(Stupid is as.........DaChickens come home to roost! - CL)
China has continued to move forward and now has demonstrated online refueling, which we had not mastered at Oak Ridge. Next up is online reprocessing which reduces the waste output that leaves the site by a factor of 100 and its danger by a factor of 1,000, having waste only dangerous for a few hundred years that ultimately leaves instead of waste that is dangerous for 100,000 years.
The next thing they will realize is what I wrote of in 2011 which is that you can turn coal into synthetic diesel and gasoline using the process heat as the temperature required is compatible with the primary molten salt operating temperature, leaving plenty of energy available for conventional steam turbine electrical generation, and the technology to do this was mastered by the Germans in WWII and in fact was their source of fuel for planes and tanks during that time. They will probably also realize that coal has Thorium in it, its quite-easy to extract because its both heavy and a metal and thus mining the coal gives you the nuclear fuel which returns more energy the coal has (by a factor of about 13:1.)
China has a lot of coal.
Our failure to go at this over the last 15 years is a critical one as behind every unit of economic output is a unit of energy.
While China was working on this we spent our time on other very foolish things -- like offshoring jobs, trying to ban combustion engines in vehicles, windmills and solar panels and more instead of securing the energy needs of the nation for the next FIVE HUNDRED years in a way that is both clean AND respects the laws of thermodynamics.
Now we're critically behind.
