Monday, May 24, 2010

American Inepitude, Russian Initiative.

Last week I went on a long walk followed by a 30 mile bike ride with Tom Blees, author of Prescription for the Planet, a must-read for anyone. He's a fisherman-turned-nuclear-power advocate; you can imagine his life story being an interesting read in and of itself. In what turned out to be a 5 hour conversation, he explained, in so many words, that the United States will not be the leader in next-generation clean energy. According to Mr. Blees, all the solar panels and wind turbines in the world will never amount to the potential of Integral Fast Reactors. No, for this, we have to turn to the Russians for leadership. Blees has been in close contact with a physicist named Roald Sagdeev (I believe that's his name), who seems to be spearheading the Russian effort to adopt next-gen nuclear power. Blees himself may be a speaker at an important meeting to be attended by Gorbachev. It seems that the Russians know that their fossil fuel infrastructure has a limited shelf life, and they're ready to make the gradual transition to a majority nuclear infrastructure. They sell natural gas to Western Europe, as well as to several other Slavic nations (powerful leveraging within trade disputes and such). However, natural gas probably has a shelf life of only a couple of decades; Russia plans on adopting IFR plants along the natural gas pipeline to essentially improve efficiency. Once its natural gas runs out or is no longer viable as an energy source, Russia then goes completely nuclear (in the peaceful sense, of course). The result is that Russia has made tens of billions of dollars based on selling cheap electricity to its richer neighbors, who may toil away in a quixotic quest to harness the power of the sun, while Russia itself has a jumpstart on the world with the more efficient and more plentiful nuclear technology.

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