Thursday, September 02, 2004

Let a Thousand Reactors Bloom: "Explosive growth has made the People's Republic of China the most power-hungry nation on earth. Get ready for the mass-produced, meltdown-proof future of nuclear energy."
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"Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies, and the media. … Even if they were right about its dangers - and they are not - its worldwide use as our main source of energy would pose an insignificant threat compared with the dangers of intolerable and lethal heat waves and sea levels rising to drown every coastal city of the world. We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilization is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear, the one safe, available energy source, now, or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet."

So, China has discovered the pebble-bed modular reactor, and is poised to mass-produce them before the originators even secure funding and permits for their test site, which they've been pursuing since 1993.

The quote comes from the inventor of the GAIA hypothesis. If the Chinese are doing nuclear power in a way that the greenest of greens will endorse, the rest of the world should pay attention.

And no, the PBMR is not one of the reference designes endorsed by the Bush administration. So there's no way to fast-track it in the US.

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