Winning, David. 2009. "Out of the Ashes: A Small Mining Company Has Big Plans to Sell the Uranium Left Over When Coal Is Burned." Wall Street Journal (22 February): Journal Report.
Sparton Resources Inc., a small Toronto mining company, is betting that a global renaissance in nuclear power will create a market for an unlikely fuel source: waste coal ash. Natural coal contains trace amounts of uranium, and when it is burned to produce electricity, varying amounts of the radioactive element are left behind in the ash. Sparton has developed a method for recovering it and says a project under way at a coal-fired power station in southwestern China is yielding uranium that could be reused as a fuel for nuclear reactors.
It's the stupidity, stupid. The "news" media will glorify anything it can find in order to sell big tires and lip gloss while protecting the current rent system.
ReplyDeleteWhy is it that India and China have active projects in LFTR and we have zip? There is also "Traveling Wave" and other new ideas and we sit on our hands and commission yet another dinosaur reactor.
It is because the aristocracy seeks to prolong its current method of rent as long as possible. There is far too much energy invested in the old way of doing things and not near enough concern for the future. Everything we do seems to be a rehash of the past. Keynes and Hayek are dead. So is FDR.
Then comes Mosler. He also does not have the golden fleece but he has part of the puzzle pretty well managed. The guy can't even get a hearing. "The future's so bright, we gotta wear shades". I will be 65 in March of this year and I have more imagination and curiosity than the younger people. It isn't supposed to work that way. The K12 system is terribly broken and it is broken because the people that are supposed to be the leaders put way too much focus on the universities, refusing to acknowledge that ignorance of custom has a certain advantage in realization of new technology. We focus way too much on debt to the past and on the staid and old institutions. The elite see K12 education as the means to assure a regimented mob for further doctrinaire development.
Mosler misses the _FACT_ that banks actually do create permanent money even more so than does government. He claims that bank money nets to zero and that is a very big flaw in his alleged thinking. Still, he has uncovered a fundamental truth concerning fiat money and bank money as well.
And technological innovation in nuclear and other fields is being starved because of these investments in current institutions that are nothing more than indoctrination centers.
LFTR?
ReplyDeleteThe Liquid Floride Torium Reactor (LFTR) is an air cooled, low pressure, safe nuclear design that produces much less radioactive wastes using thorium as opposed to uranium as a fuel source.
ReplyDeleteThe 16 minute preview
The longer discussion
You mean "Thorium," right?
ReplyDelete(sigh) Yes.
ReplyDeleteIt is all _rent_. All the time. It is "protect the investments in uranium processing and in Yucca Mountain". We be sooooooooooo slooooooooooooow!
And then there's the moonbat brigade and the environmental warriors that need pandering and petting too.
It is to puke.