Some critics say the reason the US government and a few European countries such as Germany stopped developing Thorium as a source of power was because it is thought to be almost impossible to use thorium to make nuclear bombs.
China, on the other hand, has more than 1.3 billion people expecting a better lifestyle and to deliver that modern lifestyle takes electricity, which means China cannot afford to ignore safer and cheaper sources of energy.
Currently, the Chinese are building two radically different uranium power plants (in addition to the thorium research) called “pebble-bed reactors“, which use hundreds of thousands of uranium billiard-ball sized elements cloaked in a protective layer of graphite that will be cooled by non-explosive helium gas instead of water.
Unlike power plants such as Japan’s Fukushima Daiichy power plant, these new Chinese “pebble-bed reactors” are designed to gradually dissipate heat on their own — even if the coolant is lost as it was in Japan.
If the first “pebble-bed reactors” work, China will build dozen more.
Vortex Hydro Energy – Open Water Test
While the United States is falling behind in the race to develop alternative and safer, cleaner energy sources, a new method is being explored to capture the energy potential of our oceans.
While other countries have already deployed viable, operating, power generating projects using the emission-free power of ocean waves, currents, and tidal forces, the U.S. is only beginning to acknowledge the importance of these technologies.
A system conceived by scientists at the University of Michigan, is called VIVACE, or “vortex-induced vibrations for aquatic clean energy”.
In fact, scientists claim slow moving river and ocean currents using this revolutionary VIVACE device can easily provide enough power for more than 15 billion people, which might leave the coal, oil and uranium industry with shrinking profits and many lost jobs.
I have two questions.
Does America and the West hold on to the status quo or move forward allowing cleaner, cheaper, safer energy sources to develop and replace the old, expensive dirty energy we rely on today?
Why is it that China seems to be doing more for the future of its people than the US is?
Return to or start with Doing Mankind a Favor – Part 1
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Wow, if this method of generating electricity is safer than the dangerous power plants, why aren’t governments, other than China, developing and building them?
First, these different and maybe safer types of nuclear reactors haven’t been proven to work as it is hoped they will work. As to why the rest of the world hasn’t spent time to find out and continues to rely on more polluting and dangerous methods to generate electricity—other than hydro, solar and wind power—all we need to do is answer this question?
What is the source that is used by most of the world to generate electricity?
The answer is coal, diesel and gasoline
In the 18th century, this industry started to grow and today is a monstrous industry worth trillions of dollars that employees hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. Coal and oil is the source of great fortunes for a few people. For instance, the Koch brothers who inherited from their father the largest private sector oil industry in the United States.
The Koch brothers, by themselves, spend hundreds of millions annually to elect politicians who will serve their interests in the states and in the U.S. Congress while their PR machine manufactures lies on an assembly line to fool people that carbon emissions that come from their industry have nothing to do with global warming. As long as they own enough elected officials in the states and in Washington DC and continue to fool enough voters to keep electing these puppets, we will not see any meaningful changes in how our electricity is manufactured.
In addition, the air we breathe, the oceans and the water we rely on to survive will continue to be polluted from carbon emissions and other chemicals manufactured by other HUGE industries that are today considered to big and powerful to ever be allowed to fail.
Interesting bit of trivial, the US has about 3200 tons of Thorium stored RIGHT NOW in the Nevada desert. Leftovers from the Los Alamos labs, it is enough to power the entire United States for a couple hundred years.
And this is obviously one of the reasons why the US nuclear industry refuses to develop Thorium. Uranium fuel dependence means big bucks to them and as soon as Thorium reactors come on line, they get cut out of the deal.
If there is something that China desperately needs to improve upon, it has to be its level of researchers. It’s professors are desperately lacking in standard compared to those in top American universities like Harvard and Stanford.
Terry,
From what I have been reading, China is moving in the direction, but it may takes a generation to achieve since the formal education starts at age 6 and the type of teaching that leads to this level of researchers usually takes most of a student’s education from age 6 to earning a university degree to achieve.
It seems that the schools in Shanghai have already implemented this style of teaching and learning and the plans are to spread this to the rest of China’s educational system over time.
Lloyd
‘Why is it that China seems to be doing more for the future of its people than the US is?’
The answer is simple. American only has short term plans and its politicians are more concerned with staying in office. The farthest an american president is going to look ahead is 4 years.
Terry,
The explanation is in the difference in philosophical and political beliefs between socialism and capitalism. Most successful and wealthy capitalists do not recognize the worker as a human being but as a means to achieve more wealth (regardless of the quality of life and suffering of the worker) whereas a socialist philosophy believes every individual deserves a good life but doesn’t allow for that 1 to 15% of the population that make capitalism work, which explains the failure of a pure socialist system.
There should be a balance between socialism and capitalism. In the United States, we see that balance work itself out in politics between the Democrats and Republicans and it is seldom balanced. When FDR was president in the 1930 and 1940, the pendulum favored socialism and continued to do so until after LBJ was gone from the White House. Then after President Reagan was elected, the pendulum swung the other way to favor capitalism and it has see-sawed back and forth ever since with the political arena in the US often a war of words and lies to manipulate voters through fear to favor one side or the other (conservatives do a better job at this).
If you pay attention to US politics, you will discover that socialist labor unions mostly support Democratic Party candidates while conservative Republicans work hard to demonize anything that is socialistic in nature such as unions and Communists including the national medical plan that President Obama managed to enact into law his first two years in office when he had a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress.
Through fear and lies, the conservative, capitalist supporting Republicans managed to regain the majority in both Houses of Congress and now threaten the socialistic nature of the national health plan.
The problem is that when the socialist leaning Democrats control the reigns of government, they tend to go too far to the left supporting socialist programs that creates an imbalance, while when the capitalist leaning Republicans control the majority, they spend too much in the other directions leading to huge military and defense budgets. Between the two goings back and forth as power shifts, we now have a National Debt over $14 trillion.
When capitalist leaning Republicans complain of abuses that caused that debt, they focus on socialist programs that are aimed at helping the worker and since President Reagan the Republicans have been much more efficient at using the media (especially conservative talk radio programs) to manipulate the public—many of whom are poor but buy into the fear generated by the efficient conservative media machine that is mostly controlled by six very large capitalist corporations such as Murdock’s media empire, News Corp.
When socialist leaning Democrats complain of abuses that caused that debt, they focus on the HUGE defense spending.
Currently, the US is controlled by conservatives in the House of Representatives that are difficult for the socialistic tending Democrats to compromise with and when compromises between the socialist ideology is made with capitalist ideology the working man does not gain much support.
We now know that pure socialism does not work and pure capitalism does not work either. A political system works best when there is a balance between the two and since President Reagan the pendulum has been swinging toward harsh capitalist tendencies in the United States, which explains the growing rift between the wealthy and those that live closer to poverty. In the last few years, the number of people living in poverty that must apply for food stamps so they have enough food to eat has skyrocket by about 75%.
American culture can be confusing to those that were not born here and may be confusing to those people too. A recent film caled “The Help” (starring Emma Stone, viola Davis, and Octavia Spenser) illustrates this. If you see the film, you will notice how the southern white women raise money through a charitable group to help feed needy and starving African children and are proud of this achievement while at the same time they are abusing the African-Americans that work for them.