Doing Mankind a Favor – Part 2/2

August 24, 2011

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.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.


Doing Mankind a Favor – Part 1/2

August 23, 2011

Recently, I learned something new from a comment left by Xiaohu Liu for a post called China’s Goals for going Green.

Liu wrote, “More likely China will go more nuclear before it goes green … (there are) two types of nuclear technology that could revolutionized the world as much as the steam power or petrol power did in the 19th and 20th century.”

Until Liu left that comment, I was unaware of the types of nuclear power China is developing.

The (UK) Telegraph says, “Safe nuclear does exist, and China is leading the way with thorium.”

I discovered the Chinese are investing millions in research into reactors powered by thorium, a metal, supporters say, that is as common as lead (which means it would be cheap and easy to find), and one, which, despite some concerns, would lead to power plants with fewer safety issues as well as other benefits.

“Thorium-based reactors certainly have advantages,” says Wang Kan, leader of the Tsinghua University Thorium Research Team. “The energy release from Thorium is greater than from Uranium, the by-products from using Thorium are less toxic than from Uranium, and it’s much harder to make weapons from those by-products.”

However, China was not the first nation to research the use of Thorium. In the late 1940s, US physicists were exploring the use of thorium as fuel to generate power but dangerous and dirty uranium won since the US and the USSR were fighting the Cold War and building thousands of nuclear weapons.

Continued on August 24, 2011 in Doing Mankind a Favor – Part 2

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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.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.