10/10/2012: R&D FOR THORIUM - GREEN ENERGY FOR THE FUTURE

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NEXT MEETING

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN TO THE NINTH (FIRST UNNUMBERED) SECTION BELOW FOR INFORMATION ABOUT OUR NEXT MEETING.


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WHO/WHAT WE ARE

We are a U.S. public-policy monthly discussion group founded in the Fall of 2005 that meets on the third Wednesday of each month (with adjustments to avoid secular/religious holidays).

Since February 2020, we have met via Zoom. [For the first 14.5 years of our existence, we met at the Salt Lake City Library (210 East 400 South) with remote participation via Skype.]

The topic is selected by the attendees of the previous month’s meeting. The focus is usually a book but frequently comprises only news items from magazines/newspapers/etc. This bulletin board serves, inter alia, as a place for members to post comments or additional reference materials prior to each meeting.

Our attendance averages 11-12. Participants come from all walks of life but our regular attendees include 4 attorneys and 3 scientists.

There are approx. 225 recipients of our weekly newsletter, many of whom reside outside Utah and participate by Zoom.

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40 SIX-DEGREES-OF-SEPARATION E-MAIL CAMPAIGNS, 4 REPORTS & 9 REPRISES

We take great pride in our Six-Degrees-Of-Separation E-mail campaigns to America's decision makers which, with only a few computer keyboard key strokes, can be sent by each of our members (1) to the decision maker, and (2) to all of the member's friends and acquaintances requesting them to do the same in an unending chain.

Accordingly, we also take great pride that each of our official recommendations has been approved unanimously at one of our meetings or, at most, received only one dissent.

All 40 e-mail campaigns over the years are collected in this section. They include 10 e-mails sent by John Karls that did not receive an official endorsement for the rest of our members to send. The titles of the 30 official recommendations are ALL CAPS and the titles of 10 unofficial recommendations are lower case.

The date of the meeting at which each of the 40 campaigns was adopted is listed so that voluminous additional information about that campaign can be accessed by scrolling down to the sections of this bulletin board that relate to that meeting.

In addition, there are four items whose descriptions begin with “REPORT.” They are reports of our Great Salt Lake Working Group which was formed IAW our “Short-Time Fuse” procedures described in the next section of this bulletin board.

There is also a 1/20/2021 “Report” of our JCPOA Working Group.

Finally, there are eight items whose descriptions begin with “REPRISE.” They describe additional actions that were taken IAW previous official e-mail campaigns to bring their approved policies to the attention of additional decision makers.

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SIGNING UP FOR OUR WEEKLY E-MAIL

If you would like to receive our weekly newsletter, please send an e-mail to ReadingLiberally-SaltLake@johnkarls.com with a subject, “Please Add Me To Weekly E-mail List.”

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SIGNING UP TO POST ON THIS BULLETIN BOARD

Due to sabotage and porn attacks, only attendees of one or more of our meetings are permitted to post on this bulletin board.

If you have attended one of our meetings and would like to register to post something, please send an E-mail to ReadingLiberally-SaltLake@johnkarls.com with the subject, “Please Register Me For The Bulletin Board.”
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johnkarls
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Joined: Fri Jun 29, 2007 8:43 pm

10/10/2012: R&D FOR THORIUM - GREEN ENERGY FOR THE FUTURE

Post by johnkarls »

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CALL TO ACTION -- "SIX-DEGREES-OF-SEPARATION" E-MAIL CAMPAIGN TO D.O.E. SECRETARY CHU – R&D FOR THORIUM, THE GREEN ENERGY SOURCE FOR THE FUTURE - ONLY 5 MINUTES NEEDED TO PARTICIPATE

We take great pride in our Six-Degrees-Of-Separation E-mail campaigns to America's decision makers such as President Obama which, with only a few computer keyboard key strokes, can be sent by each of our members (1) to the decision maker, and (2) to all of the member's friends and acquaintances requesting them to do the same in an unending chain.

Accordingly, we also take great pride that each of our recommendations has been approved unanimously at one of our meetings or, at most, received only one dissent (in which case we say there was a "consensus" rather than "unanimity").

The following Six-Degrees-Of-Separation E-mail campaign to U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu on the referenced subject was approved unanimously at our 10/10/2012 meeting.

If you agree with the recommended E-mail to Secretary Chu that appears below, please --

(1) send the already-prepared e-mail to Secretary Chu, and

(2) send to all your friends and acquaintances an already-prepared e-mail that comprises everything below the set of asterisks that follows this paragraph -- so that, through no more than six degrees of separation to 100% of the American population, we reach everyone in a cascading chain.


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To: All of your friends and acquaintances

Subj: CALL TO ACTION -- SIX-DEGREES-OF-SEPARATION E-MAIL CAMPAIGN TO D.O.E. SECRETARY CHU – R&D FOR THORIUM, THE GREEN ENERGY SOURCE FOR THE FUTURE - ONLY 5 MINUTES NEEDED TO PARTICIPATE

Dear Friends,

I have been requested to participate in the referenced "call to action" and request that you participate as well.

The campaign is based on the fact that there are NO MORE THAN SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION between us and 100% of the American electorate.

And that, on important occasions, we can send to all of our friends and acquaintances an already-prepared e-mail (1) for them to send to America's decision maker(s) to influence governmental policy, and (2) for them to send to all of their friends and acquaintances to do the same in an unending chain.

The reasons for the campaign are contained in the already-prepared e-mail to U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu that appears below.

If you agree with the proposal, please --

(1) hit your e-mail forward button and put the e-mail addresses of all your friends and acquaintances into the address section so that, through no more than six degrees of separation to 100% of the American population, we reach everyone in a cascading chain.

(2) send the following e-mail to D.O.E. Secretary Chu.


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To = The.Secretary@hq.doe.gov

Subj = LFTR Research and Development

Message Text =

The Honorable Dr. Steven Chu
Secretary – U.S. Department of Energy

Dear Sir:

Re: Liquid-Floride-Thorium Reactor (“LFTR”) Research and Development

For the sake of solving global warming with an abundant clean-fuel source that is cheaper than any alternatives so that all of the world’s nations will adopt it if for no other reason than self interest, ending U.S. dependence on fossil fuels, ending the political dependence of the U.S. and its allies on Middle East oil-producing countries, and solving the U.S. international balance of payments deficit, I implore you to provide the necessary funding in your FY 2013 Budget for research and development for Liquid Floride Thorium Reactors (“LFTR’s”).

I am connected with a 7-year-old politically-oriented monthly reading group whose unanimous decision to support the foregoing request was reached at one of its recent meetings which was attended, inter alia, by (1) a recipient of a PhD in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Tennessee - Oak Ridge during the 1960’s when the Oak Ridge National Nuclear-Research Laboratory successfully operated at full power for 1.5 years a LFTR prototype (the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment or MSRE), (2) the Research Director of the Radiology Department of the University of Utah School of Medicine, (3) the Assistant Utah Attorney General for the Environment, and (4) a retired University of Utah Biology Professor.

You are undoubtedly aware of the advantages of LFTR’s which include:

1. LFTR’s have no greenhouse-gas emissions (true of all nuclear reactors).
2. LFTR’s require minimal containment chambers because meltdowns are physically impossible since LFTR’s operate near atmospheric pressure (this is both a safety and cost factor).
3. LFTR’s do not require elaborate cooling systems because they operate well below the boiling point of molten salt and can be passively cooled (this is both a safety and cost factor).
4. LFTR’s have a strong negative temperature coefficient of reactivity and, therefore, react to load changes rapidly (this is a safety factor).
5. It is impossible to make a nuclear weapon from thorium -- and significantly more difficult to make a weapon from uranium bred in thorium reactors (U-233) than from enriched natural uranium (U-235).
6. Thorium has an incredibly-high “burn-up” meaning that there is virtually no long-lived radioactive waste to deal with afterwards. (Conventional or light-water nuclear reactors in America continue to have the unsolved problem of storing spent fuel since America, unlike other countries such as France, does not permit reprocessing spent fuel to weapons-grade uranium and the Yucca Mountain repository is on permanent hold.)
7. LFTR’s can safely consume uranium from decommissioned nuclear warheads and from spent uranium-reactor fuel rods. Indeed, the Oak Ridge MSRE in the 1960’s used U-235, Pu-239 and U-233 at the same time.
8. Thorium is so plentiful and readily accessible that it can provide all of the earth’s energy for, as a practical matter, all eternity (scoop up a few handfuls of sand, for example, from many beaches in India and you have enough thorium to power Mumbai for a year).
9. Thorium is so stable that it is NOT capable of initiating a nuclear chain reaction on its own.
10. LFTR’s act as breeders, producing as much fuel as they consume.
11. LFTR’s reprocess fuel on the fly since the fuel is in liquid form and, accordingly, downtime is virtually eliminated.
12. Because LFTR’s are economically practical in small sizes, they can be mass-produced in factories and assembled near electrical demand so energy losses during electricity transmission are virtually eliminated -- though to replace huge uranium reactors, it would only be necessary to assemble several of the small modular thorium reactors into a larger plant.

Accordingly, I implore you to designate in your Discretionary Budget for FY 2013 which begins October 2012 enough funding for LFTR research and development to make LFTR’s a commercial reality as quickly as possible. In this regard, it is noted that:

1. Your Discretionary Budget for FY 2012 (dated February 2012 and posted on the DOE website) contained $29.5 billion of discretionary funding which comprised many categories from which LFTR research and development could have come, such as Energy Transformation Acceleration ($5.4 billion), Energy Efficiency ($3.2 billion), and Environmental Management ($6.1 billion).

2. “Superfuel: Thorium, The Green Energy Source for the Future” by Richard Martin (Palgrave Macmillan 2012) on which the reading group described above was focusing, reports (p. 230) that it would probably only take about $5 billion to build the first commercial prototype and about $1 billion to build a small prototype.

3. “Superfuel” also reports (p. 156) that among all of the foreign governments and foreign enterprises that are racing to develop LFTR’s, China sent a delegation to visit Oak Ridge in the Fall of 2010. The delegation was headed by Jiang Mianheng, head of China’s thorium program, a Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and son of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin. Oak Ridge personnel reported that the Chinese delegation had no interest other than LFTR’s. The Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics with a staff of 400 people and a budget of $400 million plans to build two prototype LFTR’s by 2015.

With all of your background in molecular biology, atomic physics, quantum electronics, etc., I’m sure you will appreciate that LFTR’s are almost certainly the answer to many of the most pressing problems of America and the world, and that bringing LFTR’s on line sooner rather than later is imperative.

Thank you for your consideration.

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