Friday, May 09, 2014

Fission vs. LENR & Waste Treatment vs Internment

Other than news that the chairman of Industrial Heat, LLC attended the opening of Nickel/Hydrogen center in a Chinese Industrial Park, and news that the Swedish energy conglomerate, Vattenfall, has cancelled R&D on carbon capture and storage, it has been a rather quiet week on the energy front.

The big issue (outside of Japan) is still public awareness. And, this is where advocacy blogs and internet forums can serve as significant catalytic agents.

With top political leaders, it's not about ignorance; it's about holding a powerful position until retirement while on the look-out for consensus on hot issues.

If informed and vocal, the populace can influence concensus, which in turn helps change political priorities.

For main-line media it's about keeping big advertisers
(such as automotive, nuclear and petrol) happy -and keeping the populace ignorant about disruptive technology which could benefit them.

With big industrial honchos, it's mostly about protecting profits, which involves adopting latest technology in order to remain competitive.

Recent Londont posts did churn up some e-mail chatter. Summing up, my responses went something like this:

1. Some may insist engineering of the E-cat has await scientific agreement on the underlying theory of LENR, but there are some industrialists in Italy, China, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Sweden who are not so constrained. Theoretical physicists do not want to be distracted from well-funded "fission" research. We will have to await participation of new generation funders and scientists; as Max Planck quipped, "Science advances one funeral at a time."

2. The Asians have had the lowest labour costs and now they are positioning themselves to have the lowest clean energy costs.

3. If in doubt, avoid dogmatic experts and hyper-skeptics. Follow the Big money! Brillouin, Clean Planet, Industrial Heat LLC, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries are all in Asia "harnessing the unknown physics" while western nations fret over theory, drag their feet on patents and try to bury their accumulating nuclear wastes.

4. Yes, surface storage of nuclear wastes is at the mercy of human and natural elements, but internment has major long-term risks as well. And, given the emergence of a LENR-based treatment, the rush to bury is unconscionable.

5. The UN and its Vienna agency (International Atomic Energy Agency) don't appear to have LENR on their radar even though it is a potential solution to desalination, desertification, hunger, and of course, treatment of spent fuel rods and other radio-active junk. Their problem could be a diverse membership interested only in protecting markets for fossil fuel resources.

6. True, Britain and China have new nuclear power plants on the drawing boards, but some other jurisdictions, e.g. Ontario and Quebec, have removed them from their energy plan. It is noted that Austria has completed only one nuclear plant, a research reactor -at Zwentendorf- In any case, Britain will likely cancel construction as soon as the Chinese fire up their first LENR heating plant.

7. The ColdFusionNow website makes a strong case for LENR over the existing fission reactors producing much of the world's electricy -along with radio-active waste.

8. As the bombardier said to his pilot, "The fun begins. We must be on target as I'm attracting FLAK."


* In answering sharp questions from a 15-yr old wanna-be scientist, Dr. Bob relays the observation that hot fusion is Plasma Science whereas cold fusion is Condensed Matter Science, and then goes on to give the student some advice on what to study to become a nuclear scientist.

Updates:

#1. Dateline July 21, 2014 from OilPrice.com

IAEA data reveals:
(a) The top 10 generators of nuclear power are: US,France,Russia, South Korea, Germany, China,Canada, Ukraine,UK and Sweden.
(b) Of the above, only the US,France an the UK recycle nuclear waste, which greatly reduces the half life of the elements involved.
Perhaps the nature of the CANDU reactors prevents recycling in Canada.



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