Bully's Blog

or Postmillennial Rubbish

Does thinking about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch give you the eco-jitters? Do you shudder at the thought of the world running out of space for landfill? Worry no more. We finally have the answer.

My Christian friend Dave Lankshear and I don’t agree on Genesis or Revelation. He’s as passionate as I am about things, and can get worked up in a debate. But he’s also just as ready to admit when he’s wrong and to be passionate about what’s been corrected.

After doom-and-glooming us all for a couple of years concerning Peak Oil, and begging us to consider renewable energy, he recently shocked me with the following encouraging news. I must admit, as an optimistic postmillennialist, that I half expected this development anyway. God is good.

From Dave (edited by me):

I’m now fairly critical of attempts to make a renewable grid … basically I’ve had long, cranky debates with climatologist Dr Barry Brook … and he convinced me. I’m now a pro-nuclear activist!

They’ve built the technology years ago, but there were problems making it commercially viable. They now want to make these things so small (300 Megawatts) that they can mass-produce them, DELIVER THEM OFF THE BACK OF A TRUCK direct to site and plug them in. Mass-production will also dramatically reduce the cost. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-PRISM

Imagine energy barons ordering them:  ”I’ll have four, and fries with that, as I close down my coal mine!”The power of the atom is SO great that one can take any patch of unremarkable dirt, like your backyard, and mine it! Even at low parts-per-million, there’s enough uranium on our continents to run the world till the Lord returns, even if that’s 200 million years away. Their cycles CANNOT produce nuclear bomb material, but they CAN EAT bombs!:

From 1995 through late 2009, 375 metric tons of highly-enriched uranium from Russian nuclear warheads have been recycled into low-enriched-uranium fuel for U.S. nuclear power plants. This program has eliminated the equivalent of 15,000 nuclear warheads. The Megatons to Megawatts government-to-government program goal of elimination 500 metric tons of warhead material is scheduled to be completed in 2013. [1]

Currently, ten percent of U.S. electricity is produced using this fuel.

I doubt we’d need these reactors in 500 years… by then we’ll have super-cheap batteries that make renewables viable.

But right now, renewables are almost the ENEMY of a real climate and peak oil solution! Can you believe I just said that?

Basically, even if the Gen4 S-PRISM has some kinks to work out, I’m all for building Gen3 reactors because it will give us some clean energy independence and help us prepare for massive electricity demands from electric cars (and electric fast rail to replace planes).

Integral Fast Reactors eat nuclear waste and weapons, burn 90% of the waste, and the 10% that is left over is safe in just 300 years. Today’s nuclear waste could run the world for 500 years without opening a single new uranium mine.

The Trash Vaporizer

James Hansen and Barry Brook are both excited about the following amazing technology as well—plasma recycling. This thing can take council waste, lawn clippings, asbestos, old nappies … and turn the waste into anything from jet-fuel, to toothbrushes, diesel, ELECTRICITY back into the grid, gravel for building roads, and ‘rock-wool’ for making insulation or even replacing fibreglass, but without the toxicity of asbestos!

It’s not ‘burning it’ so much as ripping the waste back into its constituent atoms for reprocessing into almost anything we want to.

So, you could turn dirty nappies into cars, plastic bottles into more plastic bottles, glass into synthetic rock-bricks for building…. it just goes on and on… it can even extract the steel from old car tyres….

Wait, there’s more… it could EVEN FIX DANGEROUS LEAKING radioactive LANDFILLS WITHOUT DIGGING THEM UP by fusing the contaminated soil into sealed slag that’s waterproof. Read Chapter 7 of Blees book here.

Here’s a link to Dave’s blog, EclipseNow. I should stress that Dave is not a postmillennialist.