Read here. Recently, we had a posting on renewable energy (ethanol) and one that mentioned the great promise of thorium-based energy. A new C3 reader saw those postings and informed us of his own writings on both subjects. We can't vouch for all the very interesting content on Christopher Calder's site but to our eyes it represents a great primer for laying out the problems with renewables and the hope for newer clean, reliable and abundant energy solutions.
From the Obama's and left-liberal's energy strategy, the "Let them eat cake" strategy:
- "According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, global food prices rose an incredible 40% in 2007. The World Bank states that the cost of staple foods rose by 83% during the 3 year period from 2005 to 2008. The International Food Policy Research Institute states that biofuels are responsible for rapid grain price inflation, and a detailed analysis by Don Mitchell, an internationally respected economist at the World Bank, stated that biofuels have forced global staple food prices up by 75%.....The United Nations states that its charity programs can no longer afford to feed the starving peoples of the world because of the high cost of staple foods. Mr. Jean Ziegler, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, repeatedly denounced biofuels as "a crime against humanity." The new UN food envoy, Mr. Olivier De Schuster, has called for United States and European Union biofuel targets to be abandoned, and said the world food crisis is "a silent tsunami affecting 100 million people." Oil price increases have not shrunk the human food supply, but biofuel production has. The more biofuels we produce, the less food we have to eat, because we grow biofuel crops using the same land, water, fertilizer, farm equipment, and labor we use to grow food."
On the promising energy solution that Obama, Al Gore, George Soros, Goldman Sachs and most leftist/liberals/progressives hate:
- "The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) solves all of the major problems associated with nuclear power.....LFTRs only requires input of uranium or plutonium to kick-start the initial nuclear reaction, and as the fissionable material can come from either spent fuel rods or old nuclear warheads, LFTRs will inevitably be used as janitors to clean up old nuclear waste.....The cost savings of using a liquid fuel is like the difference between making soup vs. baking a wedding cake. Soup is cheap, and you can change ingredients very easily. The reactor works like a Crock-Pot; you keep the fuel cooking in the pot until it is over 99% burned, so LFTRs produce less than 1% of the long-lived radioactive waste of light water reactors, making Yucca Mountain waste storage unnecessary....."Liquid fluoride thorium reactors operate at high temperature for 50% thermal/electrical conversion efficiency, thus they need only half of the cooling required by today's coal or nuclear plant cooling towers." LFTRs will be manufactured on an assembly line, dramatically lowering costs and enabling electricity generation at a projected rate of about 3 cents per kilowatt hour, which is cheaper than burning coal for power."