Posted by Skye on June 17, 2025, 12:11 pm Valued Poster
What a surprise... an idiot surrounded by idiots. What more could you expect?
"Trump's $4 Trillion Plan to Raise Your Energy Bills
The Trump administration released three executive orders on nuclear energy on the Friday afternoon before the Memorial Day weekend - a time often used to dump bad news. And these orders were as disastrous as they come.
With these orders, President Donald Trump has embraced a dangerous strategy to promote the most expensive power there is: nuclear. His plan for new nuclear plants would require hundreds if not thousands of reactors, cost the nation over $4 trillion, and raise electricity bills substantially.
Worse, he is weakening design and safety oversight by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And he's doing so just as the NRC is starting to get flooded with new experimental - and highly risky - applications for previously untested small modular reactor (SMR) designs that appear to cut costs by skimping on safety."
China has once again beat everyone else to a clean energy milestone—its new nuclear reactor is reportedly one of the first to use thorium instead of uranium as a fuel and the first of its kind that can be refueled while it’s running.
It’s an interesting (if decidedly experimental) development out of a country that’s edging toward becoming the world leader in nuclear energy. China has now surpassed France in terms of generation, though not capacity; it still lags behind the US in both categories. But one recurring theme in media coverage about the reactor struck me, because it’s so familiar: This technology was invented decades ago, and then abandoned.
You can basically copy and paste that line into countless stories about today’s advanced reactor technology. Molten-salt cooling systems? Invented in the mid-20th century but never commercialized. Same for several alternative fuels, like TRISO. And, of course, there’s thorium.
This one research reactor in China running with an alternative fuel says a lot about this moment for nuclear energy technology: Many groups are looking into the past for technologies, with a new appetite for building them.
I expect the Chinese did their homework. Furthermore if thorium depends on orogeny for accessibility, China should lead the world. You can look away from a painting, but you can't listen away from a symphony
Here is a pdf with info on deposits in the USA Idaho and Colorado are specified as primary areas in the pdf.
"Wet Mountains Area, Colorado This thorium district, which is located in Fremont and Custer Counties of south-central Colorado, may be comparable in thorium resources to the Lemhi Pass district of Idaho-Mon- tana (table 2). The thorium deposits occur over an area of about 60 km north-to-south by 24 km west-to-east. Thorium occurs in veins, syenite dikes, fracture zones, and carbonatite dikes (Armbrustmacher, 1988) associated with three Cambrian-age alkaline complexes (Olson and others, 1977) that intruded the surrounding Precambrian terrane. These alkaline complexes are (1) the McClure Mountain Complex (Shawe and Parker, 1967; Armbrustmacher, 1984), (2) the Gem Park Complex (Parker and Sharp, 1970), and (3) the complex at Democrat Creek (Armbrustmacher, 1984). The thorium-mineralized veins and fracture zones, which are distal to the three alkaline intrusive complexes, have the highest economic potential for thorium resources. The USGS estimated that the vein and fracture zone deposits of the Wet Mountains area contain reserves of 58,200 t of ThO2 and probable potential resources of 145,600 t of ThO2; the seven largest carbonatite dikes in the district contain additional reserves of 119 t of ThO2 and probable potential resources of 683 t of ThO2 (Armbrustmacher, 1988). "
Same general location and cause for occurance and deposition. Containment in intrusive veins, like uranium makes retrievable mining in metamorphic formations difficult and espensive.
While the Wet Mountain formations are estimated to contain a large amount of thorium, that estimation is the sum total of the whole mountain range. It is ridiculous and impractical to mine an entire mountain range. Only idiots like the fool felon would argue, and I'd wager he has no idea what thorium is, or that is even exists.
Climax for example has been mining molybdenum from one mountain for well over a half century, and that one mountain is less than half mined! Molybdenum is far more abundant than thorium.
You can look away from a painting, but you can't listen away from a symphony
The 'magickal thinking' here
Posted by greenman on June 17, 2025, 12:25 pm, in reply to "Another bad idea..." Valued Poster
..occurs when people make a thing like energy into something ideological. Ditto global warming, in fact.
You see this from certain idiots on these boards who pretend to be 'scientific' but have sold their souls to Don the Dark Lord. 'Nuclear is the FUTURE!' proclaim those who know little about nuclear and are more interested in the past..-greenman
Insufficient uranium to power 50 more years of energy
Reality is lost on the felon. He lives in a manufactured world. He manufactured the immigrant threat, and ICE is a Gestapo answer. The Iran Israel war was suddenly flavored by report of Christianity growing by leaps and bounds in Iran. Overnight, the felon regained the evangelical support.
Should Teheran have nuclear weapons? No, for the same reason the felon should not have access to or involvement with them.
But the reality of the science is uranium is rare. It doesn't occur in nuggets and veins like gold and silver. Carnotite and pitchblende are the two rock types uranium has been found in, in sufficient quality to mine. That mining process is unlike any other ore, and uranium recovered is dwarfed by salt grains.
Uranium is heavier than gold, and while more uranium exists in the mantle, we can't access that. Where orogeny occurs- mountain building process, uranium is "brought up" by tectonic activity. While it occurs in igneous rock, a refinement of millions of years of erosion is necessary until the uranium collects and settles in very old sedimentary rocks. It isn't found in the mountains, but adjacent to them where surface transport, streams, creeks, and rivers carried it.
There it may have collected in sufficient quantity to mine. Pitchblende and carnotite formations yield the most uranium. It is very often associated with prehistoric life, and fossils often contain far greater quantity than surrounding sedimentary rock. I would NOT carry a Jurassic animal fossil in my pocket!
Extraction of uranium requires the rock to be crushed, and a placer type operation takes advantage of uranium weight to separate it. Refinement involves chemistry and melting point temperature control.
Explained to the felon, by now his eyes would be glazed over and his attention might be distracted to fascination with his anus, or his penis. His is the mind of an anal stage juvenile in the body of a fat old man.
His lies, cons, and deals are manufactured. It became his way of life with the help of Cohen, until Bragg and James penetrated the defense of delay and appeal to get convictions.
He always finds a new base of suckers and fools to con. MAGA thinks his empire is worth many billions of dollars, and by following him, they can get in on some of that. Reality is he bankrupted his business six times, last in 2016.
His business ventures, like his trust in uranium and nuclear energy, are stupid, grossly sub adult thinking. Gold cell phones and trump mobile. Whipping out a gold phone in public doesn't make you impressive. It makes you an immediate target. You can look away from a painting, but you can't listen away from a symphony
on June 17, 2025, 12:11 pm
