Timing Matters |
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Daily Rant Archive2/11/11, 2/12/11, 2/14/11, 2/15/11, 2/17/11, 2/18/11, 2/19/11, 2/20/11, 2/21/11, 2/23/11, 2/25/11, 2/27/11, 2/28/11, 3/2/11 |
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Rant LiteToday’s rant examines the population dynamics of immigration to the FSofA prom the post Civil War Era to the Great Depression. |
Quote of the DayRevelation 6:8 And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth. |
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A Tale of Two DepressionsAs the Great Depression progressed onward, the early collapse in RE prices made many Banks insolvent, which then precipitated the Stock Market Crash of 1929. |
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4 Amish Children DeadClimate issues in Kentucky causing Die Off among the Amish |
High Commodity Prices Leading to Global Food Crisis“Without exception, genuine famines have political as well as agricultural causes. A crop failure is redeemable through cross-border flows of money or food, but where political conditions disrupt these flows; or worse, where food is provided or withdrawn as a mechanism of engendering political obedience, starvation looms.” |
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One of the important factors to consider on a Population level here in the FSofA during the Great Depression was what occurred BEFORE it and how the land got settled in the post Civil War years through the Great War and then the Roaring 20s.
First off, the “Sooners” of Oklahoma got their land for free after the Natives had been pushed off the land. These were generally immigrants from Europe, poor Swedes and Germans who homesteaded that land and began to farm it. Under the technology of the day, that land wasn’t really suitable for farming, it was Grazing land. They did not have the massive pumps to bring up the water from the Ogalala Aquifer in place yet. It really only took a couple of generations to deplete the land and set it up for the Dust Bowl. So all these 2nd generation poor immigrants on the poorest land would have been the first ones displaced and formed one itinerant army of Poor People once the Dust Bowl and the Depression set in.
The other army of poor folks were the Refugees from Europe who came over directly after the Great War. My Paternal Grandparents were in that Wave. Grandpa was Russian, Grandma was a Romanian Gypsie. This group of people formed the labor force building the Great Cities of the FSofA during the Roaring 20s. My Grandfather the Acrobat found good paying work on the High Steel in NYC. A smart guy and heavy drinker, he used his money to set up a Speakeasy in Brooklyn during the Prohibition years. My Grandma ran the Still producing fine Vodka and Sour Mash Whisky in the basement of the Brooklyn Brownstone they lived in, which he eventually bought also, for all CASH. I vaguely remember him telling me he bought it for $500. Said Brownstone was worth $100K even when I was in college. Probably worth $1M in the Boom years. He also bought land in Westchester county, then all farms, again for all CASH. When RE building collapsed in the Great Depression and he no longer had work walking the High Steel, his Speakeasy carried the family through, and frankly he did pretty well. He was a funny guy and the local Brooklyn Politicians all frequented his bar. There were guys Running Numbers out of the Bar, he took a Piece of the Action. Grandad was a smart Bizman, though not a very legally correct one. My father’s older brother ran a large Junkyard during the Depression years, he also did OK. My dad was able to go to College at Pace University majoring in Accounting just as WWII ended because they all made it through. Pretty well off actually. This of course is why I am here today writing from the Last Great Frontier. LOL.
My mom’s side did not do so well. They were Polish Jews who evacuated Europe just as the Nazis were coming to power. Her father, my maternal grandfather I never knew died shortly after coming to the FSofA of Tuberculosis. My maternal Grandmother kept the family going running a Rag Shop on the Lower East Side of NY, on Delancey Street. They did go through periods of great Hunger, but made it through on the food at the Soup Kitchens and did not starve to DEATH, although my mom was one Skinny 17 year old when my dad met her at a Dance in one of the Settlement Houses. Her brother wasn’t just skinny, he ended up with neurological problems which likely came from malnutrition.
Sadly of course, many others in the immigrant labor force during the years from 1917-1929 weren’t quite so smart and fortunate in how they used their decent wages for those 12 years as my Grandad, they didn’t have a Speakeasy to fall back on when the construction jobs disappeared and the Longshoremen jobs disappeared as Trade came to a grinding halt. The later immigrants from my mom’s side pretty much missed the boom entirely and were impoverished from the time they arrived here.
Together, once the Depression hit in full force in the 1930s, this was the other massive population of poor people besides the rural poor of places like Oklahoma. Basically all at the same time, once the jobs disappeared and poor land was no longer producing, ALL of these folks took to the road in one way or another looking for a Better Place and an Opportunity. For a Decade of time, until we entered WWII in 1941, no such opportunities existed for them anywhere. You see that in the Signs from the period, “Jobless Men KEEP GOING! We Cannot support our OWN!”
Whatever Die Off did occur here in the years of the Great Depression came from this group of itinerants, and this is why they for the most part are not remembered. They were mostly newby immigrants who had no other family ties here, nobody to remember them, how they lived and how they died. People who had family ties here, who were parts of small communities that survived and looked after there own mostly DID make it through, although of course not without much hardship. The ones who did actually die of starvation or starvation related disease, however many of them there were, were the most recent immigrants in the poorest of the poor situations.
As we look into the future here, History is likely to Rhyme in this regard. The folks here in the most precarious situation are the most recent Immigrants, particularly the Illegal immigrants. They are the ones who are going to first be cut off from the SNAP cards and told to “Move ON, because we cannot take care of our own”. How many of them are there? Estimates are around 20M I think, and for the most part this bunch of people are GONERS. Just like the friends and relatives they left behind in their home countries to escape the desperate poverty there.
Quite a bit of LUCK involved in when you were born, when you emigrated and where you emigrated to, both prior to the Great Depression and now as well. My Paternal Grandfather emigrated at the RIGHT time, and hitched a ride on the Prosperity that was the Roaring 20s. Vietnamese who emigrated here in the 1970s similarly are likely to make it through, having established themselves and having family networks to fall back on. My mother’s family is more like the recent immigrants from places like Pakistan and Guatemala. They will not fare so well.
The biggest difference I see between then and now is the difference in potential for rebuilding once the initial Holocaust takes its toll worldwide. Similarly, I do expect a World War and Conscription to commence, but in this case it is very hard to see how the factories hiring “Rosie the Riveter” will be able to both bring jobs to the women not conscripted and the folks too old to fight but still young enough to work on a production line or as a Manager. This because at the time of WWII, the OIL was available locally to run those factories, not so today. Today, that Oil must be IMPORTED from the War Zone ITSELF. I cannot see how enough Oil can be moved from that War Zone to the FSofA to BOTH ramp up the war production machinery AND continue to run the civilian systems we have here that have come to depend on it over the intervening years.
Austerity in the form of Gas and Food rationing in the WWII years was pretty tough, but this time round it has to be much tougher than that to keep fuel moving to the War Machine. I don’t think the integrity of the society can hold together under that much austerity, and moreover I don’t see it possible that enough Oil can be moved from the war zone to even keep the war machinery itself going very long. This adds up to systemic collapse of the Oil conduit entirely.
Once that happens, pretty much all the International War for Oil will stop and at this point all the Wars will be loal ones for local resources amongst the people currently living on particular patches of land around the globe. No rebuild of industrialized society, just further destruction until enough are dead so there are enough local resources for the survivors. It would be at this point you could attempt a rebuild on 1850s era technology, utilizing mostly Coal and scavenging parts from the Age of Oil. Call that a 50 year timeline, then another 100 years perhaps rebuilding with that technology until it also gives up the ghost.1750s after that fo another couple of centuries, back to the Stone Age after that.
There is ZERO on the horizon I can see that will stop this inexorable progression. Nuclear Plants will not do it, neither will renewable Hydro or Solar. However, as long as some people survive, the great experiment that is Human Sentience will continue onward, and then perhaps after all of this we can build a Better Tomorrow. Only time will tell.
RE
Persnickety says:
I follow the explanations of why most proposed alternative energy possibilities won’t work, including existing nuclear fission based on Uranium. However, Thorium fuel cycle reactors seem to get glowing reviews from very knowledgeable people anywhere that they are discussed, and I have yet to read anything explaining why they couldn’t be an enormous help if we quickly started building them. Am I missing something?
Oh, as for trying to get oil home from the war zone, that would seem to give Russia a pretty strong hand in any global oil war, though Canadian tar sands could temporarily be quite important too.
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3rd March 2011 at 10:53 pm
DavosSherman says:
Really good read!
IMO population is the root of all our problems, well that and the fact we don’t live sustainably. I suspect Jim is correct, it’ll lead to a 4th turning, once these assholes realize what the root problem is and it’ll be one arrogant nation destroying another nation, possibly the world.
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3rd March 2011 at 11:17 pm
English Rose says:
“I suspect Jim is correct, it’ll lead to a 4th turning”
Last time I looked, Srauss and Howe wrote the Fourth Turning. Jim has never had an original thought in his life. No wait, he did think that NOBODY at all died of starvation during the Great Depression!
Another fantastic article RE, it’s all playing out exactly as you predicted 2 years ago. Awesome.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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3rd March 2011 at 2:15 am
eugend66 says:
RE, good article.
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3rd March 2011 at 2:48 am
flash says:
Rule1: Might makes right.
Rule 2: see Rule 2
i suspect if crack-up comes , people will again seek to clan up and declare multiculturalism dead as leaders in both Germany and the UK have recently done.
i wouldn’t count the Latinos out just yet.They outnumber Anglos in much of the Southwest and with possess skills of sustenance survival that’s been bred out of Anglos.
And in the South blacks hugely outnumber Anglos in rural and urban ares.
The majority of Americans are ignorant creatures of habit and if the SHTF they aren’t suddenly going to get all reflective on why the collapse came ,whose the blame and come together in a unified effort to punish the culprits. Instead I think that people will again unify over cultural and spiritual preferences and set up perimeters protecting their carved out turf.
I suspect the carving out process to be particulars bloody as past paradigm shifts have woefully evidenced .
Tom Chitum believes upstate New York because it will be one of the las Anglo settled areas in the Great North-East.
I’m praying he is wrong, but evidence suggest otherwise.
He has a book out that I read years ago.Some think it racist , but Chitum says the book isn’t racist but merely his analysis of the facts as he see them.
Civil War Two: The Coming Breakup of America [Paperback]
Thomas W. Chittum (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (67 customer reviews)
http://www.amazon.com/Civil-War-Two-Breakup-America/dp/0929408179
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3rd March 2011 at 7:26 am
Welshman says:
ER,
Jim did not say NOBODY died of starvation in the Great Depression, he stated that 7 million did not starve to death.
RE,
Good Rant, and noticed hunger and starving squeezed in there. I believe in the pecking order and luck have a lot to do with survival. Wise choices can also give you a big leg up. Many times a wise choice can only be seen after the fact. I think history proves the last in first out theory. Poor Jews of Europe certainly took on the chin.
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3rd March 2011 at 8:46 am
eugend66 says:
WTF, I can vote my own comment ??
WPES !
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3rd March 2011 at 9:05 am
eugend66 says:
hehehehe.
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3rd March 2011 at 10:42 am
Reverse Engineer says:
@ Welsh
What Admin said was the following:
“So a country where people were starving to death in tremendous numbers grew by 25% between 1920 and 1940. Why would Americans continue to have babies if they were already starving? Why would people migrate to a country where people were starving?”
He also said “Nobody starved in Philadelphia”.
I will be posting up a bit later with some further information from the FRASAR database.
RE
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3rd March 2011 at 12:29 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
@Persnickety
Maintaining our current systems is as much about distributing out energy as it is about producing it.
While you might build the Thorium reactors, you still need to mine all the copper for the transmission lines and then string all the line over miles of territory. How will you move those 2 Ton reels of copper caple around to string them up without heavy equipment run on Oil? How will you build and maintain your thorium plants?
The battery technology really is not there to store anywhere near the energy a gallon of diesel fuel does. What battery technology there is requires mining of rare metals, which takes stripping through tons of dirt, again using heavy equipment.
Put it this way, if Throrium plants were really the answer, why would the Chinese not be building them en masse? They have money, they have a labor force building empty cities and they need energy as much as anyone, moreso perhaps since they are home to a good portion of the world’s maufacturing sector now. So why pray tell are the Chinese not building these plants? Its not like they really worry about environmental issues, so what? Are they just STUPID?
The answer I think is that people with the money to invest in this sort of thing will not invest in it because they see no return on the investment. That would be the people who own the current energy companies. They are just milking what profit is left out of the fossil fuels system and then Bunkering Up while J6P and Chen Rice Wine starve.
RE
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3rd March 2011 at 12:48 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
I spent a little time last night going over the tables available on Da Fed FRASER database. Some interesting data is available to see in here. You can find all the tables I am referencing in this post at http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/publications/stat_abstract/issue/5597/?viewby=subjectlist&type=tablearticle&subject_id=10038
The most interesting one is regarding net immigration/emmigration during the worst years of the depression. According to these tables, from 1931 through 1936, more people left the FSofA than came here. Net NEGATIVE numbers reported in the table. One has to wonder where the folks who left in greater numbers than they came were going? By year here:
1931: -10,287
1932: -112,786
1933: -93,074
1934: -13,268
1935: -9,329
1936: -2,385
JimQ made the argument “Why would people emmigrate to the FSofA if people were Starving?” Answer by the numbers: From the period of 1931-1936, according to the tables in the Statistical Abstract of the United States, more people left than came here. Jim’s argument has been Obliterated.
Prior to this in the Roaring 20′s when my Paternal Grandparents arrived, Immigration net was postive in the 6 figures every year. Assuming the table numbers are somewhat accurate, during the worst years of the Great Depression the FSofA was NOT a welcome place for the Poor Huddled Masses Yearning to be Free. The door was not SHUT to immigration, but in the revolving door more people left than came according to these tables.
I did try to recreate what Boris says he did, which was to tally up the numbers of Births and Deaths through the census period from 1930 to 1940 and match it up against the Census Numbers of Total Estimated Population for those years. It is not possible to do this with these tables, because from the years 1931-1934, the raw data of Births over Deaths is MISSING. Table no.84 shows the data for 1930, then 1935, 36, 37, and 38, but does not show the data for 1931,32,33 or 34. So Boris must have a different copy of the tables to work with. Maybe he has an old Hard Copy that was in the library in Moscow?
You do have some estimated Birth/Death rates for 1931,32 & 33 in Table no. 85 which shows the rates decreasing during this period but still positive, but how they came up with these numbers without raw data is kind of hard to figure out. Data is missing here.
Another HUGE Missing Data Set is in the “Death From Selected Causes” Table No. 82. Here again, you have data from 1930,35,36,37,38, but NO data from 1931,32,33 & 34. Now, “Starvation” is not one of the “Selected Causes” anyhow so you can’t get direct stats on that one for any year, but other listed diseases like Pneumonia, Typhus, Whooping Cough, Scarlet Fever et al if you had the data for 1931-34 might give you an indication of starvation issues, since all of those are opportunistic diseases which will hit a weakened population.
Conclusion here is that at least from this set of tables available online from the Federal Reserve, you cannot figure out jack shit about what went on from 1931-1934. The most important raw data is all MISSING. You can speculate on the reason for that yourself.
In aggregate, from the census in 1930 to the one in 1940, the overall population of the FSofA did increase from about 123M in 1930 to about 132M in 1940 for a net increase of 9M people. This is a significantly smaller increase than from 1920 to 1930, when we went from 106.5M to 123M, for an increase of 16.5M people. The greatest reason for this by the numbers on these tables was significantly lower net immigration. From 1920 to 1930, we had about a net gain of 3.2M people from immigration. From 1930 to 1940, our Immigration net was near Zero, I didn’t tabulate it exactly but its small either way. (I will say I find these numbers a little hard to believe. My Maternal Grandparents came here during this time period, and anecdotally I think most people accept that the FSofA had quite a bit of refugee immigration during this time period) If you assume a relatively steady birth/death rate, we should have increased by around 12M people, not 9M. So with this limited data set, the biggest discrepancy I can see is about 3M people, but a steady birth rate was unlikely, it probably decreased significantly during this period. I will Ballpark the Birth Rate as decreasing by 50% through the worst years of the Depression, and the Death rate doubling through the same time period. These are total Ballpark figures I am conjuring up out of thin air because I do not have good data to work with here. With this in mind, I will make my best guess as about 1M people taken out of the game during the worst years of the Great Depression here in the FSofA by Starvation or Starvation related opportunistic disease. Nowhere near what Boris came up with of 7.5M, but still a whole lot of people, around 1% of the population perhaps.
This is just a BALLPARK figure based on the data I have been able to dig up so far. Those Missing Years of Data from 1931-1934 are the REAL bear here. Without them, you cannot really say whether the growth reduction mostly came from reduced birth rates or increased death rates. However, this is still a lot better than no data at all. So for the time being, with the caveat that I do not have all the data to make a real good estimate, I will say 1M died as a result of Starvation or Starvation related Opportunistic Disease here in the FSofA during the Great Depression. This would seem to be enough also to motivate the Hunger Marches like the Bonus Army and the kind of stuff John Steibeck chronicled amongst the migrant farm workers in CA. It fits the history so it seems to me like a good estimate.
RE
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3rd March 2011 at 1:24 pm
Administrator says:
RE RE RE
Looks like you left out some data. You didn’t think I would accept your cherry picked data. You are pitiful. The Great Depression lasted from 1929 until 1940. Fascinating that you only showed data from 1931 to 1936.
That again proves you are a douchebag that will manipulate data to win an argument. Here is the total picture for the Great Depression:
1929 +226
1930 +174
1931 -10
1932 -113
1933 -93
1934 -13
1935 -9
1936 -2
1937 +7
1938 +30
1939 +39
1940 +40
Therefore, you are obliterated again as there was net immigration of 276,000 during the Great Depression. Even if you excluded 1929, there was still net immigration of 40,000.
Keep trying douchebag. Give Boris a call.
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3rd March 2011 at 1:58 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
@Admin
You are the douchebag. I said in my post that in all the other years from 1920 to 1940 immigration was net postive. You simply do not read for comprehension and are deologically driven to believe “nobody starved in Philadelphia”.
You have been shown to be a LIAR and Propagandist of the Joeseph Goebbels variety. Anyone is free to go look at the data. You lose. Live with it.
RE
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3rd March 2011 at 2:04 pm
StuckInNJ says:
Two of the MOST BULL-HEADED people I’ve ever known duking it out over 80 year old tables. Where else but on TBP can one get such entertainment?
Jim seems to be uping the ante with the “douchbag” name calling, but RE has yet to unleash his Napalm arsenal. When will it reappear? If not now …. when???
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3rd March 2011 at 2:08 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
Nice way to not take sides there Stuck. Sit on the Fence whydonchya? LOL.
RE
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3rd March 2011 at 2:12 pm
Administrator says:
RE
Only 19 more posts on the same subject with cherry picked data, backed up by Boris Yelstin’s videos, and supported by English Rose, and you’ll surely convince everyone that 70 million Americans died of starvation during the Great Depression. John Steinbeck will rise from the dead and support your air tight case.
I think I know why you live alone in a shack in Alaska.
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3rd March 2011 at 2:21 pm
Smokey says:
The debate ended about three articles ago, with RE beaten beyond recognition, and certainly beyond all doubt.
The winning side drank toasts of champagne and then returned to their lives. Meanwhile, RE remains all alone, his pathetic arguments exposed as fictions and lies, and RE calls the Administrator a LIAR.
LOL—RE wouldn’t know the truth if it bit him in the ass. At least RE can take solace in the fact that, despite his embarrassing and complete loss, at least he has English Rose’s lips wrapped firmly around his dick.
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3rd March 2011 at 2:22 pm
llpoh says:
So immigration slowed. Birthrate slowed. Life expectancy increased. Total population increased.
And RE assimilates this data in his pointy little organic computer and comes up with …..
Starvation. BWahahahahahaha! I think I already toasted this conclusion.
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3rd March 2011 at 2:24 pm
llpoh says:
Smokey – you make me laugh. I more envision English Rose as a giant leech attached to his ass, but yours works too.
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3rd March 2011 at 2:26 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
It wasn’t Boris Yeltsin, it was Boris Badenov.
RE
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3rd March 2011 at 2:31 pm
SSS says:
RE
Why won’t nuclear plants do it? 100 triple-reactor plants built between now and 2030 will cover 100% of the additional energy requirements needed by the U.S. for the next 20 years. 100%.
Renewables and natural gas will be just gravy to DECREASE our dependence on foreign oil and free up more coal sales to China, India, and poorer nations which cannot afford high tech power plants (fuck the Global Warmers). And natural gas, which we have plenty of and so does neighboring Canada, can be used to power all sorts of vehicles, as you well know.
So the question is……….Why won’t nuclear do it?
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3rd March 2011 at 2:50 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
@SSS
Did you read my response to Persnickety? Its the Transmission problem as much as the production problem.
RE
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3rd March 2011 at 2:55 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
Just one nuclear mishap in a densly populated area will wipe out seven million Americans. Another seven million within 100 miles will starve to death. That’s why.
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3rd March 2011 at 2:57 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
Gee, I wonder who the RE Doppleganger might be? LOL. Loser tactics.
RE
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3rd March 2011 at 2:59 pm
Administrator says:
RE
You seem to missing the sarcasm gene.
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3rd March 2011 at 3:02 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
RE
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3rd March 2011 at 3:10 pm
howard in nyc says:
@re
keep posting rocky and bullwinkle. more mr. peabody!
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3rd March 2011 at 3:29 pm
Administrator says:
SSS
7 million Americans have already died of nuclear contamination released into the atmosphere. RE has a chart to prove it. His friend Boris wrote an article on it.
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3rd March 2011 at 3:32 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
RE
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3rd March 2011 at 3:35 pm
llpoh says:
Howard – I do not know about Peabody but there is a lot of peabrain being posted.
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3rd March 2011 at 3:37 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
RE
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3rd March 2011 at 3:52 pm
Smokey says:
My man Snidely Whiplash!!!
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3rd March 2011 at 4:04 pm
Persnickety says:
I’m not fully convinced of the argument on transmission, but I don’t have concrete facts to refute it. My thought process is twofold:
1) If Thorium cycle reactors work well enough and the fuel supply is as large as it’s cracked up to be, coal to liquids or even just purely synthetic oil could be viable, as long as we get the system in place before we run out of petroleum (you need energy to build it).
2) Apart from #1, let’s say diesel/gasoline etc. is simply gone forever and can’t be replaced. Why do we need to rely on them? Yes, our base of knowledge for the last 100 years relies on liquid fuels, but there are other ways to design and power machinery, other ways to do things.
Heinlein’s novel Friday envisions a world where there is suborbital space travel (replacing atmospheric long distance flights) yet local travel is mostly by horse and cart, except for government users. I wonder if we could be heading in that direction.
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3rd March 2011 at 4:08 pm
howard in nyc says:
wanna see smokey get all wet?
you wanna understand smokey’s politics?
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3rd March 2011 at 4:10 pm
howard in nyc says:
wanna see smokey get all wet?
you wanna understand smokey’s politics?
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3rd March 2011 at 4:12 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
@Persnickety
On the assumption we could get some virtually inexaustible energy source (fusion, geothermal, maybe thorium) going, then you could in theory use the energy to make synthetic liquid fuels using any source of carbon, even CO2. I could imagine a huge vacuum cleaner turbine sucking CO2 laden air in with a fusion reactor running a reduction process exhausting oxygen and carbon polymers from ethane up through say neo-propane. Muh as I can imagine it, I don’t see it on the horizon before we have a collapse of systems making such a venture impossible.
RE
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3rd March 2011 at 4:26 pm
SSS says:
RE
You’re winging it again.
The transmission problem is solved by CO-LOCATING the 100 new plants with existing nuclear power plants, of which the U.S. has 104 in operation. Also largely solves the security issues because the perimeter security already exists. AND, since you’re putting the new plants on land where the older plants are, the whacko environmentalists will have much less to bitch about, although I’m sure they’ll pull something out of their ass. Oh, the new plants will add about 240,000 permanent jobs to the economy. I’m sure you don’t have a problem with that.
We haven’t yet reached Peak Copper, Peak Aluminum (also used in high voltage lines), or Peak Uranium. Plenty of those minerals out there.
You also said, “So why pray tell are the Chinese not building these plants? Its not like they really worry about environmental issues, so what? Are they just STUPID?” No, the Chinese are not stupid. See my comments to Persnickety. And stop butting heads with me on nuclear energy. You’ll lose every time.
Persnickety
What’s up with the thorium reactor stuff? The only operable thorium reactor in the world is in India, and it’s rated at about 350 megawatts. Too small for our needs, and the technology still needs lots of tweaking.
Read up on the Westinghouse AP 1000. Approved by the NRC. It’s a standardized plant (meaning the design won’t change) with the bonus that the design itself is modular. Sort of like putting together an expensive modular home. Ready to go right now with orders from several southern states AND China AND Taiwan. The AP 1000 is the ticket to a secure energy future.
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3rd March 2011 at 5:10 pm
Persnickety says:
SSS: I have no objection to more modern Uranium reactors, including breeder reactors and the various simpler/safer types. However, we simply don’t have all that much Uranium left (didn’t have that much to begin with) to get a lot of useful power at 1% or so efficiency of conversion. Thorium is a more abundant fuel and the Thorium reactors should operate at far, far higher efficiency levels.
One source of info is here:
http://energyfromthorium.com/
I am not connected to that site.
RE: Appreciate the reply comments. I think you are conceding that the issue is at least partly political/social rather than technical. This assumes that some form of not-yet-common nuclear reactor would work, but while it’s not completely proven, it’s basically just derivative of existing technology and knowledge, rather than requiring a complete breakthrough like fusion would require.
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3rd March 2011 at 5:18 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
@SSS
Your knowledge of the nuke industry is probably better than mine, mainly I base my argument on what I have seen occurring to date, and it does not appear as though the many problems involved with changing our total infrastructure from Oil to Nuke or renewables can possibly occur in time to avoid the social dislocation of Peak Oil
I would mostly present Stoneleigh’s arguments, she worked in the industry and expalins the problems more succinctly. If you can answer all the points she makes, you might have a good case:
http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2009/07/july-1-2009-renewable-power-not-in-your.html
“Investment in grid infrastructure, as with public infrastructure of most other kinds, has been sadly neglected for a long time. Much of the existing grid equipment is at or near the end of its design life, as are many of the power plants we depend on. (For instance, in Ontario we haven’t got around to paying for the last set of nuclear power plants we built, that are now approaching the end of design life and have had to be very expensively re-tubed in recent years.
The outstanding debt is some $40 billion, and the debt retirement charge we pay doesn’t even cover the interest.) Liberalization in the electricity sector has led to a relentless whittling away of safety margins in many places. Where we once had a system with a great deal of resilience through redundancy, that is generally no longer the case. In North America we now have an aging system with a very limited capacity for accommodating either new generation or new load, and we have great difficulty building any new lines.
As the power system was designed under a central station model to carry power in one direction only, with high voltage transmission and low voltage distribution, the modifications that would be required to enable two-way traffic, especially at the distribution level, are very substantial. Comprehensive monitoring and two-way communication would be required down to the distribution level, with central control (dispatchability, or at least the power to disconnect) of large numbers of very small generators. ”
RE
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3rd March 2011 at 5:45 pm
howard in nyc says:
sorry bout the double.
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3rd March 2011 at 6:08 pm
Iowan says:
Moose and Squirrel, I will tell you why 100 triple reactor plants won’t be built. No one has the political balls to set aside some land under which to store all of that radioactive waste. Even if you reprocess the U and start using MOX fuel and/or IFRs there is still going to be waste from fission. Pure and simple. Where the hell are we going to put that?
Problem #2 with Uranium as a fuel: One method of uranium mining is in “In-Situ Leach.” The goal here is that you put in a bunch of wells in a U ore bearing aquifer, pump a bunch of chemicals into the ground A) to oxidize the U and B) make it more soluble it so you can pump it out of the ground. It is a bad idea environmentally, as you will for sure contaminate the ore-bearing aquifer with uranium. It was already U bearing, but by oxidizing it and solublizing the U you just created a big ass problem that already doesn’t have a good solution at several DOE sites that formerly processed uranium.
Thorium is better from an environmental standpoint. For one thing, it is much less soluble in water, so its not going to cause a huge contamination problem. And some of the designs can actually consume waste.
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3rd March 2011 at 6:12 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
“Moose and Squirrel, I will tell you why 100 triple reactor plants won’t be built. No one has the political balls to set aside some land under which to store all of that radioactive waste. Even if you reprocess the U and start using MOX fuel and/or IFRs there is still going to be waste from fission. Pure and simple. Where the hell are we going to put that? “-Iowan
How does that explain why the Chinese don’t do it? Its not like they don’t have political balls to store the radioactive waste in the irrigation water for the rice paddies.
RE
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3rd March 2011 at 6:16 pm
AKAnon says:
SSS-”(fuck the Global Warmers)”-and by extension, other “greenies”. Ahh, there is the rub. The dipshits holding the cards (EPA, Bureau of Interior, etc.) don’t want to fix the problem, at least not domestically. The want to promote the the “Anti-everything” agenda, and if the multitudes ever figure out that we NEED to develop nukes and that anthropogenic CO2 is not our arch-enemy, it will be too late to play catch up.
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3rd March 2011 at 6:27 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
“SSS-”(fuck the Global Warmers)”-and by extension, other “greenies”. Ahh, there is the rub. The dipshits holding the cards (EPA, Bureau of Interior, etc.) don’t want to fix the problem, at least not domestically.” AKAnon
Repeat the question. Greenies do no seem to be an obstacle for the Chinese, so WTF aren’t they building Thorium reactors?
RE
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3rd March 2011 at 6:40 pm
SSS says:
Iowan
WTF are you talking about? Mining uranium ore is largely open pit mining, not that aquifer bullshit you threw out there as a red herring. Got it? Digging a big fucking hole in the ground.
As for your nuclear waste argument, more bullshit. Classic liberal bullshit. Well, we’ve been safely storing nuclear waste for way over 40 years in situ. Got an answer to that one if you’re concerned? I do. Ever heard of Yucca Mountain, dickhead? But no-o-o-o, shitheads like you skip right over the subject. Or block the shipment of nuclear waste and shut down a $15 billion dollar federal investment. Congratulations, Harry “The Iowan” Reid.
Don’t come on this site with your fucking environmental concerns, particularly about nuclear energy, and not expect to get a really sharp response from me. You fuckers are 100% responsible for this country’s energy problems. Got that? 100%. You rant and rave about ANY rational solution to energy. You do nothing but distort and misinform. And you have nothing but irrational, unworkable solutions.
You’re at the plate, big guy. Prove me wrong.
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3rd March 2011 at 7:38 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
@SSS
Repeating again the question. Since Tree Hugging is Illegal in China, WTF on’t they build all the Thorium plants to run their toy factories?
Also you might try addressing some of Nicole Foss’s arguments if you expect to have any credibility whatsoever.
RE
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3rd March 2011 at 7:44 pm
Administrator says:
SSS
Give em hell. Nuclear is our only chance.
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3rd March 2011 at 8:16 pm
SSS says:
RE
I answered the question about thorium reactors. It’s not now practical and doable with current technology. If it were, we’d be building them.
As for Nicole Foss, here goes.
Per Nicole, “Much of the existing grid equipment is at or near the end of its design life, as are many of the power plants we depend on.”
Wrong. Nuclear power plants are NOT ending their design life. In the beginning, it was thought to be 40 years. The oldest plant in America, in New Jersey, just got a 20-year extension on its 40-year-old plant. It is now up to 80 years and counting.
Give up, RE.
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3rd March 2011 at 8:17 pm
Iowan says:
SSS -
I think you’ve got me wrong. I’m not a “NO” environmentalist, but on the other hand: Do you mean to say all environmental concerns should eat shit? Pollute at will?
In situ leaching isn’t a red herring, its the preferred method of uranium ore recovery in the US.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf27.html
Is a trade organization good enough for you as evidence? I highly doubt it is benign, but I will give you that if the aquifer sucks (high dissolved solids etc) already then its probably no loss as long as no contamination to potable water aquifers occurs.
You are right in-situ storage is an option. My guess is that the utilities would love to have it off site though, as they are spending money to watch over it. They’ve also been paying since the start of the industry for a central disposal site. And the politicians have consistently fucked them over on it.
I’m all for Yucca Mountain. Every repository is going to have some problems with it. Harry Reid’s position isn’t so much because he is a greenie as it is because he says “not in my backyard.” (i.e. a good political position to have relative to his constituency.)
But yes, you are right, a small portion of the population has driven the move away from nuclear energy because they are dumbfucks. No appreciation of the safety of nuclear power when done right. Most people are so fucking stupid that they don’t understand properly what ionizing radiation is, and think that radiowaves/microwaves from your cell phone can give you cancer. But then again, nuclear power wouldn’t have mitigated our big energy issue, which is transportation fuel – oil. Once cheap oil is gone, maybe nuclear has a chance to support some coal-to-liquids scheme.
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3rd March 2011 at 8:49 pm
Persnickety says:
RE: You seem to have post spam, as you asked about China and Thorium about 4 times. China doesn’t have the world’s most advanced technology on much of anything. Most of the non-US countries with advanced nuclear tech have decided they are afraid of it. France is the only significant exception. The fact that India, which probably has as many physicists as the rest of the world combined, and is desperately poor, is working on Thorium reactors should be taken as a good sign.
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3rd March 2011 at 8:52 pm
StuckInNJ says:
sss, you are really full of shit. You try to come across as an expert on things Thorium and Uranium. Are you a nuclear engineer, or is your knowledge limited to what you googled in the past 10 minutes?
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3rd March 2011 at 9:38 pm
SSS says:
Stucky
Stay the fuck out of the argument on nuclear energy. Admin can attest to the fact that I posted a comprehensive article on the subject on TBP One, or was it Two. I’ve researched the subject in detail. I know what I’m talking about.
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3rd March 2011 at 10:03 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
” Nuclear is our only chance.”-Admin
If that is the case, you picked the wrong year to quit drinking.
RE
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3rd March 2011 at 10:14 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
@Stuck
SSS has Top Secret CIA documents on Thorium reactors.
RE
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3rd March 2011 at 10:15 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
@SSS
What do you mean the Chinese don’t have enough Smarts? JimQ keeps telling us the Chinese have all the Smart Kids with the Ph.Ds graduating from Ivy League Schools!
RE
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3rd March 2011 at 10:17 pm
Administrator says:
None of them are graduating from Columbia.
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3rd March 2011 at 10:25 pm
Administrator says:
SSS
We can dump the nuclear waste in Alaska. No known intelligent life there.
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3rd March 2011 at 10:27 pm
SSS says:
Iowan
I looked up the World Nuclear University link you sent and found the following.
“I am wholly in favour of the World Nuclear University. We are at the point where there is no sensible alternative to nuclear power if we are to sustain civilization.
Obviously to replace the present use of fossil fuel with nuclear energy is a vast undertaking, and we will need a great number of engineers and scientists with the ability to lead. It is heartening to see the WNU inspiring and equipping young professionals around the world to fulfil that leadership role.”
James Lovelock – author of the Gaia Theory and world leader in the development of environmental consciousness
So far, so good. Right? Now let’s take a look at James Lovelock and his Gaia Theory.
Gaia
First formulated by Lovelock during the 1960s as a result of work for NASA concerned with detecting life on Mars, the Gaia hypothesis proposes that living and non-living parts of the Earth form a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism. Named after the Greek goddess Gaia at the suggestion of novelist William Golding, the hypothesis postulates that the biosphere has a regulatory effect on the Earth’s environment that acts to sustain life.
While the Gaia hypothesis was readily accepted by many in the environmentalist community, it has not been widely accepted within the scientific community. Among its more famous critics are the evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins, Ford Doolittle, and Stephen Jay Gould — notable, given the diversity of this trio’s views on other scientific matters. These (and other) critics have questioned how natural selection operating on individual organisms can lead to the evolution of planetary-scale homeostasis.
Nuclear power
Lovelock has become concerned about the threat of global warming from the greenhouse effect. In 2004 he caused a media sensation when he broke with many fellow environmentalists by pronouncing that “only nuclear power can now halt global warming”. In his view, nuclear energy is the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels that has the capacity to both fulfill the large scale energy needs of humankind while also reducing greenhouse emissions. He is an open member of Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy.
In 2005, against the backdrop of renewed UK government interest in nuclear power, Lovelock again publicly announced his support for nuclear energy, stating, “I am a Green, and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy”. Although these interventions in the public debate on nuclear power are recent, his views on it are longstanding. In his 1988 book The Ages of Gaia he states:
“I have never regarded nuclear radiation or nuclear power as anything other than a normal and inevitable part of the environment. Our prokaryotic forebears evolved on a planet-sized lump of fallout from a star-sized nuclear explosion, a supernova that synthesised the elements that go to make our planet and ourselves.”
“A television interviewer once asked me, ‘But what about nuclear waste? Will it not poison the whole biosphere and persist for millions of years?’ I knew this to be a nightmare fantasy wholly without substance in the real world… One of the striking things about places heavily contaminated by radioactive nuclides is the richness of their wildlife. This is true of the land around Chernobyl, the bomb test sites of the Pacific, and areas near the United States’ Savannah River nuclear weapons plant of the Second World War. Wild plants and animals do not perceive radiation as dangerous, and any slight reduction it may cause in their lifespans is far less a hazard than is the presence of people and their pets… I find it sad, but all too human, that there are vast bureaucracies concerned about nuclear waste, huge organisations devoted to decommissioning power stations, but nothing comparable to deal with that truly malign waste, carbon dioxide.”
Well, Iowan, we have a Global Warmer, with whom I disagree, and someone who is not quite as concerned with nuclear waste, as you are.
Fucking complicated, isn’t it?
Build my 100 triple-reactor plants, and let the future sort it out. Statues will be built in my honor.
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3rd March 2011 at 10:33 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
Columbia stopped graduating Chinese? Since when? The whole fucking Engineering School was Chinese. Our Football Team sucked to beat the band, but our Ping Pong Team was AWESOME!
RE
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3rd March 2011 at 11:40 pm
Reverse Engineer says:
“Per Nicole, “Much of the existing grid equipment is at or near the end of its design life, as are many of the power plants we depend on.”
Wrong. Nuclear power plants are NOT ending their design life. In the beginning, it was thought to be 40 years. The oldest plant in America, in New Jersey, just got a 20-year extension on its 40-year-old plant. It is now up to 80 years and counting.”-SSS
Read for comprehension SSS. Nicole was talking about the whole grid, not just the power plants. Your arguments are not as convincing as hers as of yet. You will have to do a lot better. Keep trying though.
RE
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3rd March 2011 at 12:07 am
newsjunkie says:
RE,
You might be interested in this:
http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/2010/10/global-village-construction-set-gvcs-in-2-minutes/
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3rd March 2011 at 12:34 am
SSS says:
RE
Stop changing the subject. I contested and destroyed your statements on nuclear energy AND the transmission issue AND the production issue.
Now you switch to the national power grid in general. I’m not an electrical engineer and know very little about the power grid. Unlike you, who pontificates on every subject known to man, I will at least admit it.
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3rd March 2011 at 11:34 am
Reverse Engineer says:
@SSS
I didn’t change the subject, you did. The quote I posted from Stoneleigh referenced the problems of the grid in general, not just the issues of Nuke Power. Nuke Power is not the main issue, power distribution is. You wanna build a lot of Nuke Plants, but you don;t address the problem of how the power will get distributed. Until you do, your solution is a non-starter, sorry. Keep trying though.
RE
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3rd March 2011 at 6:51 pm