear fuel weighing a kilogram contains more stored energy than 50 large tanker trucks filled with petroleum.

At the current diesel fuel price of $5.60 per gallon, 50 trucks can carry more than $3,000,000 worth of fuel. In contrast, nuclear power plant owners pay approximately $1,700 per kilogram of fuel in the form of finished assemblies.

The tiny waste production per unit energy released is an inherent aspect of concentrated fission reactions. Unlike combustion, all ingredients needed for fission are contained inside fission fuels. (Combustion needs an external source of oxygen in greater masses than the fuel itself.) The mass of fission wastes is slightly less than the mass of fission fuel; the mass of combustion wastes are about 2.5 times the mass of input fuel.

No fission product wastes need to be routinely removed to allow the reaction to continue operating for its design fuel cycle. None need to be discharged to the environment. Fission reactors are clean enough, safe enough and independent enough to operate inside sealed submarines carrying crews of several dozen people. Those submarines have gone to every part of every ocean on the planet.

Fission even works in the vacuum of deep space.

Those physical and economic facts almost beg power plant designers to think about building a wide variety of machines in order to use that amazing source of energy in as many parts of the diverse global energy markets as possible. Power systems using combustion fuels range in size from model trains to multi GWe power stations. Fission-based power systems need sufficient size to support a chain reaction, and to provide adequate shielding, but that still leaves a wide spectrum of potential applications and sizes. //

Larger units can successfully use the economy of scale to lower the cost per unit of output but it isn’t the only kind of scale that can drive down costs. Ever larger units can also run into diseconomies of scale that plague mega-projects in construction, mass transit, sports complexes, and airports.

The experience of the industry in building the Vogtle AP1000s shows that there is such a thing as too large. In contrast, the economies of scale that we believe will aid in the appeal of SMRs takes the form of mass production and is expected to enable the construction of SMRs to more closely follow the declining cost curves experienced by wind and solar projects.

One advantage of smaller systems is the improved ability to use factory manufacturing techniques. Of course, the components used in conventional large reactors are produced in factories, but then they are individually shipped to the site to be assembled into an operating plant. With reactors that have the size and complexity closer to that of large ships or commercial aircraft, it is possible to assemble and transport complete or nearly complete products.

Factory workforces have many advantages over site construction workforces. They can improve productivity by repeating similar tasks regularly, They can live and work in cities served by mass transit. They can implement quality assurance techniques and environmental consistence systems that are difficult to achieve at remote large plant assembly sites. //

…for a sodium-cooled reactor, for instance, that sodium coolant is likely to become low-level waste at the end of the reactor’s lifetime, because it becomes contaminated and activated during reactor operation. So, the “up to 30 times more waste” that’s been driving the headlines, it’s mostly the sodium coolant.

Diaz-Maurin,François Interview: Small modular reactors get a reality check about their waste, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Jun 17, 2022 //

NuScale will get the final approval nearly six years after starting the process.

On Friday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) announced that it would be issuing a certification to a new nuclear reactor design, making it just the seventh that has been approved for use in the US. But in some ways, it's a first: the design, from a company called NuScale, is a small modular reactor that can be constructed at a central facility and then moved to the site where it will be operated.

The move was expected after the design received an okay during its final safety evaluation in 2020. //

Small modular reactors have been promoted as avoiding many of the problems that have made large nuclear plants exceedingly expensive to build. They're small enough that they can be assembled on a factory floor and then shipped to the site where they will operate, eliminating many of the challenges of custom, on-site construction. In addition, they're structured in a way to allow passive safety, where no operator actions are necessary to shut the reactor down if problems occur. //

The NRC will still have to weigh in on the sites where any of these reactors are deployed. Currently, one such site is in the works: a project called the Carbon Free Power Project, which will be situated at Idaho National Lab. That's expected to be operational in 2030 but has been facing some financial uncertainty. Utilities that might use the power produced there have grown hesitant to commit money to the project. //

C.M. AllenArs Tribunus Militumreply2 days agoReader Favreportignore user
Wheels Of Confusion wrote:

Would have been even better 20 years ago. But then again, so would EVERY non-fossil fuel-based power source being rolled out at scale. We're just so late on everything, and most of the blame lies with politicians allergic to governing and rich, subsidized industry allergic to changing.

If it can bring the cost of nuclear power down by an order of magnitude and reduce the lagtime between facility approval and initial production, it might have a legitimate place in the effort to eliminate CO2 pollution. A nuclear plant coming online start producing electricity in a couple years, while still scaling up to its full production levels as more reactors get built, also gives it a serious edge against other nuclear technologies in addition to fossil fuel plants, which are more or less 'all or nothing' projects //

raxx7Ars Legatus Legioniset Subscriptorreply2 days agoReader Favreportignore user
itfa wrote:

Initial estimates have it within a few percentage points of natural gas in price per megawatt, both from the manufacturer and the operator of the first project these are supposed to go into.
Personally, I think this type of design has a far better chance of being on budget than traditional nuclear construction.
MegalodonArs Legatus Legioniset Subscriptorreply2 days agoReader Favreportignore user
quamquam quid loquor wrote:
SMNRs are a fundamentally flawed technology. They don't benefit from efficiencies of scale and can't benefit from manufacturing economies of scale, because an SMNR is still more expensive than natural gas.

I don't follow this argument. Economies of scale come from regularizing construction by doing more in the factory rather than on-site, and from shrinking the size of a unit of generation until you're building enough of them to get good at it. We can see this from the fact that nobody builds gigawatt natural gas turbines, they build them to a smaller size and when they want a gigawatt they order a larger number of them. But as far as nuclear reactors are concerned, a gigawatt is about the smallest you can get. That seems like the wrong way to get good economics.

You need to build about 12 of the NuScale reactor to get a gigawatt, and it seems to me you're going to be a lot better at building them by the 12th unit than you will be with the 3rd or 4th larger reactor. But an entire country would be lucky to build 4 full size reactors reactors per decade so nobody gets good at it. //

ORcoderSmack-Fu Master, in traininget Subscriptorreply2 days agoreportignore user
ZenBeam wrote:
Here's hoping this pans out, and gives us one more low-carbon power source knob to turn, to use to replace higher carbon sources.

Do these have any capability to vary their power generation, trading lower output for a longer lifetime? If so, how much can they vary it?

They probably won’t be great at it- likely can bypass the turbines to load follow as necessary (like many current nuclear plants can), but it won’t help fuel life. Even if they load follow by lowering the power of the reactor, which is possible but slower, thanks to fuel damage it also probably won’t save much uranium.

Designs that will be better at this are Natrium, which incorporates thermal storage for load following, and molten salt reactors, which don’t have to worry about fuel damage.

Per megawatt (power) or per megawatt·hour?

The first would be pure fantasy.
There's no way the cost per MW of a pure steam cycle plant can get within a factor 3 of a combined cycle gas turbine plant no matter what heat source we use to boil the water.

The second I'm willing to hold my judgement. //

The Power Hungry podcast spotlights energy, power, innovation, and politics. Author and journalist Robert Bryce talks with top thinkers, writers, and influencers — as well as regular citizens.

The liberals in the West need to face the reality that not only does the world primarily run on fossil fuels, but energy has also become a powerful weapon in this new Cold War. The West cannot win this new Cold War with its self-defeating anti-carbon energy policies.

What the greenies don’t understand, or can’t understand, or refuse to understand, or perhaps understand but pretend they don’t, or can’t, is that with fossil fuels, we can make an inhospitable climate more hospitable. The greens instead insist that fossil fuels have made and continue making an already hospitable climate inhospitable. But of course, any sentient human being knows this is violently foolish.

To prove how foolish this is, ask the people wiped out in Pompeii how hospitable the climate was on that day.

Or perhaps we might ask the 300,000 who died in 1839 during the deadly Cyclone how nice Mother Nature was on that lovely morning in India.

Or maybe the 1,000,000 who died in Bhola, Bangladesh, in 1970 from that weather event might have a different opinion.

Or we could ask the 2,000,000 dead Chinese who perished in 1887 during the Yellow River Flood. If not them, how about the 4,000,000 Chinese who perished 50 years later in yet another Yellow River Flood, this one occurring in 1931?

The 230,000 Chinese who died in 1975 during Typhoon Nina probably weren’t huge fans of the weather. Nor the 8,000 who died in the San Zenón hurricane in the Dominican Republic in 1935. And then there’s the 3,100 who died during the Cuba hurricane in the Cayman Islands in 1932…

Out of curiosity, how much C02 was in the atmosphere in 1887? Or in 1931? How about 1975?

Yeah, folks, don’t let the alarmists fool you today. Sure it’s hot. Of course, it’s hot. It might even be record-breaking hot. Records are made to be broken. It is July. We are in the peak of Summer.

The strategy from a public policy standpoint should be energy abundance and energy reliability so that as many people throughout the country, indeed throughout the world, have access to air conditioning during heatwaves and heaters powered by natural gas during winter freezes, as much of both as we can make possible through technological innovation, human ingenuity, sound market principles, and minimal government interference.

In other words, memo to politicians: Shut up and get out of the way. Allow the private sector to provide energy resources to those most in need of them, especially when they are most in need of them. In other words, don’t just do something; sit there.

Because even though the weather outside is frightful, the AC is so delightful. And since we’ve no place to go, let it blow, let it blow, let it blow…

The country has relied so heavily on Russian gas pipelines that it didn’t build a single LNG terminal, making it impossible to receive gas via carrier vessels from the U.S. and other overseas suppliers. //

The current energy crisis is of Germany’s own making. German Chancellor Angela Merkel ignored U.S. President Donald Trump’s warning in this regard.

The U.S. and German media regularly mocked the former president for his prescient warning. Even members of Chancellor Merkel’s government ridiculed him for these earnest warnings.

At the UN general assembly in September 2018, when President Trump cautioned Germany against becoming ‘totally dependent’ on Russian energy, the German delegation publicly laughed him off. “German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas could be seen smirking alongside his colleagues,” The Washington Post gleefully reported.

As Trump’s predictions come true, the German political elites and the media aren’t laughing anymore. And with all German eggs in Putin’s basket, Berlin fears a “gas crisis” that could cripple the nation’s industry and disrupt everyday life.

The European Union voted on Wednesday to keep some specific uses of natural gas and nuclear energy in its taxonomy of sustainable sources of energy.

Europe’s taxonomy is its classification system for defining “environmentally sustainable economic activities” for investors, policymakers and companies. This official opinion of the EU matters because it affects funding for projects as the region charts its path to address climate change. In theory, the taxonomy “aims to boost green investments and prevent ‘greenwashing,’” according to the EU’s parliament.

The vote on natural gas and nuclear energy follows one that was passed in February, which amounted to a referendum on what had been a particularly controversial piece of the ruling. Natural gas emits 58.5% as much carbon dioxide as coal, according to the U.S. Energy Information Association. Nuclear power does not generate any emissions, though it draws criticism surrounding the problem of storing radioactive waste. //

The U.K., Poland, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands have all announced plans to build new reactors, adding to Europe’s decades-old reactor fleet. France, which already generates 70% of its electricity from nuclear power plants, is beginning to train thousands of workers in the rigorous requirements of nuclear engineering and construction as part of a plan to build up to 14 new full-size reactors and other smaller ones. //

The International Energy Agency says it expects global nuclear power capacity will have to double by 2050 for the world to reach so-called net zero, in which greenhouse gas emissions are so low that they can be completely offset by forests and other natural means of absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Australia is also home to almost half of the world’s lithium supply. The trucks and machinery are humming once again, but now they’re part of a race to secure the clean energy sources of the future—a race being dominated by China. //

Over the past 30 years, lithium has become a prized resource. It’s a vital component of batteries—for the phone or laptop you’re reading this on, and for the electric vehicles that will soon rule the roads. But until recently, the lithium mined in Australia had to be refined and processed elsewhere. When it comes to processing lithium, China is in a league of its own. The superpower gobbled up about 40 percent of the 93,000 metric tons of raw lithium mined globally in 2021. Hundreds of so-called gigafactories across the country are churning out millions of EV batteries for both the domestic market and foreign carmakers like BMW, Volkswagen, and Tesla.
China’s share of the market for lithium-ion batteries could be as high as 80 percent, according to estimates from BloombergNEF. Six of the 10 biggest EV battery producers are based in China—one of them, CATL, makes three out of every ten EV batteries globally. That dominance extends through the supply chain. Chinese companies have signed preferential deals with lithium-rich nations and benefited from huge government investment in the complex steps between mining and manufacturing. That’s made the rest of the world nervous, and the United States and Europe are now scrambling to wean themselves off Chinese lithium before it’s too late. //

An electric car battery has between 30 and 60 kilos of lithium. It’s estimated that by 2034, the US alone will need 500,000 metric tons of unrefined lithium a year for EV production. That’s more than the global supply in 2020. Some experts fear a repeat of the oil crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with geopolitical tension spilling over into a war of sanctions.

Rather than confront the energy crisis head on, Biden and his administration have apparently decided to a) demand censorship of their critics, b) scapegoat the only people who can end the energy crisis, and c) lie about their own role in creating the crisis. It is a transparently counterproductive strategy, one which is antagonizing the energy industry, worsening investor confidence, and alienating voters.

Biden’s is a strategy that makes him look like a child and oil and gas executives like grown-ups. Wrote Wirth, “we need an honest dialogue… We can only meet these challenges by working together.”

But if Biden’s strategy is so counterproductive, why does he keep pursuing it?

Switching to renewables will only happen if gas prices remain expensive.

Once there were 17 reactors in Germany. Now there are only three remaining, all of which are scheduled to go offline by the end of the year.

The move to “clean energy”—without nuclear—has accomplished three things:

1. It has prompted Germany, and the rest of the EU, to begin relying more heavily on Russian natural gas as it “transitioned.” Putin, who has begun demanding EU nations pay for their energy in roubles, is now able to undercut the European economy at will.

2. It has created the highest global electricity prices per household in the world. In 2019, German households were paying 34 cents per kilowatt-hour compared to 13 cents in the United States. The price of energy has doubled since 2000, when Germany first mandated decarbonization, an effort that forced energy companies to purchase long-term inefficient renewables at high, fabricated prices.

3. It has meant the burning of coal. Even before Russia began cutting off supply, Germany was more reliant on coal than the United States. This week, Germany’s Economy Minister Robert Habeck, who earlier this year rejected a European Union label of nuclear energy as “green,” announced that in an effort to avoid future gas shortages—because cars can’t run on wind—the government would incentivize the use of more coal-fired power plants.

The “transition” to green that Germany began 30 years ago has not worked. In 2000, Germany obtained 84 percent of its energy from fossil fuels. By 2019, it was 78 percent. As Vaclav Smil pointed out a couple of years ago, at this rate, Germany would still be deriving 70 percent of its energy from fossil fuels by the year 2050. With a move back to coal in 2022, it will surely be even later, if ever.

In other words, renewable energy generation is just another racket subsidized by the federal government. It’s not that there isn’t enough energy to generate electrical power. There’s plenty of oil, plenty of coal and natural gas.

But who can compete with subsidized energy like solar and wind? //

Moreover, intermittent sources like wind are allowed to bid into MISO’s capacity auction. But wind is unreliable and can’t be dispatched—you never know when it will produce, and you can’t make it produce when you want it to. So, wind bids in at an average expected level of generation. A simple visual (left) reveals what a fatal flaw this is.

As Orr, the energy analyst, points out, this model assumes that wind will blow at 15 percent capacity. But there is no guarantee that it will do so.

In the end, it comes down to a simple, mathematical equation: will our company make a profit from generating electricity or not?

It should be noted that this is a feature, not a bug of renewable energy. Making it too expensive to use fossil fuels to generate electricity is part of the charm renewable energy holds for green fanatics.

And they want you to feel pain, they want you to suffer. They figure you aren’t going to be mad at heroic green warriors fighting to save the planet. They think you’ll become enraged at the dirty, greedy, energy capitalists the heroic green warriors are trying to destroy — along with a couple of million jobs and a reliable supply of energy.

They just don’t mention those last two goals or say them out loud.

EU Signs Landmark Natural Gas Deal With Israel
“Israeli gas is expected to be sent to liquefaction plants in Egypt, then shipped north to markets in Europe.” //

Biden Admin Tried to Kill Europe-Israel Gas Pipeline Deal
The agreement allowing supply of Israeli gas was reached despite Biden administration’s efforts to kill a similar pipeline deal. Just weeks ahead of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden State Department pulled the U.S. support away from the EastMed pipeline designed to deliver Israeli gas to the European market — reversing a Trump White House decision.

“Washington no longer supports the proposed EastMed gas pipeline from Israel to Europe, according to a Jerusalem diplomatic source,” the Israeli TV channel i24News reported January 19. “The Biden administration reportedly informed Israeli, Greek, and Cypriot officials in recent weeks of its change in attitude,” the news outlet added.

The Biden White House decision emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin as he was amassing troops along the Ukrainian border, and further consolidated Moscow’s stranglehold on the Europe’s energy supply. It was only the shock of the Russia military offensive on the Europe’s eastern flank which forced the policymakers in Washington and Brussels to rethink energy security and look for ways to reduce dependence on Kremlin.

YetAnotherSecretAnonymousPseudonymeArs Tribunus Militumet Subscriptorreply2 months agoignore user
Bdnzor wrote:
Everyone seems to love nuclear plants, but do they forget about the tons and tons of waste you have to store somewhere basically forever?

1. Not all "radioactive" waste is the same.

Amongst the amount of radioactive waste generated by nuclear power, research, medical and a few others activities, there are different kind of waste, distinguished by their activity and their half life.

I'm most familiar with the French classification, so I'll use that one, but countries usually account for this is similar ways.

High Activity waste represent 0.2% of the volume and 94.9% of the radioactivity.

Medium Activity with long half life represent another 2.9% fo the volume and 4.9% of the activity.

The volume in France of those two categories is 4 000 + 42 000 m3. If you spread these on a football field, it raises up to 7 meters. That's the waste for the whole country.

The remainder usually is composed of shorter half life (<31 years) and medium activity, low and very low activity waste, and very short half life stuff that you can keep in storage until they get inert.

Dealing with those is significantly easier. (And generally no worse than dealing with normal industrial waste, of which we have significantly larger volumes).

2. Proper underground storage is a reliable way to deal with High Level Waste.

The underground storage projects are not stupid dig how, bury, forget process. They are designed using serious geology studies, including what can be learn from the Oklo natural reactor that ran 2 billions years ago.

The vitrified waste is in such a form that water has to actually dissolve the glass to free-up the waste (that's not happening very fast, especially given that there are a few barriers before water even comes into contact with the glass), and the storage is built in low permeability rocks were water barely flows at all. As such by the time water manages to dissolve some amount of waste, it usually has decreased significantly and gets diluted to homeopathic doses by the time it gets anywhere near surface.

The Left’s animus towards energy independence and corresponding human flourishing must be challenged. //

A new book from philosopher Alex Epstein, however, argues continued use of fossil fuels and its byproducts will positively impact our future.

Epstein’s new book, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less, masterfully makes the case for continued usage of coal, oil, and natural gas against so-called “renewables.”

The author articulates to readers the importance of refuting hostile viewpoints concerning fossil fuels. //

Epstein notes fossil fuel benefits far outweigh the negative side-effects attributed to them. Oft-dismissed benefits, he writes, include “affordable food, clothing, shelter, and medical care.” //

Nuclear energy, in Alex’s view, especially raw materials for it, are “far more abundant in nature than even fossil fuels” because it has massive scalability potential. And it boasts a reliable base load and isn’t intermittent like solar or wind.

Talk about an inconvenient truth. //

In his book, Epstein challenges readers to advance the “human flourishing framework” and associate it—not the “anti-impact framework” espoused by “designated experts”— with cleaner environmental standards and overall climate safety.

An unimpacted environment, he says, leads to more disasters —like high-intensity fires raging across the American West. And vice versa.

This framework parallels the debate surrounding conservation stewardship versus preservationist environmentalism. Preservationists intentionally conflate preservation (no use of natural resources) with conservation (wise use of natural resources).The former admonishes human input and calls for nature to take its course compared to the latter, which welcomes positive human impact (including multiple-use management of public lands) on the landscape.

On this token, environmental policies shouldn’t prefer nature over people but safeguard the interests of both. After all, this is the essence of America’s true conservationist ethos.

A Chevron station in the coastal village of Mendocino about 175 miles north of San Francisco was charging $9.60 a gallon for regular on Friday afternoon.

The Menocino station, Schlafer’s Auto Body & Repair, is the only one in the tourist haven — described on the county website as “an enchanted place filled with real, unspoiled California opportunities” — and is routinely considered the most expensive in the nation.

Owner Judy Schlafer told SFGate.com she paid $50,000 for an 8,880-gallon delivery this week, which she has 10 days to pay for. Three months ago, the same load would have been about $30,000.

Schlafer said that if she didn’t charge $9.60, she’d be out of business. //

Dorien Grey
14h ago

Why has the media remained silent even the Post here and Fox on the fact that Under Biden 5 refineries were shut down by the EPA which is part of the driving factor here? That pretty big news since there are not replacement refineries in the works!

A new generation of reactors promises a nuclear energy renaissance, but critics say the US needs to figure out what to do about its radioactive garbage first. //

But there’s a new type of nuclear on the block: the small modular reactor (SMR). For a long time, the US nuclear industry has been stagnating, in large part because of the tremendous costs of building massive new plants. SMRs, by contrast, are small enough to be built in a factory and then hauled elsewhere to produce power. Advocates hope this will make them more cost-effective than the big reactors of today, offering an affordable, always-on complement to less-predictable renewables like wind and solar. According to some, they should also produce less radioactive waste than their predecessors. A Department of Energy-sponsored report estimated in 2014 that the US nuclear industry would produce 94 percent less fuel waste if big, old reactors were replaced with new smaller ones.

Krall was skeptical about that last part. “SMRs are generally being marketed as a solution—that maybe you don’t need a geological repository for them,” she says. So as a postdoc at Stanford, she and two prominent nuclear experts started digging through the patents, research papers, and license applications of two dozen proposed reactor designs, none of which have been built so far. Thousands of pages of redacted documents, a few public records requests, and a vast appendix full of calculations later, Krall, who is now a scientist with Sweden’s nuclear waste company, got an answer: By many measures, the SMR designs produce not less, but potentially much more waste: more than five times the spent fuel per unit of power, and as much as 35 times for other forms of waste. The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this week.

Startups seeking licenses to build SMR designs have disputed the findings and say they’re prepared for whatever waste is generated while the US sorts out permanent disposal. “Five times a small number is still a really small number,” says John Kotek, who leads policy and public affairs at the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s trade association.

But the authors say the “back-end” of the fuel cycle, which includes waste and decommissioning, should be a bigger factor in what they consider to be the precarious economics of the new reactors. “The point of this paper is to prompt a discussion,” says Allison Macfarlane, a former chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and a coauthor of the paper. “We can’t get to how much it is going to cost until we understand what we’re dealing with.”

Providing energy for a global economy in which billions of people in developing countries aspire to a lifestyle similar to that of Europe, North America, and East Asia is one of the most daunting challenges of the 21st century. //

When its development began in the 1950s, power generated by nuclear fission was heralded as the energy source for the future. I am old enough to remember when the “atomic age” was used in a non-ironic fashion. The energy density of uranium, exploited optimally, is more than a million times greater than than of fossil fuels, and producing electricity from it emits no carbon dioxide, smoke, or noxious gas pollutants. Since its energy density is so great, nuclear power plants are compact and require little land compared to low density sources such as solar power farms or wind turbine arrays. Finally, the mining and refining of the small quantities of uranium fuel required and the modest quantities of radioactive waste produced have a small environmental impact compared to producing, transporting, and burning fossil fuels.

But due to historical accidents, lack of imagination, government bungling and regulation, incompetent engineering and operation leading to a small number of highly-visible accidents, fear mongering by media and ignorant advocates of other technologies or abandonment of our energy-intensive modern civilisation, nuclear fission power never achieved the ambitious goals (“too cheap to meter”) it originally seemed to promise.

Today, nuclear power is not usually considered among the “sustainable” alternatives to fossil fuels and, since it relies upon uranium as a fuel, of which a finite supply exists on Earth, is classified as “non-renewable” and hence not viable as a long-term energy source. But what do you mean “long-term”, anyway? Eventually, the Sun will burn out, after all, so even solar isn’t forever. Will ten thousand years or so do for now, until we can think of something better?

Energy “experts” scoff at the long-term prospects for nuclear fission power, observing that known worldwide reserves of uranium, used in present-day reactor designs, would suffice for only on the order of a century if nuclear power were to replace all primary power generation sources presently in use. But is this correct? In fact, this conclusion stems not from science and technology, but stupidity and timidity, and nuclear fission is a “bird in the hand” solution to the world’s energy problems awaiting only the courage and will to deploy it.

That is the conclusion by the authors of a paper with the same title as this post, “Nuclear Fission Fuel is Inexhaustible 1” [PDF, 8 pages], presented at the IEEE EIC Climate Change Conference in Ottawa, Canada in May 2006. Here is the abstract:

Nuclear fission energy is as inexhaustible as those energies usually termed “renewable”, such as hydro, wind, solar, and biomass. But, unlike the sum of these energies, nuclear fission energy has sufficient capacity to replace fossil fuels as they become scarce. Replacement of the current thermal variety of nuclear fission reactors with nuclear fission fast reactors, which are 100 times more fuel efficient, can dramatically extend nuclear fuel reserves. The contribution of uranium price to the cost of electricity generated by fast reactors, even if its price were the same as that of gold at US$14,000/kg, would be US$0.003/kWh of electricity generated. At that price, economically viable uranium reserves would be, for all practical purposes, inexhaustible. Uranium could power the world as far into the future as we are today from the dawn of civilization—more than 10,000 years ago. Fast reactors have distinct advantages in siting of plants, product transport and management of waste.

Last Thursday, something extraordinary happened: A senior HSBC banker, Stuart Kirk, told the world that climate change, though real, is not something financial markets need worry about. “Unsubstantiated, shrill, apocalyptic warnings are ALWAYS wrong,” one of Kirk’s presentation slides read.

The reaction was instantaneous. Christiana Figueres, former head of the United Nations climate secretariat, denounced Kirk’s remarks as “abhorrently outrageous,” words that might well describe Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — but a banker’s presentation analyzing climate financial risk for what it is?

Four hundred years ago, people were burnt at the stake for believing the wrong things about religion. Today, they get fired for questioning the climate-change catechism.

Figueres demanded HSBC immediately cleanse itself of Kirk’s remarks and fire the climate heretic. “I do not agree — at all — with the remarks made at last week’s FT Moral Money Summit,” bank chief executive Noel Quinn duly declared, avoiding any mention of Kirk by name. “I am determined that our team won’t be distracted by last week’s comments.” On Monday, it emerged HSBC had suspended Kirk.

Kirk’s problem is that he is telling the truth, one contrary to the central tenet of environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing — which holds that it is the duty of finance and business to save the world from a planetary catastrophe. In his presentation, Kirk complained about his team being buried in an avalanche of climate-risk reporting.

Article 2 of the 2015 Paris climate agreement has the objective of “making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low” emissions. As a result, central banks and financial regulators are using every regulatory weapon in their armories to suppress investment in fossil fuels and direct capital flows toward renewables like wind and solar.

Their weapon of choice is the spurious but plausible-sounding notion of climate-related financial risk. In reality, modern economies are remarkably resilient against extreme weather. “How Bad Are Weather Disasters for Banks?” a November 2021 paper by Federal Reserve Bank of New York staff asked. The answer: “Not very.” Federal Emergency Management Agency-level disasters over the last quarter-century had insignificant or small impact on banks’ performance.

In a rational world, this finding would be welcomed. But that would be to miss the point. It is not the reality of climate resiliency that matters but the use of climate risk to push financing flows in the direction of net zero. “There’s a lot to like about climate stress tests,” Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell exclaimed at a Green Swan conference of central bankers and regulators last year. //

The need to hype up climate alarm to drive investment flows to net zero comes at a bigger cost than Stuart Kirk’s job. Painfully high oil and natural-gas prices are hurting consumers and businesses and pushing up the cost of food. Normally, high prices would trigger more investment and more output that would help bring prices down. Not this time. Wall Street — with the full support of the Fed and bank regulators — is stomping down on investment in oil and gas. That’s not just hurting the little guy. It’s hurting the Biden administration and the Democrats.

Two months ago, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was begging oil executives to invest. “I hope your investors are saying these words to you as well: In this moment of crisis, we need more supply,” Granholm told them. “Right now, we need oil and gas production to rise to meet current demand.”

It could well be that woke bankers on Wall Street — backed to the hilt by purveyors of scary climate scenarios in the Fed, financial regulators and the media — help sink Democrats’ election hopes in the November midterms.

How can the Biden team claim that they are doing everything they can to bring down gas prices, if they continue on the path they have been on since Joe Biden came in — being anti-energy?

Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK), who comes from the oil-rich state of Alaska, blew the whistle on that by listing what the Biden Administration has done, just in the last three weeks that has impeded oil and gas production during his questioning of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. //

“There has been a comprehensive hostility to the energy sector by this Administration,” Sullivan declared. “I watch it every day.” Sullivan detailed how prolific Alaska is for oil. But the Biden Administration and Sec. Haaland has taken half the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska (NPRA) designated by Congress for oil and gas drilling “off the table.”

“That is not focused on increasing supply,” Sullivan said. Sullivan’s second example was Cook Inlet Basin. At the last minute, Biden canceled the lease sale,

Sullivan explained. “That is exactly the opposite of getting supply on the market.”

Finally, there was the new Council on Environmental Quality NEPA regulations that Sullivan said were meant “to kill the production of American energy.”

“That’s what you guys just did,” Sullivan concluded. “Do you have a response to any of this?” He said Biden, from day one, wanted to stop everything in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), but he can’t do that because Congress has decided there should be two lease sales there. He can’t stop it.

Granholm had no real response. She couldn’t, since it was all true. Her response was basically, “It’s not my lane.” //

Sullivan then asked her another, surprising question: why — when so many of our allies want to buy LNG (Liquid Natural Gas) from us — would the climate czar be discouraging our Japanese allies from purchasing from us? //

These exchanges between members of Congress versus Biden team people show a big problem here. If it was just about doing what was best for the environment, they wouldn’t be reaching out to Venezuela; they’d want to produce the oil here because that would be better for the environment. So, it’s not just about the environment; it’s about cutting our production. That’s why they don’t want new leases and that’s why John Kerry would be sabotaging our LNG sales.