The U.S. Government’s Fake
Opposition to Global Warming
Eric Zuesse, July 13, 2022
The
U.S. Government is set to destroy America’s stockpile of thorium, which element
is the likeliest source of safe nuclear energy, and is also the
likeliest replacement of the fossil fuels that are increasingly
threatening the world’s future if a uranium 235 and plutonium nuclear-bomb
World War III won’t end the world before global burnout does.
Some
people think that a WW III is the world’s biggest threat; others think that a
global burnout from fossil-fuels usage is. Thorium-based electricity could provide the
solution to both concerns. But the U.S. Government has
stunningly ignored thorium, because their top goal is to win control over
the entire world (U.S. hegemony, an all-inclusive U.S. global empire),
and only the uranium-based nuclear reactors produce feedstock
to make nuclear bombs (for conquest), which is the U.S. Government’s top goal. So, their plan is
simply to get rid of the thorium ‘waste’ from its nuclear
industries. According to the narrative from the U.S.
Government’s propagandists, “in 1973 the United States government shut down all
thorium related nuclear research due to the success of the uranium reactor to
produce energy, so the vast majority of the nuclear reactors that exists today
use enriched uranium (U-235) or reprocessed plutonium (Pu-239) as their source
of energy,” but the truth is quite otherwise: thorium-research was shut down
because bomb-production was the real purpose of all nuclear
development in the U.S., then, and now. They wanted more nuclear bombs.
(Whereas bombs can be made from thorium producing uranium-233, it’s more difficult and far less suitable
for major industrial-scale nuclear industries. As one 2011 engineering analysis concluded, thorium-based
production of electricity would “have extraordinary proliferation resistance
because thorium cannot be made directly into a weapon.5 The reactor cannot be
used to create substantial, pure quantities of plutonium or 238U, which are
needed to make bombs.2” Unfortunately, however, this is also why the U.S.
Government has shunned it.)
America’s
Government has built nuclear power upon the foundation of producing
fission-bombs, nuclear weapons, which need U-235 and plutonium, that are
required for large-scale bomb-making, instead of to build America’s
nuclear-electricity production upon the basis of vastly safer thorium,
which doesn’t explode. Thorium is being considered a mere
‘waste’, because it’s not useful for bomb-making (although
thorium can do that on a small scale). China, by contrast, is racing past the
U.S. to build-out mankind’s thorium electrical-production future, instead of to
focus upon producing the biggest nuclear-weapons stockpiles like the U.S. and
Russia have been doing (to make bombs for potential usage against each
other).
Fortunately,
two U.S. Senators are now trying to block America’s planned destruction of
its thorium stockpiles, which are residues from the production of nuclear
weapons and from existing uranium-235-based nuclear electricity-generation.
These two Senators want America, not China, to be leading the
world into a far safer future. However, they do this not in
order to prevent global burnout, nor to prevent a nuclear-war global holocaust,
but, instead, in order to prevent a termination of U.S. global hegemony (U.S.
rule over the entire world). Loss of U.S. global hegemony is what they are
actually worrying about. They simply want America to beat China. It’s purely
a competitive goal, for them — not actually a mankind goal
(which it is in China): to reduce global warming.
On 23
April 2006, the thorium-reactor expert Kirk Sorensen’s blog, “Energy From
Thorium” headlined “Don’t throw
away U233!”, and he wrote:
When I
learned that the entire National Defense Stockpile of thorium (3216 metric tonnes)
was slated for burial in the Nevada desert, that was bad enough. But the
destruction of our U233 really breaks my heart and hurts so much worse.
Uranium-233
is the ideal fuel to start a liquid-fluoride reactor, and there is a very
little bit in the world, left over from different attempts to get a
thorium-powered future going. Now the DOE is taking great pride in the fact
they are going to throw it away. I can only comfort
myself with the idea that if they knew how valuable this material is for
starting a liquid-fluoride reactor, they would never do this.
It gets
even worse – the $128 million that they plan to spend to “blend” down this
little bit of U-233 could be used to progress liquid-fluoride reactors, which
currently get about $40K a year under the DOE Gen-4 program. The fellow that
gets the money tells me it’s enough to “answer the phone”.
And
once blended with U-238, the U-233 will be unrecoverable (I’m sure this is what
they want). We could not isotopically separate it like natural uranium, since
it will be far, far too radioactive to introduce into a diffusion plant. So
it’s gone – thrown away when it could have started a thorium reactor.
What a
tragic loss and waste.
This
wasn’t a problem only of the war-mongering George W. Bush U.S. Presidency,
which then was in power. It’s instead bipartisan in
Washington. Thus, journalist Ambrose Evans Pritchard, in Britain’s Telegraph, bannered,
on 29 August 2010, “Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a
nuclear dash for thorium: If Barack Obama were to marshal America’s vast
scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project, he might
reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to
our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years.”. He meant it seriously, and
he wondered why America hadn’t already initiated such a “Manhattan Project II,”
in order to put the environmentalist rhetoric of Obama, and of
other American liberals, into an authentically promising means of actually
achieving their asserted environmentalist objective
against global warming. He closed by saying, “If it works, Manhattan II could
restore American optimism and strategic leadership at a stroke: if not, it is a
boost for US science and surely a more fruitful way to pull the US out of
perma-slump than scattershot stimulus. Even better, team up with China and do
it together, for all our sakes.” However, twelve more years of “stimulus”
(without much stimulation) were yet to pass, before even just
two U.S. Senators decided to team up together so as to push that idea through,
but not cooperatively, with China (such as that journalist had
proposed) — but instead as a means of beating China,
so as to maintain America’s continuing global hegemony,
against China and Russia. (The U.S. Government has actually been secretly continuing its Cold War
even after the Soviet Union and its communism ended in 1991. The U.S.
Government’s actual enemy wasn’t communism:
it turned out to have been Russia and any other resistant nation; the Cold War,
on America’s side, was America’s war against all nations —
to control all of them. That’s just a historical fact. Communism was just an
excuse.)
On 18
May 2022, U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville headlined a press release, “Tuberville, Marshall Introduce Bill
to Save Clean, Safe Nuclear Power”, and he announced:
U.S.
Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), a member of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, and Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS), a member of the Senate Committee
on Energy and Natural Resources, today introduced the Thorium Energy Security
Act to prevent the destruction of Uranium 233 (U-233), a critical element used
to produce clean energy.
“Thorium
and U-233 hold the promise to produce clean, safe power and are vital to our
national security. Energy will continue to be at the heart of global conflicts,
so the United States must invest in energy technology,” Senator Tuberville
said. “China clearly saw the value in our thorium research — they’ve taken up
where we left off, and we may soon see thorium-powered Chinese aircraft
carriers and thorium reactors on the Belt & Road courtesy of American
technology.”
“Uranium-233
is too valuable and too useful to just be thrown in the trash, a fact that the
Chinese Communist Party understands but our Department of Energy clearly does
not. While we are spending millions of dollars to destroy U-233, the CCP is
investing in it by preparing to build a new generation of advanced aircraft
carriers and nuclear reactors powered by U-233,” said Senator Marshall. “The
United States needs to lead on advanced nuclear reactors and not leave the
future of innovative clean energy technologies in the hands of China.
Preserving this valuable national resource is the first step on that
path.”
BACKGROUND:
In the
1960s, the United States pioneered thorium molten salt breeder reactor
technologies at Oak Ridge National Labs. This promising technology, which
employed uranium 233 (U-233), produced clean, safe power, but did not produce
plutonium like other reactor designs. As our country was focused on growing our
nuclear arsenal, the U.S. shelved thorium and U-233 for decades.
In
2001, the Department of Energy began the process of destroying our stocks of
U-233. ...
Since
then, their bill has been bottled-up being considered in the Senate Energy
and Natural Resources Committee. After these decades of the
U.S. Government’s trying to find a way to ditch thorium as
mere waste because it’s not useful for making nuclear bomb-heads, because it
doesn’t explode, our Government might at last start to put it
to use replacing fossil fuels, which goal, for this Government, has, thus far,
been only a rhetorical matter, in order for liberal
politicians to appeal to their snookered voters (who don’t recognize the
difference between mere rhetoric versus actual intentions), not something
that liberal politicians ever actually cared about or intended
to solve. (Of course, conservative politicians have instead
been saying that human-created global warming doesn’t even exist, that it’s
just a hoax. Their voters don’t even care about the environment, and the future
— not even about their own descendants.)
According to the World Nuclear
Association, “The use of thorium as a new primary energy source has been a
tantalizing prospect for many years. Extracting its latent energy value in a
cost-effective manner remains a challenge, and will require considerable
R&D investment. This is occurring preeminently in China, with modest US
support.” The near future will actually decide whether America trashes its
thorium, or instead will use it to compete against China.
According
to a 2011 article published by the American Chemical Society, “Should We Consider Using Liquid
Fluoride Thorium Reactors for Power Generation?”:
Thorium
is four times more abundant than uranium and naturally occurs in only one
isotope, 232Th, eliminating all enrichment activities inherent in uranium
mining and processing. … [In order to operate a thorium reactor,] there
is a start-up load of approximately 1.5 tons of fissile material, such as 235U,
238U, or 239Pu, after which the reactor thermally breeds 233U [by
constant feeding of the 100% thorium fuel feedstock, into the reactor] to
maintain fission [the reactor’s energy-production]. Conventional
nuclear reactors [which use 100% U-235 as their fuel feedstock] need
510 times more initial material [enriched uranium] to start
and continuous feeding of enriched uranium.1 Perpetually needing to transport
enriched uranium presents proliferation risks. Thorium by itself does not pose
proliferation risks and presents a much smaller radiation risk.
Recently,
Sorensen delivered a 10-minute
TED-talk explaining why thorium-based nuclear-based energy will be the
world’s future. Finally, the idea that he’s been championing for twenty years
is starting to get some traction in war-mongering Washington
DC — the world’s global-imperialist capital. Finally, something serious might
be afoot to halt global warming, but its motivation is instead to keep the U.S.
Government in control over all nations — so as not to lose America’s
hegemony. It’s a “national security” matter, to America’s Government: to remain
“Number 1” (regardless of whether doing so might actually be endangering both
America’s, and the entire world’s, national security, thus threatening everybody’s safety).
That’s what it’s really about. All of the liberals’ rhetoric about stopping
global warming has merely been PR cover for bomb-making and
continuing America’s global hegemony, nothing serious to stop global
warming.
The
only possible competitor to thorium as an ecologically friendly electrical
energy source is generally thought to be nuclear fusion, but that has always
been unlikely and now seems to be even more unlikely than before. On 23 June
2022, Science magazine headlined “Out of gas: A
shortage of tritium fuel may leave fusion energy with an empty tank”, and explained why the
feasibility of ever achieving a fusion reactor is looking smaller the more that
the barriers to achieving it are becoming scientifically understood. That’s the
exact opposite of the prospects for achieving thorium fission
reactors. Thorium seems to be the only practicable way to
avoid global catastrophe.
The
U.S. Government’s obsession for global hegemony has been threatening everybody,
everywhere. Either it will end, or else the world will end, maybe even within
our own lifetimes — especially if the U.S. Government’s
grasping for global hegemony will produce WW III. The U.S. Government is global
warming’s friend, and everybody’s enemy. Will that change? Nothing yet
indicates it will. But perhaps China or some other country will pull us all
through this perilous historical moment.
—————
Investigative
historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S
EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need
to Change. It’s about how America took over the world after World War II in
order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the
world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social
‘sciences’ — duping the public.
