# “Nuclear Fission Fuel is Inexhaustible”

Providing energy for a global economy in which billions of people in developing countries aspire to a lifestyle similar to that of Europe, North America, and East Asia is one of the most daunting challenges of the 21st century. Even with all of the potentials for improving efficiency in energy use, this will require a dramatic increase in energy production and consumption. The U.S. Energy Information Administration forecast in 2019 that global energy use would increase almost 50% between 2018 and 2050 (“EIA projects nearly 50% increase in world energy usage by 2050, led by growth in Asia”), and this does not account for increasing the standard of living for the burgeoning population of Africa.

(Many different units are used to discuss large quantities of energy. The graph above uses “quads”, or quadrillion (10^{15}) British Thermal Units. The SI unit of energy is the joule, and a comparable quantity is the exajoule (EJ), with:

1\ {\rm EJ} = 10^{18}\ {\rm joule}= 0.948\ {\rm quad} = 9.48\times 10^{14}\ {\rm BTU}

Smaller quantities of energy are sometimes expressed in terawatt hours, with one exajoule equal to around 278 terawatt hours.)

Meeting these needs will require the development of new energy resources and the means to deliver them worldwide. Currently, fossil fuels supply around 85% of world energy needs. Producing the additional energy with the same mix of fuels risks exhausting supplies recoverable at an affordable price, altering Earth’s climate due to releasing combustion products into the atmosphere, geopolitical instability due to concentration of resources in certain geographical regions, and pollution due to production, refining, transportation, and combustion of fuels. All of these concerns have motivated searches for other energy sources which do not run these risks.

The term of art for the goal of this quest is “sustainable energy”, which is often taken to imply “renewable energy” produced from sources such as hydroelectric, photoelectric solar, or wind power, all of which are ultimately ways of exploiting the energy of the Sun which, while neither renewable nor sustainable, may be expected to substantially exceed the time horizon of “policy makers”. Unfortunately, these resources are limited in quantity and either largely already exploited (hydroelectric) or intermittent (solar, wind) and poorly suited to provide reliable, inexpensive, “base load” power.

Using the United States as a proxy for the developed world, let’s look at an energy source and use flowchart for the U.S. in 2018 prepared by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, found and posted here in an earlier discussion by @drlorentz. (Click image to enlarge).

Since U.S. consumption happened to be 101.2 quads, you can read the numbers in the chart as percentages with only a little imprecision. While those speaking of “sustainable energy” often concentrate on sources of electricity, note that electricity currently accounts for less than 40% of energy use, with the balance direct consumption for space heating, transportation, industrial process heat, and other applications. Thus, any proposed energy source which produces electricity must, to replace current fossil fuel consumption, also imply the electrification of those uses which, in itself, may be a challenging prospect. Battery technology has only recently made electric automobiles marginally practical, and is far from that required to replace turbine engines for air transport. Electrification of other large bulk uses of energy will require dramatic expansion of the electrical grid, from bulk distribution through local delivery to consumers.

When its development began in the 1950s, power generated by nuclear fission was heralded as the energy source for the future. I am old enough to remember when the “atomic age” was used in a non-ironic fashion. The energy density of uranium, exploited optimally, is more than a million times greater than than of fossil fuels, and producing electricity from it emits no carbon dioxide, smoke, or noxious gas pollutants. Since its energy density is so great, nuclear power plants are compact and require little land compared to low density sources such as solar power farms or wind turbine arrays. Finally, the mining and refining of the small quantities of uranium fuel required and the modest quantities of radioactive waste produced have a small environmental impact compared to producing, transporting, and burning fossil fuels.

But due to historical accidents, lack of imagination, government bungling and regulation, incompetent engineering and operation leading to a small number of highly-visible accidents, fear mongering by media and ignorant advocates of other technologies or abandonment of our energy-intensive modern civilisation, nuclear fission power never achieved the ambitious goals (“too cheap to meter”) it originally seemed to promise.

Today, nuclear power is not usually considered among the “sustainable” alternatives to fossil fuels and, since it relies upon uranium as a fuel, of which a finite supply exists on Earth, is classified as “non-renewable” and hence not viable as a long-term energy source. But what do you mean “long-term”, anyway? Eventually, the Sun will burn out, after all, so even solar isn’t forever. Will ten thousand years or so do for now, until we can think of something better?

Energy “experts” scoff at the long-term prospects for nuclear fission power, observing that known worldwide reserves of uranium, used in present-day reactor designs, would suffice for only on the order of a century if nuclear power were to replace all primary power generation sources presently in use. But is this correct? In fact, this conclusion stems not from science and technology, but stupidity and timidity, and nuclear fission is a “bird in the hand” solution to the world’s energy problems awaiting only the courage and will to deploy it.

That is the conclusion by the authors of a paper with the same title as this post, “Nuclear Fission Fuel is Inexhaustible” [PDF, 8 pages], presented at the IEEE EIC Climate Change Conference in Ottawa, Canada in May 2006. Here is the abstract:

Nuclear fission energy is as inexhaustible as those energies usually termed “renewable”, such as hydro, wind, solar, and biomass. But, unlike the sum of these energies, nuclear fission energy has sufficient capacity to replace fossil fuels as they become scarce. Replacement of the current thermal variety of nuclear fission reactors with nuclear fission fast reactors, which are 100 times more fuel efficient, can dramatically extend nuclear fuel reserves. The contribution of uranium price to the cost of electricity generated by fast reactors, even if its price were the same as that of gold at US$14,000/kg, would be US$0.003/kWh of electricity generated. At that price, economically viable uranium reserves would be, for all practical purposes, inexhaustible. Uranium could power the world as far into the future as we are today from the dawn of civilization—more than 10,000 years ago. Fast reactors have distinct advantages in siting of plants, product transport and management of waste.

Let’s have a look at the argument. (First, note that when this paper was published in 2006, the price of gold was quoted as US$14,000/kg, or around US$ 435 per troy ounce, while in early 2022, gold is around US$1900 per troy ounce, or US$ 62,000/kg. So comparisons of “uranium at the price of gold” should keep that in mind. If uranium were to increase to near the present gold price, the quantity of economically viable ore would increase accordingly.)

Let’s begin by investigating replacing all fossil fuels with electricity generated from nuclear fission. The following table gives fuel consumption for energy generation worldwide in 2005 for the main areas of consumption in exajoules (which, for estimates like these, are close enough to quads that you can read them whichever way you prefer), the nuclear generated electricity required to replace that energy consumption, and the ratio of fossil fuel energy to nuclear electricity required for the replacement.

While electric generation can be replaced one for one, replacing space and process heat is assumed to require twice the amount of nuclear-generated electricity to account for the efficiency of generation, losses in transmission over the grid, and efficiency in conversion at the consumer location. For transportation, the ratio is estimated as four to one on the assumption that synthetic fuel is manufactured from the nuclear-generated electricity. Migration to vehicles directly powered by electricity may decrease this ratio. Adding these gives an estimate that it would take about twice the nuclear generating capacity to replace all applications of fossil fuels.

Next, we move on to estimating long-term global energy consumption assuming world population levels off around the year 2100 and that per capita energy consumption worldwide rises to its current level in Europe. This gives a rise from the present level to about 2500 exajoules (or quads) per year in 2200, remaining roughly constant thereafter. Combining with the earlier calculation, this implies replacing all fossil fuels with nuclear electricity will require around 5000 exajoules per year of generating capacity.

Now let us consider the design of the reactors used in nuclear electric power stations. Essentially all civil power stations in use worldwide, whether pressurised water, boiling water, graphite moderated, or other designs, are “thermal neutron reactors”. This means they employ a moderator substance such as water or graphite to slow down neutrons emitted by nuclear fission to increase the probability they will fission another uranium nucleus, thereby maintaining the chain reaction. This kind of reactor can only fission the U-235 isotope of uranium, which makes up just 0.71% of natural uranium mined from the Earth. This means that the rest, the 99.28% U-238, is “just along for the ride” and generates only a small amount of power through the secondary reaction of production of fissile plutonium-239 from absorbed neutrons. The upshot of this is that a thermal reactor extracts around 1% of the energy in its uranium fuel, with the rest being discarded as nuclear waste, requiring long-term storage. The “once-through” fuel cycle used in the United States, which does not even reprocess spent fuel to extract plutonium and unreacted U-235 to fabricate new fuel, is even less efficient, but we’ll assume sanity will eventually put an end to that stupidity, even in safetyland.

The main alternative to thermal reactors is variously called a “fast reactor” or “breeder reactor”. This design has been used in various reactors since the early days of nuclear research and, in fact, the first electrical power ever produced from nuclear energy was by a fast breeder reactor called EBR-I in the year 1951. A fast reactor does not use a moderator, but instead uses fast neutrons in higher enriched uranium to create fission which, by generating more neutrons per nucleus split, strike nuclei of U-238 and transmute them into plutonium. The reactor is called a “breeder” because it produces more fuel in the form of plutonium than it consumes. Spent fuel is reprocessed, extracting the plutonium (which, as a chemical process, is much simpler and less expensive than enriching uranium), that is fed back into the reactor to keep the cycle going. A mature fast breeder reactor and reprocessing cycle can extract essentially all of the energy in the natural uranium with which it is fed, or a hundred times more than a thermal reactor. As an extra benefit, the fast reactor “burns up” most of the long-lived fission products that make nuclear waste difficult to store and produces waste which is largely innocuous after around 500 years. Finally, most fast breeder designs use liquid metal as a coolant, which allows them to run at a higher temperature than water-cooled reactors, improving the thermal efficiency of steam production for power generation and (modestly) increasing electrical power output.

So, by moving from wasteful thermal reactors to fast breeders and using no more nuclear fuel, you can increase the estimated number of years nuclear fission can supply our energy needs by a factor of a hundred. But we’re not done yet.

Finally, consider where that uranium is coming from and what we’re paying for it. Natural uranium (0.71% U-235) is a commodity mined in a number of regions of the world, with production in 2019 amounting to 53,656 tonnes. Over the last decade, the price of natural uranium has fluctuated in the range between US$55/kg to US$ 110/kg. At those prices, the cost of uranium is almost a negligible component of the cost of nuclear-generated electricity. Even in thermal reactors, the cost of uranium accounts for only around US$0.0015/kWh, compared to an average retail price of electricity in the U.S. of about US$0.10/kWh.

Assume the price of uranium were to rise to the vicinity of US$14,000/kg, which was the price of gold when the paper was published in 2006. That would make economically viable the exploitation of very low-grade ore (or, if you prefer, high-grade dirt) containing only 1000 parts per million of uranium. It is estimated that at a price of US$14,000/kg for uranium, recoverable reserves would rise to between 40 and 50 times those estimated based on the current price of uranium.

And yet, even at this price, using the costly uranium in fast breeder reactors, the fuel cost of the electricity produced would be less than US$0.003/kWh. Here are various estimates of the world supply of uranium with mine reserves calculated for its recent price. All numbers in this table are thousands, so the thermal reactor generation power potential from line 2, from an estimate made in 2000 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), should be read as 7700 exajoules, for 15,400,000 tonnes of uranium. Going back to our estimate of 2500 exajoules per year for worldwide consumption replacing all fossil fuels after 2100, this doesn’t look very good—we’ll burn up the entire world’s uranium supply in just three years! But now, re-run the numbers assuming we replace the thermal reactors with fast breeders. Now we’re generating 1,223,000 exajoules from the same amount of uranium, providing power for almost 500 years. But the IPCC estimate was based upon uranium at around US$70/kg. If we let that rise to US$14,000 and assume that will increase the supply recoverable at that price by a factor of 40, we now have uranium sufficient for around 19,500 years of power! And that’s not all. Another 20,000,000 tonnes of uranium are recoverable from phosphate deposits, and 4.4 billion tonnes more could potentially be recovered from seawater, should we need to start exploring that option, say, 15000 years in the future. Every technology mentioned in this article, with the sole exception of recovery of uranium from seawater, which wouldn’t be needed for many millennia, already exists, has been demonstrated at scale, most over periods of decades. None requires breakthroughs in fundamental science, engineering that has not already been demonstrated long ago, or investments larger than those contemplated for other alternatives to fossil fuels. The endpoint of the adoption of this energy path is the complete replacement of fossil fuels with nuclear power, reserving these valuable hydrocarbon resources as feedstocks for industry, total elimination of carbon emission from fuel consumption and pollution from power generation, heating, and transportation, and an assured supply of energy for a stable human population on Earth at developed nation standard of living for millennia into the future. As the authors conclude: Many of the most serious problems facing human society have an important energy component. We do not know when peak production for fossil fuels will come, but we know that it will eventually arrive. Considering the importance of energy to humanity, it would be prudent to have a substantial program for the development and commissioning of fast nuclear fission reactors under way now in order to be adequately prepared. Certainly, there are challenges in mass adoption of fast breeder reactors and electrification of all fossil fuel applications. Fast breeders, like any nuclear reactor, are a demanding technology which is intolerant of shoddy engineering, construction, maintenance, or operation. Mass deployment involves commerce in highly enriched nuclear fuels which can be diverted for nuclear weapons purposes. Siting and building the required generating stations, fuel reprocessing plants, and fuel fabrication facilities will probably be the object of intense “environmental” and “not in my backyard” opposition. Fear-mongers may be expected to gin up opposition to any human future which does not involve half-naked pithecanthropoids digging for grubs with dull sticks, and design, construction, management, and operation of these facilities will require teams of people recruited, evaluated, and compensated by merit, not metrics of “diversity”, “equity”, or “inclusion”. Problems are inevitable, but problems have solutions. Humans are universal problem solvers—it’s what we do. A solution to the long-term supply of energy for human civilisation on Earth is at hand, and has been for years. It is up to us whether to grasp it, continue to pursue things which an evening’s calculation will show are folly, or chase dreams in the future which may never be realised. Choose wisely. 9 Likes Years ago, there were articles stating that Japan was experimenting with a kind of plastic seaweed which would adsorb uranium from seawater. The idea was to hang this plastic seaweed in places where there are suitable ocean currents, leave them for a period of time, and then harvest the material and extract the uranium. As you point out, the expense is not significant since fuel costs are trivial in nuclear fission. There is hope for humanity, if not for the West which has fallen under the sway of False Doctrine. China has 221 nuclear reactors at various stages of construction and planning, in addition to their 53 currently operating. Russia has 51 reactors in construction and planning, in addition to 37 currently operating. Reality will eventually prevail! World Nuclear Power Reactors | Uranium Requirements | Future Nuclear Power - World Nuclear Association (world-nuclear.org) 3 Likes This is the discussion of uranium recovery from seawater in the IEEE paper. The estimated 4.4 billion tonnes of uranium in the oceans of the world at a concentration of 3.3 parts per billion is often considered as an inexhaustible uranium mine by itself. However, extraction of uranium from seawater at such a low concentration is not easy. The ion exchange resin must be exposed to enormous quantities of seawater [Hoffert, 2002]. The resin is not specific to uranium and picks up other metals at the same time. Development of ion exchange resins, which began more than twenty years ago, is at the stage where 350 kg of resin as non-woven fabric can recover 1 kg of uranium (expressed as U₃O₈) after 240 days of submersion [Seko, 2003] in a suitable natural ocean current. Although this is an interesting experiment, the need for large scale extraction from seawater is very far in the future. Nevertheless, a cost effective way to access that uranium would be beneficial because probably many more countries have access to the ocean than to land based uranium reserves. The Seko paper cited is: Seko, N., et al., Aquaculture of Uranium in Seawater by a fabric-Adsorbent Submerged System, Nuclear Technology, 144: No. 2, November 2003, pp 274–278. I found a PDF of a scan of this paper online which I have linked to the citation above. 2 Likes One thing missing from Livermore’s graphic, and energy analyses in general, is the prime energy requirements for each end use. For instance, electricity generation by any means* requires the extraction and refining of a natural resource (fissionable material, coal, oil, gas), and the transportation to the generating plant. Presumably, those energy costs are hidden in the “Industrial” and “Transportation” boxes of Livermore’s graphic. Thus, it is missing the important feedback loop that connects “Energy Services” to all the boxes on the left-hand side. The requirements for this box are not independent of the means of energy generation, nor is the efficiency of prime energy conversion to useful output (i.e., the magnitude of Rejected Energy). A proper accounting of the energy budget under a new regime requires consideration of these factors. If all electric generation were from nuclear fission, how would those prime energy costs compare and how would they be met? Would there be electric-powered uranium mining? *renewables such as wind and hydro being the trivial exceptions, though solar definitely requires mining and most require batteries (which require mining and manufacturing). 6 Likes I agree that closing that circle is important for any detailed analysis of energy production and consumption. I have seen plausible arguments that if you consider the entire materials, fabrication, maintenance, and eventual disposal costs over their entire lifespan, neither photovoltaic panels nor wind turbines are net energy producers. In the case of nuclear power, accounting for the long-term storage of nuclear waste is difficult, since how does one discount land use and maintenance costs centuries in the future? On the mining and refining costs for nuclear fuel, I think the assumption by the authors that transportation energy would be scored as 4× the fossil fuel contribution on the assumption that all of it would be provided by synthetic fuels with electricity as the energy input provides a conservative estimate. Also, the million-to-one energy density advantage over chemical combustion fuels provides for a margin of error in assumptions. Since I don’t believe we’re faced with an “immediate existential climate crisis”, I’d argue for exploration of new generation versions of these technologies, proceeding from research reactor to pilot plant to first commercial deployments, much as was envisioned for the Integral fast reactor, which began development in 1984 and was cancelled in 1994, three years before completion. I’m sure this decades-old design can be improved upon, but just restarting the effort would begin to collect information on how viable and scalable this path was as a primary power source. 7 Likes Since we are on this topic – one of the rationales given for ignoring nuclear fission is that – Hey! There is no need for risky nuclear fission; safe nuclear fusion is just around the corner! (As if generating the temperature of the Sun on the face of the Earth were incontestably “safe”). In that regard, there is an interesting video by Sabine Hossenfelder: How close is nuclear fusion power? - YouTube Ms. Hossenfelder’s concern is that the proponents of nuclear fusion are being disingenuous. I would describe it as lying by omission. The history of nuclear fusion has been one of decades of disappointments, but now the proponents of super-expensive ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, being built in France) claim the device will produce 10 times as much energy as is put into it – which sounds great! What Ms. Hossenfelder points out is that this factor of 10 applies only to a small part of the power generation process – energy used to create the plasma in the reactor compared to the heat generated by the created plasma. But much larger amounts of energy also have to be used to create the required very strong containment magnetic fields and run the reactor. Plus the heat generated in the plasma then has to be converted to something useful, probably electric power, with an efficiency of perhaps 50%. Put it all together, and ITER – if successful – may generate little more than half the input power required to run the plant. ITER will be an energy sink, not an energy source. So let’s not wait for nuclear fusion. The broader question is why academia has become so corrupt? Was it worth sacrificing their technical integrity to access the honeypot of big budgets? 6 Likes Very interesting post and comments, and clearly, fission is the logical choice. But, the arguments and policy surrounding this issue are typically not scientific or logical in nature. As with most other facets of our civilization’s technical progress, the Left has coopted the very institutions able to ferret out correct data and thus realistic and successful energy policy. The arguments will not be won by the very best analyses we have to offer, as other efforts have shown, notably the third-rail social “progress” in our culture. What will take the place of our irrefutable data, graphs, and pie-charts that show the correct answers? Maybe Bill Whittle or Daily Wire’s god-king Boreing need to create credible stories to elucidate sound choices. Realizing that I’m not adding any data-driven value with this post, maybe a separate thread about the convolution aspects of science vs. art is needed? 5 Likes Well, I’ve been running a series here, “Fusion Friday”, presenting talks by ITER sub-project leaders about aspects of the machine, which explain the goals of the project and why it was designed that way. ITER is an energy sink, but it was designed to be one from the outset. In fact, part of the installation is a large farm of coolers intended to dissipate the energy produced by fusion in the machine if and when it finally generates it. But the purpose of ITER is not to generate energy for the grid, but rather to demonstrate stable, steady-state, and long-term fusion energy production with all of the requirements of a power production reactor including removing the helium “ash” from the plasma as it is produced, introducing new deuterium and tritium fuel during the burn, breeding tritium in a “blanket” of lithium surrounding the plasma chamber from excess neutrons from the fusion reactions, efficiently converting the kinetic energy of the alpha particles and neutrons produced by fusion into heat, and extracting that heat from the reactor in a form from which electrical power could be generated. Previous fusion experiments produced pulses of power (generally less than input power to heat and confine the plasma), but did not achieve ignition, steady state burn, or have any of the requirements to sustain the burn. If ITER works, it will have demonstrated every component of a power production reactor, and it will then be a “simple matter of engineering” to scale up the design into a pilot plant to demonstrate net power production. The pilot plant will probably be much simpler than ITER, since ITER is a research machine with massive instrumentation to understand what is going on inside the plasma chamber and the ability to reconfigure its operation to explore alternatives to achieve the assorted goals. These will not be needed in a production reactor. I am not a “fan” of Big Fusion, and I agree that over its history there has been a great deal of academics feeding from the trough of taxpayer money. But in the grand scheme of things, the amount of money is small compared to things like a high speed railway to nowhere in California, and the potential payoff is very large, so given where we are, ITER seems a reasonable next step. 2 Likes One of the little details about deuterium-tritium fusion that fusion boosters don’t like to talk about is that every fusion reaction emits a 14.1 MeV neutron which, as a neutral particle, cannot be confined or steered by the magnetic field containing the plasma and just flies out in any old random direction. This must be absorbed in the “blanket” and its kinetic energy converted to heat which is extracted to generate power. (Here is a talk I posted earlier in Fusion Friday about the blanket.) But this intense neutron flux causes neutron activation in any material upon which it impinges, and can convert many elements into radioactive isotopes that remain radioactive when the machine is shut down. It also embrittles or otherwise damages metals, which means that the many tonnes of fusion reactor vessel become dangerously radioactive and must eventually be disposed of as low-level radioactive waste, just like the waste from a fission reactor. This is why most plasma fusion experiments use deuterium only, which does not undergo neutronic fusion. Once you introduce tritium, the machine becomes “hot” and difficult and expensive to work upon. Under current plans, ITER will start testing with deuterium in 2025, but is not planned to begin experiments including tritium until 2035, when they’re confident they’ve got it right, because it is hideously difficult and expensive to change things once the guts of the machine have become radioactive. 5 Likes Good points – but Ms. Hossenfelder’s good point also stands: the proponents of fusion power are misleading the public about how close fusion is to being a practical source of power for humanity. Suppose it does take “only” until 2035 to demonstrate that ITER is an energy sink, as designed but never adequately conveyed to the public. Then would follow a decades-long process of modifying the design so that an ITER-like system could generate useful power, and deal with all the related issues of operating safety and equipment disposal at the end of its working life. That would have to be followed by more decades of scaling up the power plant to useful levels, and then yet more decades of actually building out the thousands of fusion plants which would be required to supply the human race with power. Fusion proponents are facing a century or more – maybe two human lifetimes – before they could supply a significant part of human energy needs. Yet that fact is not being conveyed to the public – resulting in people rejecting nuclear fission which is available today in favor of nuclear fusion which (even in the most optimistic case) cannot be a meaningful source of power within their lifetimes. 3 Likes In my humble opinion, the most hopeful and practical directive on Nuclear Energy, came from President Eisenhower in 1953 (see link below). Generations since have dropped the ball. The idea that we could have increased energy costs since the invention of nuclear energy, clearly demonstrates epic human failure. A safe energy system that uses nuclear fission can work economically, but we must have the will to do it – and may have to launch many in the legal profession to Mars first! 5 Likes When I think of the fear the public has about nuclear, I think how people are so easily manipulated. We have bio labs that contain biological substances that pose threats that are orders of magnitude larger than nuclear power. It amazes me that there has been no world wide demand that bio labs be terminated. Even if COVID was not lab made, the simple fact that it or something much worse could be released should have resulted in public outrage that would make nuclear fear look like a turd. Labs in a shit hole like Ukraine, regardless of purpose, are asinine. 7 Likes Energy Monitor reports, “China’s nuclear pipeline as big as the rest of the world’s combined”. Analysis of power plant data from GlobalData, Energy Monitor‘s parent company, shows the enormous scale of China’s nuclear ambitions, which encompass both the new 150-reactor plan as well as existing plans. The country has 19 reactors under construction, 43 reactors awaiting permits, and a massive 166 reactors that have been announced. The combined capacity of these 228 reactors is 246GW, more than the entire electricity generation capacity of Germany (225GW). It is a figure close to the 289GW of new nuclear capacity the rest of the world has in the pipeline. 5 Likes China is also investing heavily in coal-fired power plants, in a bid to expand electric power supply substantially. This goes along with China investing in multiple Electric Vehicle companies – which will require a big increase in the electric power supply. It is almost like someone in the Chinese government is, you know, thinking! We in the West made a huge mistake. We outsourced manufacturing to China. Instead, we should have outsourced our governments to China. 6 Likes Even half is over 50 reactors in China … as the U.S. struggles to build a handful. Epic failure by U.S. and West. 5 Likes 2 Likes Lots of those December 2021 “under construction” reactors are Russian-origin. Likely to be affected by the recent sanctions one way or another. 2 Likes In our eyes and to any objective observer, the failure to build lots more nuclear generating capacity is indeed, a failure. The heart of the problem though, is that to our “elite leaders”, it is a resounding success, along with their hoped-for$10/gallon gasoline. It is their intentionally assisting suicide of the West which is the problem. This is just part of their strategy.

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Any hypothesis on why our “elite leaders” are so intent on doing the West down? Destroying the West unintentionally because of their stupidity, ignorance, arrogance, & incompetence would be quite plausible. But what would be their rationale for deliberately destroying the greasy pole after spending their lives precariously clambering up it?

For the avoidance of doubt, if our elite leaders do indeed intend deliberately to destroy the West, they are doing an excellent job of it. It is simply difficult to see what is in the destruction for them personally.

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People never stop doing what they CAN do.