RedStateEclectic

Down Deep

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Matt Ridely reminds us:

It was the American senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who once said: “You are entitled to your opinions, but not to your own facts.” In the debate over shale gas – I refuse to call it the fracking debate since fracking has been happening in this country for decades – the opponents do seem to be astonishingly cavalier with the facts.

Here are five things that they keep saying which are just not true. First, that shale gas production has polluted aquifers in the United States. Second, that it releases more methane than other forms of gas production. Third, that it uses a worryingly large amount of water. Fourth, that it uses hundreds of toxic chemicals. Fifth, that it causes damaging earthquakes.

See Shale Gas (Fracking) Opponents Entitled to Their Own Facts.

 

A Note on Yolanda

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Today in the morning,

writes Czech blogger Luboš Motl

I was stunned by the dishonesty of the professional climate alarmists again. Their moral defects are just shocking. It seems completely obvious to me that they must know that they are lying 24 hours a day.

This controversy is about the claim that the typhoon Haiyan was the strongest tropical cyclone that ever made a landfall, and so on. You can see this preposterous misinformation almost everywhere. For example, start with the first sentence of the Wikipedia article on Typhoon Haiyan.

All the mistakes are completely obvious and demonstrable, as I will argue below, but it is impossible to even fix basic errors on the Wikipedia page, or elsewhere. Such pages are being controlled by obsessed hardcore climate alarmist trolls and crackpots. They are just completely blind and deaf to any evidence and they revert any edit that would try to fix the basic mistakes.

So let's look at some real numbers and the origin of the flawed numbers.

Make sure to consult the facts at the source.

In an article entitled "Global warming isn't to blame for the disaster in the Philippines," The Spectator quotes the eminent US-researcher Indur Goklany:

Currently many advocate spending trillions of dollars to reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gases, in part to forestall hypothetical future increases in mortality from global warming induced increases in extreme weather events.  Spending even a fraction of such sums on the numerous higher priority health and safety problems plaguing humanity would provide greater returns for human well-being.

[...T]he average annual deaths and death rates from all extreme weather events has declined by more than 90 per cent since 1920. This decline occurred despite a vast increase in the populations at risk and more complete coverage of extreme weather events. Goklany also shows that, globally, the number of deaths and death rates due to storms (including hurricanes, cyclones, tornados, typhoons) have declined by 47 per cent and 70 per cent respectively since the 1970s. [...]

People around the world who are exposed to natural hazards are increasingly relying on the effectiveness of warning systems.  Disaster warning systems are most effective for natural catastrophes that develop gradually and relatively slowly, such as floods or tropical cyclones. Only two months ago, a fierce cyclone ripped along India’s east coast. It only killed 25 people as millions of people were evacuated in advance of the tropical cyclone, thus minimising the number of fatalities. 14 years earlier, over 10,000 people were killed in a similar cyclone that arrived without much warning.

Even poor countries such as Bangladesh, which is especially vulnerable to cyclones, have learnt how to prepare for the recurrent threat of cyclones and have succeeded in significantly reducing cyclone-related deaths. The two deadliest cyclones in Bangladesh’s history occurred in 1970 and 1991, killing 500,000 and almost 140,000 people respectively. In the last two decades, Bangladesh has introduced better warning systems that have helped to reduce deaths and injuries from cyclones significantly. A severe cyclone in 2007, for instance, caused 4,234 deaths, a 100-fold reduction compared with the devastating cyclone of 1970.

The source.

Chernobyl - Life in the Exclusion Zone

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Watch this remarkable report about people who have been living in the Chernobyl exclusion zone for almost 30 years:

 

The source.

See also my Chernobyl and Fukushima, Hiroshima Victims Live Longer, Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, Fukushima 2013, Fukushima - Level 7 (note many interesting links at the bottom of the post), and Colt Revolvers and Nuclear Plants.

San Franciscan Sea Lebrities

Great pic of San Fransisco, and some of its inhabitants.

For more see here. Also of interest: An Ecuadorian Market.

 

And another pic:

Anthropocene

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In the spirit of Julian Simon Professor Erle C. Ellis reminds us:

The science of human sustenance is inherently a social science. Neither physics nor chemistry nor even biology is adequate to understand how it has been possible for one species to reshape both its own future and the destiny of an entire planet. This is the science of the Anthropocene. The idea that humans must live within the natural environmental limits of our planet denies the realities of our entire history, and most likely the future. Humans are niche creators. We transform ecosystems to sustain ourselves. This is what we do and have always done. Our planet’s human-carrying capacity emerges from the capabilities of our social systems and our technologies more than from any environmental limits.

Two hundred thousand years ago we started down this path. The planet will never be the same. It is time for all of us to wake up to the limits we really face: the social and technological systems that sustain us need improvement.

There is no environmental reason for people to go hungry now or in the future. There is no need to use any more land to sustain humanity — increasing land productivity using existing technologies can boost global supplies and even leave more land for nature — a goal that is both more popular and more possible than ever.

The only limits to creating a planet that future generations will be proud of are our imaginations and our social systems. In moving toward a better Anthropocene, the environment will be what we make it.

The source.

See also my How Much Destructiveness Can Man Afford? and Greed versus Self-Interest and The Sport of Facile Killing ... and Matt Ridley's Falling Population, More Wilderness in 2100

Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and Fukushima

Following up on my post Fukushima - August 2013,  I offer this intriguing account of questionable journalistic reports concerning the damaged nuclear plant at Fukushima. First, take a close look at the below two pictures (click to enlarge):

Hiroshima:

Chernobyl:

ABC journalist Mark Willacy recently launched a book: “Fukushima: Japan’s tsunami and the inside story of the nuclear meltdowns”. The ABC is giving the book plenty of exposure and gave Willacy time off to write it.

Back in March this year I wrote an article on poll results exposing deep nuclear ignorance in Australia. Only 10 percent of Australians understood clearly that a nuclear explosion was impossible in a nuclear reactor. The other 90 percent occupied various positions along a spectrum between certainty of the facts and being equally certain that the impossible was possible.

Willacy doesn’t just believe that the impossible is possible, but that it’s already happened. His book reveals similar knowledge deficits not only in the Japanese public, but in many of those who oversaw Japan’s Fukushima meltdown response, including nuclear industry workers.

Willacy states clearly (p.128) that the Chernobyl reactor underwent a nuclear explosion in 1986. Not true or even possible. Power reactor fuel is simply wrong stuff. It’s as different from bomb material as potting soil is from gun powder. And even if you loaded a reactor with bomb grade enriched uranium, there’s no detonation mechanism. Designing and building the latter is one the hardest design jobs in building a nuclear bomb.

Confusion about categories of explosions may seem a small thing, but we’ll see that it extends to a more general ignorance about the nature and scale of radiation risks.

Explosion types, no small matter

Here’s a couple of pictures illustrating the difference between what Willacy claimed happened at Chernobyl and what actually happened … a steam explosion. The image on the left is of a nuclear explosion (the World War II Hiroshima bombing) which flattened about 700 hectares of buildings and killed about 60,000 people with its blast heat and pressure waves. An additional similar number died in the following weeks from various injuries, including radiation received from the blast. The image on the right is the aftermath of the Chernobyl explosion … a steam explosion which blew the top off the reactor, killed two workers and mangled a building. But, as you can see, it didn’t even have enough power to knock over a tower a few metres away from the blast.

A steam explosion, together with a larger radiation release could definitely have happened at Fukushima if workers at the plant hadn’t succeeded in releasing steam (including radioactive material) from the reactors. This was definitely worth avoiding, but it could never have been a nuclear explosion. Nor could it have possibly killed any workers in the anti-seismic command bunker hundreds of meters away. The worker death fears described by Willacy were clearly very real to them, but they weren’t at any risk of death other than when out of the bunker and close to the reactor. As at Chernobyl and at the recent fertiliser explosion at West near Waco in the US, it’s usually the firefighters taking the big risks. The West explosion left a 93-foot crater and killed 14 people, mostly the firies … this was a much, much bigger bang than Chernobyl. The 1947 Texas fertiliser explosion was a very much bigger bang again, it levelled 1,000 buildings, killed 581 people and even knocked a couple of planes out of the sky.

But Chernobyl was certainly the biggest ever nuclear accident, and also probably the biggest ever journalism screw-up. A few days after the accident, current economics editor at The Age, Tim Colebatch, reported a Western diplomat citing a Kiev source that 2,000 dead was in “the right ball park”. The UK daily papers screamed that number in huge print. The Daily Mail ran with ’2,000 dead’ in atom horror while The Daily Express ran with Nuclear nightmare is here “More than 2,000 dead, Thousands more doomed, Help us! plea to the west”. The Sun added a mushroom cloud for good measure.

Nobody, it seems, even bothered to ask if this number was even plausible. It wasn’t. How can you kill 2,000 people when a reactor like this typically has a staff of less than 200? Fatal radiation doses typically take weeks to kill, so how do you kill 2,000 people in just days? The 29 firefighters who died at Chernobyl did so over a three month period, with 5 dying from burns. Anybody who bothered to fact-check their story against what happened during the atomic bombings of Japan in World War II would know there could be no deaths in four days except from the explosion and that no reactor explosion could kill more than the immediate staff. That sloppy journalism has been rattling around for over 25 years with a devastating legacy. Now the ABC and Mark Willacy’s book are giving it new legs with false claims about nuclear explosions.

The talk of Tokyo evacuation was totally unfounded

Perhaps the then Prime Minister Naoto Kan shares Willacy’s false belief about the Chernobyl explosion? We have to assume, based on Willacy’s account, that Kan was seriously worried about the possibility of having to evacuate Tokyo and of the possible end of Japan as a world power. Were such concerns warranted? Willacy’s frequent mention of them without comment or analysis gives them an unwarranted credibility.

Consider again Chernobyl with its full blown steam explosion and much larger radiation release. The three surrounding countries, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia all experienced extensive radioactive contamination and for the past 27 years more than a few people have been eating food with levels of radioactivity frequently far higher than current Japanese regulations permit. And the outcome?

All up, there have been about 14 million cases of cancer (based on national statistics available on Globocan) in the three countries. Had the three countries experienced Australian or US cancer levels, there would have been some 20 million cancers … an extra 6 million. Willacy cites an estimate that the eventual Chernobyl cancer death toll might be 4,000. Even if true, this pales next to the impact of far more potent carcinogens than radiation. Simply being fat is a far more potent cancer risk for the individual concerned than the kinds of radiation doses received by any member of the public from either the Fukushima failures or the Chernobyl accident.

These are the solid statistics which Willacy either doesn’t know or has chosen not to include in his account for whatever reason.

Instead, Willacy gives legitimacy to talk of a Tokyo evacuation as if it was a real prospect because of real risks. The Chernobyl experience shows this to be simply false.

Are there any real large new cancer risks in Japan?

It’s worth discussing one cancer in some detail to understand the difference between the big players on the cancer stage and the small time grifters like radiation. Consider bowel cancer. Willacy could have done a story on the epidemic of bowel cancer in Japan any time since his posting to the country. The rise of bowel cancer in Japan over recent times hasn’t just been a possible worst case rise of a few percent in some people that full blown reactor steam explosions may have caused, but an actual rise of about 500 percent which has turned a minor cancer in Japan’s health system into a major one. There are now 80,000 extra bowel cancer cases in Japan every year compared to the 1970s. There were once 20,000 new cases annually and there are now over 100,000 with only a small population increase. This is a real 500 percent per person increase.

Let me repeat, as things stand, the bowel cancer epidemic will produce 3.2 million extra bowel cancers in Japan over the next 40 years compared to a disputed estimate of 4,000 extra cancer deaths due to the Chernobyl accident over a similar period. This is the difference between the cancer players and the wannabes.

What caused this bowel cancer increase? The World Cancer Research Fund is pretty much the IPCC of the cancer world and it summarises the state of cancer research in reports every decade. It had suspicions about possible culprits in its 1997 report, but confirmation of the possibilities only came in its 2007 update and subsequent followup statements. Of all the diet and lifestyle changes in Japan in past decades, there is only one with a demonstrated solid causal connection to bowel cancer … the increase in red and processed meat intake. The other significant lifestyle cause of bowel cancer in the west is obesity, but rates in Japan are still very low.

Real tragedies can be too hard to report

Interspersed within the body of what is primarily a book about the triple reactor meltdowns are heart rending accounts of personal tragedy wrought by the tsunami and its preceding earth-quake. These interludes are so truly gut wrenching that a return to the story of the meltdowns comes as a welcome relief. A book dominated by an accurate account of the tsunami would be well nigh unreadable, but when Willacy returns to the nuclear failure storyline, there are no deaths and very few injuries to describe, so the accounts of horror, death and despair give way to fascinating tales of cabals and corruption, intrigue and incompetence, cover-up and confusion. This is mixed in with accounts of the heroic deeds of firefighters and nuclear staff at the stricken reactors. It’s only when we get to the evacuation that Willacy returns to chronicling death and despair. But suddenly Willacy’s skepticism and investigative skills evaporate, he never questions whether the evacuation was necessary, or who should take responsibility for its deadly outcomes and ongoing impacts.

Alternative scenarios to the evacuation

Was the evacuation required? What were the alternatives?

Suppose for example, that the 150,000 Fukushima evacuees had been resettled in Australia. What would happen to their cancer risk? Particularly with regard to the children?

Their cancer rates would rise. How much? Perhaps as much as 50 percent. The age standardised cancer rate for Japan is about 200 per 100,000 per year compared to 314 per 100,000 per year in Australia. To the extent they adopted Australian lifestyles, the cancer rate rise in the adults might be small (a slow decade by decade increase). But the cancer rates in their children as adults would quickly rise toward Australian levels. This is a much studied global phenomenon (see the World Cancer Research Fund’s 2007 report for a readable account).

How would this level of change in cancer risk, particularly for children, compare with living in the Fukushima exclusion zone? Experts pretty much agree that single radiation doses in the range of 100 mSv will raise cancer risk by, at most, a few percent. Most of the exclusion zone wouldn’t even deliver this much radiation over the course of a year and radiation levels are dropping rapidly. Is there an expert anywhere willing to suggest that living in the evacuation area would raise cancer rates by 50 percent? Not likely.

The implication is clear. The evacuation was ordered to prevent a risk far smaller than the risk of moving to Australia. Willacy documents the tragedy of this misguided policy with great detail. The evacuation caused immense and on-going suffering. Everything from suicide by self-immolation to elderly people being left to die in nursing homes. Animals also paid a high price with many thousands left to starve. Was so much death and despair a good choice over a trivial risk? A risk lower than that of moving to Australia? Pretty obviously not. So why was it ordered? What kind of advice was Kan being given? Did he reject rationality to pander to anti-nuclear panic merchants or were his advisers simply incompetent?

That’s a book that needs to be written.

The source.

Fukushima - August 2013

Jimmy Lawlor, Sound Byte; image credit.

(NOTE UPDATES BELOW)

Not politically correct for libertarians, it appears from browsing Lew Rockwell's tabloid, I venture to argue nevertheless (more in sync with Ted Rockwell), the below report on Fukushima (August 2013) is well-worth reading:

The situation is this. The melted-down cores at the damaged reactors (the site is not "crippled", two reactors were undamaged and will return to service) are still hot - though much less hot than they were two years ago - and need to be cooled. This is done by pumping water through their buildings, then sucking it out again and putting it into holding tanks before purifying it to remove the radiation it picks up from the cores. Then it gets used again.

What has happened is that one of the holding tanks, containing water that had only been through one stage of purification, has sprung a leak and about 300,000 litres of water has got out. Almost all of this was contained by a backup dam which had been built around the tanks when they were set up (this is the nuclear industry, there is always a backup). However, "two shallow puddles" of the water got out of the dam via a rainwater drain valve which has since been sealed off.

The water is quite radioactive, and dose rates measured next to the puddles were 100 milliSieverts per hour. Nuclear powerplant workers, whose cancer rate is somewhat lower than in the general population (probably because they don't smoke so much) are allowed to sustain 50 millisievert in any one year in normal times and average doses across five years of 20 millisievert/yr.

However what Reuters haven't picked up on is that the high 100 milliSievert reading is for beta radiation only. The reading for gamma rays is only 1.5 milliSieverts per hour.

As we no doubt all recall from skool, beta radiation is not very penetrating: it can't get through human skin and it only travels a few feet through air. So you'd have to stand very close indeed to the two puddles, in them probably, for their beta rays even to reach you. A sturdy pair of wellingtons would have a good protective effect, if you should do this. As far as beta radiation is concerned, the only ways to seriously harm yourself with that water would be to get it on your exposed skin and leave it there for some time, or to drink it. This is also true of many domestic cleaning products.

The gamma hazard is noticeable, you wouldn't want to take up residence next to the pool of water, but you could work for days around it without breaching normal nuclear-worker health limits and the crews in the vicinity are being rotated regularly. Tepco is pumping all the water back into another tank pending purification, and segregating wet soil from the area. The firm told WNN that it has no indication so far of any water having got into a drainage channel or otherwise left the area.

So this is a pretty minor industrial-waste spill; thousands of more serious accidents occur every single day.

It's not global news. It's not national news. It would barely even be local news, in a sane world.

But it's not a sane world, and the media crusade against nuclear power rolls on.

The source. And the source's source.

UPDATES:

See also Fear Mongering over WATER Leaks at Fukushima Dai-ichi.

Update on Fukushima Water Leans - Unrepresentative Sample Used to Support Fear Mongering.

For more posts at RSE, see Fukushima - Level 7, which includes a number of insightful links.

Incidentally, when watching the women's world championship soccer final in 2011, the German commentator kept referring to "the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe" (as is the mindless habit of countless of my compatriots to this day), which I found most irritating as no nuclear catastrophe had occurred, which should have been a reason to celebrate. At the same time, the real catastrophe was/is not worth mentioning: the nuclear-unrelated deaths of 20 000 Japanese.

In Praise of Fossil Fuel

Greenpeace activists invade a Shell refinery in Denmark dressed in oil-based Polar Bear party costumes.

The stuff is so good, you even need it to stage a protest against it, to get to the event, to disseminate the unhappy message, etc. 

In the sequel to his excellent post on how Fossil Fuels Improve the Planet, Alex Epstein discusses why the oil industry is fundamentally a force for good in human life.

Imagine you are an advertising executive, and a CEO asks you: “Do you think you can help improve the reputation of my industry?”

You respond, “Sure, what are some ways your industry makes people’s lives better?”

He replies, “Well, actually, our product helps people in just about everything they do. This past year, it helped take 4 million newlyweds to their dream destinations for their honeymoons. It helped bring 300 million Americans to their favorite places: yoga studios, soccer games, friends’ houses. It made possible the bulletproof vests that protect 500,000 policemen a year and the fire-resistant jackets that protect 1,000,000 firefighters a year.” [1][2]

“If you do all that, how could you be unpopular?”

“We’re the oil industry.”

Why is the oil industry so hated? After all, the oil industry does everything I said above, and many more wonderful things.

Make sure to read the entire article.

See also The Economics of Lushness.

The Vision of the Anointed and Science in the Public Square

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I encourage our audience to read Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed, a book that deals in systematic fashion with the techniques of self-delusion and manipulation of the public, of which the global warming scare is a significant contemporary instance, as Richard Lindzen explains in the below video clip. In the last chapter of Sowell's book, "Optional Reality," the author observes:

The vision of the anointed (less charitably known as statist do-gooders) has become

independent of empirical evidence. That is what makes it dangerous, not because a particular set of policies may be flawed or counterproductive, but because insulation from evidence virtually guarantees a never-ending supply of policies and practices fatally independent of reality. This self-contained and self-justifying vision has become a badge of honor and a proclamation of identity: To affirm it is to be one of us and to oppose it is to be one of them. Moreover, the pervasiveness of the vision of the anointed at all levels of the American educational system ensures future supplies of people indoctrinated with this vision and also convinced that they should "make a difference"--that public policy-making is to be seen as ego gratification from imposing one's vision on other people through the power of government.

From: Sowell, T. (1995), The Vision of the Anointed. Self-Congratualtion as a Basis for Social Policy, New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 241

The inestimable Richard Lindzen on "what happens to science in the public square."

Apologies: for some reason the video commences 9 minutes into the lecture, to get to the start (which you should not miss) you will have to adjust the time mark manually.

 

See also Against Political Biology.

Green Sprawl Stifling Science - Liberty Submerged

The new National Geographic cover shows the Statue of Liberty covered in 65m (214ft) of water — 80 times more than even the highest expected sea level rise in the upcoming IPCC report.

The source.

One of the worst aspects of green ludditism and the attendant abuse of science for political and quasi-religious purposes is the effective prohibition of unhampered research into technologies truly capable of dealing with the challenges of mankind's future. Our age will be remembered as an age when political leaders and broad sections of the population believed that good science is to be found in the intersection of political propaganda, its simplistic echos in the media, and the gullibility of the rationally ignorant voter.

Policy measures to combat climate change that favour ‘green’ energy technologies go against the engineering principles that decoupled the costs of energy and human labour. Professor Colin McInnes FREng FRSE believes that reversing transitions to higher energy density and moving towards spatially diffuse and intermittent energy sources is a recipe for a future of energy austerity.

When James Watt’s separate steam condenser began to displace Thomas Newcomen’s early atmospheric engine, it did not require government targets or financial incentives to encourage the take-up of the technology. Watt’s idea succeeded simply because it took less than half as much coal to deliver the same quantity of mechanical work. Watt’s innovation was part of a long-term trend in energy production; it was part of a continuous move towards using fuels of greater energy density and so lower carbon intensity.

The beginning of the transition from wood to coal in the Elizabethan era allowed us to escape from the photosynthetic limit of diffuse biomass. This was followed much later by oil, methane (natural gas) and now uranium. Each new fuel has a higher energy density and lower carbon intensity than the last, with methane releasing about half as much carbon dioxide as coal per unit of energy produced and nuclear being essentially carbon-free.

That evolution has, so far, relied primarily on carbon-rich fuels. If we now want to displace carbon from energy production – to meet policy goals on climate change – we had better come up with something better and cheaper than coal, and ultimately oil. The answer is not, though, to abandon the pursuit of higher energy density.

As it stands, today’s policies ignore the lessons of engineering history. We now seem determined to replace historical transitions toward fuels of greater energy density with diffuse energy production. This step will require vast quantities of materials, land and subsidies, misallocating economic resources that we could use more productively elsewhere. We should, therefore, treat with caution talk of a ‘green energy revolution’.

Many forms of green energy are spatially diffuse and intermittent, making them inefficient and inherently expensive. Therein lies the need for feed-in tariffs and other support mechanisms. Green energy is set to grow, not because it is more productive, like Watt’s separate steam condenser, but because government mandates it and provides generous incentives. An energy transition that leads to more expensive, less efficient energy production is more a regression than a revolution.

In choosing to make energy more expensive, we should remember that, with James Watt’s development of efficient steam power, hydrocarbon-fuelled machines replaced carbohydrate-fuelled human labour. In the late industrial revolution, this decoupled the costs of energy and labour for the first time in human history. Energy became cheap while human labour became more expensive and so our prosperity soared.

Our entire modern economy is built on this remarkable decoupling. In contrast, our headlong rush into expensive green energy risks sacrificing jobs elsewhere in the economy: it also threatens large tracts of the British landscape and hits the pockets of those who can ill afford higher energy bills.

As engineers, we should insist that energy policy sets out to deliver lower costs, security of supply, and now a transition to lower-carbon energy. This will require greater use of methane and uranium and less use of coal and, ultimately, oil. A number of new technologies could help us to achieve these transitions.

For example, while modern power stations have come a long way since Watt’s steam engine, we still generate much of the world’s electricity by heating water and then extracting useful work. A recent exciting innovation has been the demonstration of energy conversion using supercritical carbon dioxide as a working fluid, akin to a jet engine running on hot liquid. Not unlike Watt’s separate steam condenser, this offers a step change in the efficiency of turning heat into useful work in future thermal plants.

Other recent developments include China’s new national programme to develop next generation molten-salt thorium nuclear reactors. This high temperature, low pressure fuel cycle fissions all of its fertile thorium fuel and leaves only short-lived waste products with a half life of around 30 years. Again, this innovation could be on a par with Watt’s separate steam condenser. It appears that even now some producers of rare-Earth metals are storing rather than discarding thorium, as a waste product, in anticipation of its use as a future nuclear fuel.

Support for the energy sector, and in particular energy innovation, is of course essential. But we need to distinguish between supporting innovation and subsidising commercial-scale energy production. Significant subsidies for production consume economic resources that could help deliver future energy innovation.

As the UK drives forward with an ambitious programme to deploy various forms of green energy, it is becoming clear that a combination of energy-dense, lower-carbon methane, partly from expanding reserves of shale gas in the UK and elsewhere, together with uranium, and later thorium, can be the key fuels of the future. This combination can provide the foundations of an energy policy to deliver future abundant, clean energy from compact power plants.

The era of cheap energy is over only if we choose so. If we use technical innovation to accelerate, rather than supplant, moves towards greater energy density, we can deliver energy that is both cheaper and more abundant. And, as a useful side effect, we will help de-carbonise our economy in the process.

The source.