The Invisible Lobby Hates This Idea
How 'bout $48 to Fuel 100 Years of Your Entire Energy Consumption?
In 1994, some unknown lobby killed nuclear power research via none other than Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Dr. Yoon Chang warned what would happen. He was 100% correct. Source
$120 million per year was just too much money. Gotta protect the taxpayers from dumb nuclear power research. Isn’t it nice to know how concerned the Clinton Administration was about precious Tax Dollars. The money being squandered on dumb fast-neutron reactor technology implementation would be so much better spent on Rube Goldberg Machine research. Take that, Vladimir Putin! Ha! We're gonna Blow You Away.
The American Wind Energy Association had clearly captured public opinion through the magic "renewables" label. Clinton's DOE Secretary "was prophesying an 'in your face' energy budget that would clearly delineate the president's priorities." Al Gore--renewables are critical to change the climate. Nuclear power is dumb. Superheroes each one.
The Invisible Hand strikes again. Dr. Chang: "I can't see how the US would just turn away from development of a technology like the IFR," a next-generation nuclear reactor. Open the curtain and take a look.
1. The Integral Fast Reactor: A liquid sodium cooling system that is safer and more reliable than the US's light-water reactors (LWR) that generate electricity today.
2. A metal-alloy fuel that is safer and easier to cool and recycle than the LWR fuel of uranium embedded in ceramics.
3. An electrochemical process that reduces waste and greatly increases efficiency by separating uranium, plutonium, and other highly radioactive material from used fuel rods for reinsertion into the reactor's core.
4. The ability to almost completely burn up plutonium, including the estimated 100 metric tons of destabilizing, weapons-grade plutonium that is being dismantled from Russian and US nuclear warheads.
Really dumb ideas. Apparently Dr. Chang did not understand, as Al Gore clearly did, that Wind is Free.
Hey there Hazel O'Leary, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore: How'd that Visionary, "in your face" energy planning and investment work out for us?
We are buffoons,while Russia mocks us. While we wring our hands over "Nuclear Waste" and waste billions on Yucca Mountain and Interim Storage drama, Russia has spent the last 30 years developing Fast Neutron Tech. In Russia: Nuclear Waste Is Fuel.
While a few people, such as Chuck Till, who understood the critical importance of fast-neutron tech, did everything he could to prevent it, the Clinton Administration killed the USA's only fast reactor.
The Clinton-Gore saved taxpayers $120 million per year demolishing that dumb test reactor in Idaho. Championed by Superhero VP Gore, Clinton needed every cent to change the Climate with Rube Goldberg Wind and Solar Machines.
Meanwhile, another Clinton was happily facilitating a deal to ensure that Russia would have a large stake in US uranium reserves. Who needs non-renewable uranium when we have free sun, free wind, and renewable Rube Goldberg Machines to collect infinite, free energy?
Today, Chuck Till’s successors are jumping through hoops and begging Congress to fund a new fast-neutron test reactor in Idaho. They need help! Nuclear power has no natural constituency but has many natural enemies.
Civilization and humanity desperately need fast-neutron tech. Here is the plan. Congress: No Money for You. Eat Wind, Solar, and Batteries. We spent your wad on Rube Goldberg Machines, just like Superhero Al Gore said we should.
If you care about the planet, humanity, and Civilization, I recommend that you learn as much as possible about the VTR and ask your representatives, senators, and president why they refuse to fund the VTR while Russia mocks us?
I don't see this as Russia mocking the US. This is purely the US mocking ourselves with stupidity. Napoleon said it, though he was paraphrasing Cardinal Richelieu, "There are limits to corruption. There are no limits to stupidity."
So! Here we are! USA! USA! USA! We're number one In stupid! We're number one in stupid!
And we're paying the price for it, right now! How? Inflation. You feel that at the supermarket?
Inflation is caused by energy poverty (which masquerades as energy expense). Here are the two papers that definitively link energy to valuation of money.
Garrett, T.J. (2022) Lotka's wheel and the long arm of history: how does the distant past determine today's global rate of energy consumption? https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/13/1021/2022/esd-13-1021-2022.html
Garrett, T.J. (2011) Are there basic physical constraints on future anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide? https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-009-9717-9 ...the human system grows through a self-perpetuating feedback loop in which the consumption rate of primary energy resources stays tied to the historical accumulation of global economic production—or p×g—through a time-independent factor of 9.7±0.3 milliWatts per inflation-adjusted 1990 US dollar.
That brings us to the egregious stupidity of the economics profession. Economics has yet to accept this fact that is proven. Why? Well, economists are taught ancestor worship in their classes.
Harvey, J.T. (2020) Book: Contending Perspectives in Economics: A Guide to Contemporary Schools of Thought. https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/usd/contending-perspectives-in-economics-9781789900484.html
Economics today has a relationship to understanding flows of money and products analogous to the relationship astrology has to astronomy. There are a small number of renegades who developed modern monetary theory (MMT). However, they have wrapped their MMT exposition in a thick blanket of social programs.
William Mitchell, L. Randall Wray, Martin Watts (2019) Macroeconomics. (1st ed.) https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/macroeconomics-9781137610669/
MMT is correct in its mechanics as far as it goes. I think MMT theorists make a grave mistake in presuming (as Marxists did before them) that people and politicians can be expected to be saintly.
Hanley, B. Is Modern Monetary Theory’s prescription to spend without reference to tax receipts an invitation to tyranny? https://akjournals.com/view/journals/032/71/3/article-p431.xml
However, MMT has not accepted Garrett's work, not yet. The only economist I know of that recognized the value of Garrett's work is Steve Keen. Steve published this update to Cobb-Douglas before co-authoring the Lotka's Wheel article with Tim Garrett.
Keen, S. , Ayres, R.U., Standish, R. (2019) A Note on the Role of Energy in Production. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800917311746
Steve has been a renegade critic economist for most of his academic life.
Keen. S. (2011) Debunking Economics. The Naked Emperor Dethroned? https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/debunking-economics-9781848139947/
I have seen evidence that China's economists are not strangled by the grip of dead economists of yore. Russia also shows evidence of this. Both are understandable because their academics were, of course Marxists, and then Marx was dethroned in Russia, and quietly bypassed in China. I have heard a clear statement from V. Putin that the economy is about energy, resources, and engineering. And both Russia and China have operated their Central Banks better than the USA has.
Meanwhile, the USA is in the constrictor grip of the school of Western economics. This Western school encompasses neo-classical, institutionalist, etc. pretty much everyone except for MMT. Our economists, in Europe and North America sit astride a reeking pile of garbage that is well known to be empirically wrong, led by the ghost of Milton Friedman, a man who literally said that the less accurate a model's assumptions the more valuable it is. Friedman has been proven wrong on everything I am aware of. And yet, we of the stupid Western world just arranged for Friemdan acolytes to get a Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics. The work they were feted for is, in a word, malarkey.
Keen, S. (2022) The fantasy economics of the Nobel Prize: How banks create money. https://iai.tv/articles/the-fantasy-economics-of-the-nobel-prize-auid-2279?_auid=2020
So let's not blame any of this on Russia. This is 100% our problem. We created it. We maintain it. The enemy is us, nobody else. Yes, it's more than an embarrassment. This wealth of idiocy is now threatening the survival of civilization.