The U.S. Government’s Fake Opposition to Global Warming

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Written by Eric Zuesse

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.

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