David Archibald
One of the first things the new administration will do is issue a report saying global warming is nonsense. When Trump was last president, he met with Will Harper, a distinguished professor of physics at Princeton University, before the inauguration to launch the report. Unfortunately, the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, said Republican women will not take kindly to stopping global warming. So no report was issued, and good-hearted Professor Harper returned to Princeton. Global warming is still here thanks to Jared Kushner’s malign influence. Eight years have been lost.
Not a single government on Earth has issued a report saying global warming is fiction; nor has any university. Global warming is the primary religion of globalists. This is their moral cover for killing and torturing the rest of us. Without global warming to justify their regulations on gas stoves, vacuum cleaners and washing machines, they are just psychopaths.
That's a thing of the past. The report is expected to be released shortly after the inauguration. This, in turn, would leave a vacuum in energy policy. Don’t worry about President Trump’s promise to cut energy prices at least in half in his first year in office. Judging from the current oil prices, the number of oil drilling rigs is showing a downward trend. If oil prices don't rise, no one will dig or drill faster. The only reason natural gas prices are low right now is because tight oil wells in the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico are increasing the gas-to-oil production ratio. This is a bad sign, not a good one, because it means the rate at which reservoir pressure is falling is increasing, which in turn means oil production from each well will fall faster.
So what is the overall situation of energy? First, we know what not to do, which is add more solar panels and wind turbines. Our children and grandchildren will not inherit these things; their fate will be landfill. Fortunately, big tech companies have broken the logjam on small nuclear reactors, and a nuclear renaissance is well underway. In theory, the federal government should sit back and let the market determine what is the best nuclear technology.
But there are steps the new Trump administration can take to speed things up and reduce risks for commercial operators, which will ultimately lead to faster adoption of new technologies and lower prices for consumers.
First, we need Phase 3 synthetic fuels research in the United States. The first phase was the late 1940s at the Bergius plant in Pike County, Missouri, which produced synthetic oil from coal. German engineers helped put it into operation. The second phase was the construction of the Great Plains Synfuels plant in Beulah, North Dakota, in 1984. This was the result of the Natural Gas Act of 1938. The plant has recently been optimized to produce nitrogen fertilizer.
Incidentally, in 2021, the Sri Lankan state conducted an experiment to ban the use of synthetic fertilizers out of eco-religious fervor. Rice production fell by 30%, tea production by 20% and vegetable production by 40%. The government was overthrown and starvation was barely averted.
The reason we need Phase 3 of synthetic fuels research is because there are signs that tight oil production appears to be about to enter a decline. Once oil prices top $110 a barrel, plants that convert coal into synthetic liquid fuels should profit. But it would be better to use hydrogen produced by electrolysis in a nuclear reactor rather than the steam reforming portion of the process stream. This will allow our coal reserves to last longer. This had never been done before because it was always assumed that coal would always remain cheap. With the demon of carbon dioxide gone, converting coal into diesel and gasoline will be the next big thing. Anyone who owns a coal deposit will effectively own an oil deposit of the same energy content, but with lower switching costs.
The second big thing the Trump administration could do is build one or more demonstration plants for spent nuclear fuel reprocessing. Currently, the U.S. nuclear power industry produces 2,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel per year, with current production at 90,000 tons. Currently the dominant nuclear technology in the world is U235– Combustion light water reactor. This is extremely wasteful. Under this technology, uranium dug out of the ground is processed to enrich it235 Contents range from 0.7% to 3.5%. What remains is 86% of the original uranium, which was actually discarded as depleted uranium and is now 99.8% U238. Its only use is in depleted uranium anti-tank rounds, and even though it weighs the same, it will produce the same energy as uranium if grown into plutonium.235.
Of the 14 percent uranium that makes up the fuel rods, only one-thirtieth is burned to produce energy. This means that only 0.4% of the uranium originally mined is used to generate electricity. This process has gone on for decades and is extremely wasteful. It's like killing a cow and only eating its tongue.
It is speculated that the cost of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel is high, more expensive than mining uranium, and the yellowcake price may be as high as $250/lb. But as SpaceX has shown, private operators can replace some government monopolies with only 10% of the latter's operating costs. The solution could be as simple as passing spent nuclear fuel through a molten salt reactor, which separates out the actinides while producing electricity. We won't know until we start, and the important thing is to start in early 2025.
David Archibald is the author of “American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare”
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