We have the energy answers.

We just need to apply them correctly.

Don’t fear the wall of words. You WANT to read this! You’ll thank me later, I promise.

First, I’ll say it outright. We need to bring more nuclear power plants online - NOW! Whether you like them or not does not matter. We know what happened to Fukushima, we know what happened at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

With today’s technology and lessons learned, we can build plants vastly superior to the ancient creatures we are using today. Also, those existing plants are going away, and right soon.

But the fact is, we are not going to be able to grow our way out of the global economic contraction that started around 2019 with wind and solar tinker toys and no one would tolerate coal on a scale we see being used in places like China, India or even Germany.¹

So for power at scale, we need these things to get us from here to perhaps 2060 or 2070 in some form of productive comfort. Natural gas plants would be a good bridge for now.

But what about waste? What about nuclear proliferation? Hang tight! All will be revealed!

Then there is the cheaper little brother.

There are people now proving out what I have been saying about small, sodium cooled reactors for years. One of them, oddly enough, is Bill Gates. Yes, the guy who wants you to eat bugs while he eats Porterhouse.

Of course, he sees, in his development of anything, profit and personal power. All his buddies in the Davos Cult see things the same way. But even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then.

Just because a man is an amoral, power nut whose made his billions and now is living for pure control, doesn’t mean he must be wrong about everything. In fact, viewing the world through such a lens is precisely why we have so many idiots at the top of the pyramid today.

The fact is small reactors, powered by thorium or similar fuel, work. They cost a fraction of what a large plant costs. Gates, et al, will be building theirs for around $5B. They say, as I predicted way back when in my WordPress days, that each succeeding plant will be cheaper. $1B per unit is realistic.

At that price Delaware County, where I grew up, could power several of their townships off one small plant, without the need for cooling water or the risk of hydrogen explosions.

Where they might be wrong…

But building small reactors purely for power generation may not be the best use for the technology. But it could be an excellent secondary benefit.

I laid out one hyper critical application these Liquid Fluorine reactors would be perfect for in a previous podcast. It was a humdinger! Basically, I said they would make an excellent source of desalinization at scale. This would instantly change the fortunes for all of California, and the farmland surrounding rivers in the Southwest, almost as soon as they are built. But such an idea requires REAL vision. And it would be cheap, considering the benefits. But it absolutely would work. Doubt me not.

If you want to read or listen to that podcast, hit the button. It’s an important article. You really should check it out.

Also, tucked away in a post I am having difficulty finding, I wrote that these reactors can be used to power plants that produce hydrogen in huge quantities, making hydrogen powered vehicles realistic. Ironically, the main ingredient in the process would be ethanol. That’s a far better use for the stuff than putting it in our gas tanks and scorching our cylinders - and far less polluting. Oh, the irony!

Anyway, I hope to find the link to that one before this episode drops.

The bottom line on the small plants is this. You can build them with enough capacity to provide supplemental power for the region while using them efficiently for a specific application.

But back to the original point.

Big BAD nuke plants. We need them. We will not power this nation without them.

But…but…They produce plutonium! Gasp! And that can make nuclear warheads! Gasp! AND they create waste, with which we are already having trouble. Added to that, consider the waste from batteries attached to tinker toys like wind farms and EV’s. Now what?

Well, friends and neighbors, the answer to the latter is stop building the tinker toys. They will NEVER work as advertised and yes, their waste will be a headache. So dump them - NOW - before they become impossible to deal with.

But for nuclear waste, we come back to the small reactors. A Liquid Flourine Thorium Reactor (LFTR) will reduce waste from their more powerful big brothers from something the size of a wine keg down to that of an ashtray. It will all have a smaller half life and store in a facility a tiny fraction the size of Yucca. In fact, Yucca should be building one today to burn down what they already have stored.

$5 Billion or less to solve Yucca? A deal at twice the price. But once this first reactor is proven out, it would be far less than $5B.

The challenge:

A company called NuScale just pulled the plug on small rectors saying they couldn’t find investors enough to pay for the plants to generate power. Well, duh!

The people developing this technology need to go to the people in the country with the most to loose if we don’t bring the little buggers online. We tell the ethanol producers (corporate farms and refiners) we are going to stop putting food in our gas tanks. It’s inefficient. Instead, we are going to expand our hydrogen power technology. And ethanol will be the key to it. But that will require investment in processing, using LFTR’s. But ethanol gasoline is going away - period.

They’ll be happy to invest.

Then you tell the giant farms, especially avacado and almond produces², and the cities of LA and Las Vegas, and the people around the Colorado river (for one): your way of life is going away rapidly. You will not be able to keep sucking up water at the rate you are without a new source. Our rivers are dying. Here’s this idea for desalinization at scale.

They’ll contribute.

Then you issue bonds for the rest. You can go to the bleeding hearts who cry about the environment and water and clean energy, but they won’t contribute. They rarely put their money where their mouth is. But the smart citizens certainly would.

But with the size of the industries we are talking about chipping in a percentage of what would be needed, you might not even have to issue a bond.

There are probably dozens of major industries - hell, entire sectors - who would benefit from applied small nuke power with regional power supplementation on the side. If a car company built a LFTR to power their giant new plant, they could sell all the excess power to the surrounding communities. And they would be far less likely to leave the area on a short term whim.

Consider this. When there is more of something, it becomes cheaper for the consumer. And what if we could make brownouts at peak hours a thing of the past.

Call to action

Email your House and Senate delegations. You have my permission to cut and paste this article for that purpose only. Share the hell out of this post across you social media. Call you power provider.

1. Germany is reverting rapidly from wind and natural gas because wind doesn’t work as advertised (I said it wouldn’t.) and they were cut off from the gas from Russia that they ahd designed their manufacturing around. They fucked up. They trusted the wind hucksters, and they trusted Russia. Stupid twice.

2. Avacados and almonds take an outrageous amount of water to produce one fruit.