Sir John Beddington thinks: Forget it! There'll be no LFTRs in the UK....It's too risky!...It's too expensive!

The following is an extract from a DECC email reply, to an enquiry from a gentleman, pointing out LFTR interest in a Daily Telegraph Blog on Nuclear Power: 

The Government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir John Beddington, with input from the shadow Nuclear Centre of Excellence and others, recently coordinated an assessment of the prospects for research into advanced thorium reactors.......

The conclusion was that, whilst the science is reasonably sound, developing reactors based on a thorium fuel cycle would carry major technological and commercial risks. The resources required to develop these technologies to the point at which they might be deployed successfully at a commercial scale are also significant.

Daily Telegraph 23 January 2010:

Wind farm subsidies top £1 billion a year

Britain's energy policy faces new controversy as it can be revealed that electricity customers are paying more than £1 billion a year to subsidise windfarms and other forms of renewable energy.

By Rowena Mason 6:39AM GMT 11 Jan 2010

The cold weather has been accompanied by high pressure and a lack of wind, which meant that only 0.2pc of a possible 5pc of the UK's energy was generated by wind turbines over the last few days.

Yes, playing safe politics will keep us in power lads! Keep telling the people what Green Parties we are and keep the subsidies flowing into renewables (whisper, whisper - even though we know they're completely useless!). How many votes would we get sticking £300 million into the first-of-a-kind LFTR - not a lot - we'd have Greenpeace and the rest of those screaming anti-nukes at our throats!

Sir John says it'll be a bit tricky and a bit expensive - we can just tell the media that's the best advice and we've no need to stick our necks out!

It's Now or Never!

The text of Kirk Sorensen's interview for ABC News (http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/03/18/3168019.htm?section=world) shows how he was allowed to make the case for LFTRs being several orders of magnitude safer than the the vast majority world's current LWR fleet.



Can we ever guarantee to
second-guess nature? 



The history case, linking to Alvin Weinberg, the inventor of the LWR, is mighty pursuasive in terms of presenting the information to the public at large. However, LFTR advocates need to be at the politicians and their expert advisers, who we know will have their backs to the wall, defending decades of pouring money into a safety-fallable, uranium-fuelled nuclear industry.


I've already emailed Chris Huhne, with the link to this article, suggesting he'd better move quickly on LFTRs, if he wants to stand a chance of meeting our carbon targets. He needs to  bear in mind what the gathering storm, from the massed ranks of the viscerally driven anti-nukes will do to his new-build nuclear programme.

I now plan to email him with a 'formal' request (if there is such a thing within the machinery of the studies his department carry out) for a study to be conducted on prototyping the first-of-a-kind (FOAK) LFTRs (to pre-production status). A further study, on production line manufacture of (say) 100 MWe units capable of being transported on a flat-bed truck, is also needed.

Anybody in the UK who reads this and is so inclined, I hope you will bang-on to your MP, to urge Chris Huhne to get LFTRs onto his energy agenda, with utmost urgency.

Dan Brown - Get your teeth into this!!

40 Years of Planetary desecration - Maybe

theWorst 40 Years in History.

Is it more than just deeply irreligious?

Is it a Conspiracy Theory??

Scary or what? - Had LFTRs made the breakthrough those 40 years ago: Would sea-ice be melting? Would glaciers be retreating? Would permafrost be releasing methane? Would oceans be as acidic? Would the developing world be developed? Would population be declining? Would resource availability crises be postponed? Would Chernobyl, Three-Mile Island, The Gulf of Mexico have happened? Would all of those millions of early deaths from pollution have been avoided?

The Da Vinci Code has got nothing on this! It is so mind-blowingly incomprehensible that the LFTR concept did not rocket into existence, that dark forces must be at work.

If, like Dan Brown, you can invoke forces for good, versus forces for evil, playing on the stage of human development, you'll need a lot of imagination to introduce black, rolling, thundering-and-lightening clouds into the plot, when the only manifestation, in the developed world, is mass complacency, apathy and an air of 'life's pretty good, what's the problem?'. Truly, 'out of sight, out of mind' is as dark a dark force as it gets and it's common to the general public, politicians and all other pillars of society.

Because there is something almost irreligious about the whole issue, I sense that attacking the human failures holding development and production of LFTRs at bay,can best be achieved through the symbiosis of religion and politics. The Lords Spiritual have politically committed to: 'development of environmentally friendly sources of energy' and 'rethinking the development agenda in a way that makes sense of the unprecedented human security challenges posed by climate change'.

I have written to the Public Affairs office of The Archbishop of Canterbury, to see if opportunities exist, to present the wider context of the LFTRs case to a wider religious audience.

Watch this space!

We've Hoped! We've Prayed! Now Let's Do Something!!

They ought to do something about it!

Every time you see it, your heart feels like a brick, and somebody, somewhere should do something to make it right!

Those of us who have beliefs, pray for intervention and their relief from such deprivation. The rest of us just hope that politics, free-markets, capitalism, world banks, charity, anything...will improve things and stop this from happening again. After we've done our praying and hoping, it's back to life; we've got a living to make, mortgage to pay, clothes to put on backs, heating and lighting bills to pay and our favourite charities to support. It's not all that sumptuous, but life's pretty good.


Couldn't life be just that little bit fairer?

At the very least, everybody ought to have food on the table! And then, shouldn't they have clothes on their backs? Then shelter? Then warmth? Then light?

LFTRs to Power the Planet!

What's the latest plan?

The latest plan is to contact religious leaders of every conceivable denomination, in the UK, to establish if a policy can be implemented to inform, persuade, cajole or even instruct congregations to vote for a single-issue party 'The LFTRs to Power the Planet Party' at the next election. If one or more denominations are prepared to politicise their religion, over this one issue, then political impact would be ensured.

Plan 'B' would be to seek ways and means from religious leaders as to how congregations and followers can be inspired to become politically active or activists in support of LFTR production in the UK?

I'll be doing the writing and emailing to all of the multifarious leaders and I'll be reporting on the volume and nature of their responses.