E-mail To Harvard Law School Class of 1967

[johnkarls]

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---------------------------- Original Message -----------------------------
Subject: HLS-67-Oliver Stone’s “Nuclear Now” + “A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow”

From: john@johnkarls.com
Date: Tue, April 25, 2023 9:20 am MDT
To: john@johnkarls.com
Bcc: Members of the Harvard Law School Class of 1967

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Dear Friends,

Murray Levin immediately speculated that France was one of the “Some Countries [That] Have Solved Climate Change” when, midway through our HLS-67 Zoom chat yesterday, I mentioned Oliver Stone’s “Nuclear Now” – not so much as a new topic but more as a public-service announcement.

Murray was correct that for many decades, France has generated virtually all of its electricity from nuclear power and usually exported to the rest of Europe nuclear-generated electricity.

And yes, France, Sweden and South Korea were among the countries featured in “A Bright Future.”

The reason for my “public-service announcement” was that Oliver Stone’s new 1 hour 45 minute documentary “Nuclear Now” will appear in U.S. theaters beginning 4/28/2023 BUT IF YOU BLINK, YOU WILL PROBABLY MISS IT.

I promised to provide additional information which is accomplished herewith.

The official “Nuclear Now” website (https://www.nuclearnowfilm.com/) lets you select “find a theater” and then input your state, whereupon it provides a current list of theaters and dates.

HOWEVER, there are only a few theaters currently scheduled to show “Nuclear Now.”

And virtually all such theaters have only one showing – the evening of May 1.


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IMDb Description of Oliver Stone’s “Nuclear Now”

As fossil fuels cook the planet, the world is finally forced to confront a massive disinformation campaign about humanity's cleanest, safest, and fastest energy source – nuclear energy. Beneath our feet, Uranium atoms in the Earth's crust hold incredibly concentrated energy. Science unlocked this energy in the mid-20th century, first for bombs and then to power submarines, and the United States led the effort to generate electricity from this new source. Yet in the mid-20th century as societies began the transition to nuclear power and away from fossil fuels, a long-term PR campaign to scare the public began, funded in part by coal and oil interests. This campaign would sow fear about harmless low-level radiation and create confusion between nuclear weapons and nuclear power. With unprecedented access to the nuclear industry in France, Russia, and the United States, director Oliver Stone explores the possibility for the global community to overcome the challenges of climate change and energy poverty to reach a brighter future through the power of nuclear energy.


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The Book On Which “Nuclear Now” Was Based

“A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow” by Joshua Goldstein and Staffan Quist (PublicAffairs Publishing hardcover 1/8/2019 & paperback 11/17/2020 – 226 pages sans notes & index).


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“A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow” -- Amazon.com Description

The inspiration for Nuclear Now, the new Oliver Stone film, co-written by Joshua Goldstein

As climate change quickly approaches a series of turning points that guarantee disastrous outcomes, a solution is hiding in plain sight. Several countries have already replaced fossil fuels with low-carbon energy sources, and done so rapidly, in one to two decades. By following their methods, we could decarbonize the global economy by midcentury, replacing fossil fuels even while world energy use continues to rise. But so far we have lacked the courage to really try.

In this clear-sighted and compelling book, Joshua Goldstein and Staffan Qvist explain how clean energy quickly replaced fossil fuels in such places as Sweden, France, South Korea, and Ontario. Their people enjoyed prosperity and growing energy use in harmony with the natural environment. They didn't do this through personal sacrifice, nor through 100 percent renewables, but by using them in combination with an energy source the Swedes call käkraft, hundreds of times safer and cleaner than coal.

Clearly written and beautifully illustrated, yet footnoted with extensive technical references, Goldstein and Qvist's book will provide a new touchstone in discussions of climate change. It could spark a shift in world energy policy that, in the words of Steven Pinker's foreword, literally saves the world.


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Author Bios per Amazon.com

Joshua S. Goldstein is an International Relations professor who writes about the big issues facing humanity. He is the author of six books about war, peace, diplomacy, and economic history, and a bestselling college textbook, International Relations. Among other awards, his book War and Gender (2001) won the International Studies Association's "Book of the Decade Award" in 2010. Goldstein has a B.A. from Stanford and a Ph.D. from M.I.T. He is professor emeritus at American University in Washington, DC, and research scholar at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he lives.

[NB: Prof. Goldstein was also the co-author of Oliver Stone’s “Nuclear Now.”]

Staffan A. Qvist is a Swedish engineer, scientist and consultant to clean energy projects around the world. He has lectured and authored numerous studies in the scientific literature on various topics relating to energy technology and policy, nuclear reactor design and safety, and climate change mitigation strategies -- research that has been covered by Scientific American and many other media outlets. Trained as a nuclear engineer (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley), he is now involved in renewable energy development projects and also works with several "fourth generation" nuclear start-ups.


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Additional Context

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Invading China Militarily To Avoid Climate Change

The world’s greatest (by far) carbon polluters, China and India, are not required to do anything to limit their carbon emissions by the Paris Climate Accord of 2016 until the distant future.

This mirrored a similar provision in the Accord’s predecessor, the Kyoto Protocol of 1997.

The conundrum is that (1) wind and solar are much more expensive than fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, coal) and require massive subsidies, (2) hydroelectric power is severely limited by the world’s relative (to need) paucity of dammable rivers, and (3) nuclear power has, since WW-II, been the target of scare campaigns.

My 17.5-year-old non-partisan public-policy study/action organization of 223 members including many professors has studied thorium fission on several occasions (all of our monthly meetings that have addressed nuclear issues since our 4/3/2011 meeting on Fukushima Daiichi have been led by a PhD in Nuclear Engineering from the nation’s Oak Ridge National Nuclear-Research Laboratory (U/Tenn)).

At each of those meetings, we have asked for a show of hands by anyone who favors invading China militarily to force it to stop bringing on line a new monster-size coal-fired electric-generation plant every week or so.

Nobody has ever raised her/his hand.

Accordingly, it would appear that the climate-change challenge is to promote/develop an energy source that is cheaper than fossil fuels so that China et al. will adopt it in their own economic self-interest.

Nuclear energy is the only energy source meeting that description.


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Thorium Fission

During the 1960’s, the U.S. National Nuclear-Research Laboratory at Oak Ridge TN conducted a successful 18-month continuous demonstration project comprising a thorium-fueled nuclear reactor.

President Nixon caused the nation to turn away from thorium (and toward uranium and plutonium) because thorium is incapable of exploding or being utilized to produce nuclear weapons.

BTW, the largest thorium reactor is the earth itself which is why molten lava billows from any rupture in the earth’s surface and why the center of the earth is 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit which is hotter than the sun’s surface.


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Thorium Fission vs. Uranium Fission

The following quotation is taken from the last time my organization tried to promote thorium fission – letters to the 2019-2020 Democrat Debate Moderators asking them to address the issue (NB: two candidates, Sen. Cory Booker and Sen. Michael Bennet were, at the behest of Bill Gates, strong supporters of uranium fission and sponsors of successful nuclear legislation).

Needless to say, none of the 2019-2020 Democrat Debate Moderators even mentioned climate change, much less nuclear power -- as if wind-solar were on the tablets Moses brought down from Mount Sinai.

----------Excerpt From 2019-2020 Debate Moderator Letter----------

Both conventional uranium fission and proven thorium/fission share all of the following advantages: (a) producing no greenhouse gases; (b) eliminating the dependence of the U.S. and its allies on members of OPEC (the long-standing Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries) and, in the case of Europe, natural gas imports from Russia (in addition to oil & gas imports from OPEC); and (c) eliminating the gaping U.S. balance-of-payments deficit and resulting piling up of our foreign national debt.

However, proven thorium/fission has the following advantages over conventional uranium/fission –

[These advantages are virtually identical to those listed by Dr. Victor Stenger in The Huffington Post – https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lftr-a-l ... _b_1192584.]

(1) LFTR’s (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors) require minimal containment chambers because meltdowns are physically impossible since LFTR’s operate near atmospheric pressure (this is both a safety and cost factor).

(2) 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 also both a safety and cost factor).

(3) Thorium is so stable that, as mentioned above, it is impossible to make a nuclear weapon from thorium which is why the U.S. turned to uranium and plutonium instead of thorium.

(4) Thorium has such an incredibly-high “burn-up” that there is virtually no long-lived radioactive waste.

(5) 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 was able to use U-235, Pu-239 and U-233 at the same time as thorium. [NB: Since former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of NV prevented the opening of Yucca Mountain NV as the repository for our spent uranium-nuclear fuel rods, the spent uranium-nuclear fuel rods have been left on site at each uranium-nuclear plant to remain cool in the equivalent of home swimming-pools even though many of those uranium-nuclear plants are situated in high-volume air corridors!!!]

(6) Because LFTR’s are economically practical in small sizes, they can be mass-produced in factories and assembled near electrical demand so that the huge 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.

(7) In addition, thorium is so plentiful that proven thorium supplies are capable of supplying 100% of the world’s energy (not just electricity) for more than 1,000 years. Indeed, virtually all of India’s “sand” beaches comprise thorium.

[Our calculation was 80 years of “proven” reserves of uranium for current (electricity only) usage multiplied by 3 (the minimum abundance factor of “proven” thorium reserves vs. “proven” uranium reserves) multiplied by 99 (usable thorium energy content vs. usable uranium energy content) multiplied by 5.8% (the percentage of total worldwide energy including transportation fuels, that comes from nuclear plants) = 1,378 years.]

Proven thorium/fission has all of these advantages and only needs 2-3 years of final development = the equivalent of having already produced a Ford Model T proving an automobile is feasible but still needing 2-3 years of development (and relatively-modest funding) to design a Ford Fusion for mass production.

The relatively-modest funding for the 2-3 years of final development has been estimated by many experts at $5 billion to build the first commercial prototype.

[ThEC15 was a worldwide conference on thorium research that was held in Mumbai, India, in 2015 by the Government of India and two of its agencies, BARC and NPCIL, along with HBNI and IThEO. The ThEC15 website (http://www.thoriumenergyworld.com/thec15-mumbai.html) contains 127 papers and speeches by 46 speakers from 30 different nations.]

----------End of Excerpt From 2019-2020 Debate Moderator Letter----------


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Re: I Take The Point That Thorium Is Incapable Of Exploding, But What About The Uranium-Fission Nuclear Accidents?

This is the reply to one of our members who had posed this question.

Dear Solutions,

Thank you for your inquiry.

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First, it should be noted that former Vice President Al Gore was WRONG when he famously testified before Congress that nuclear plants come in only one size – extra-large.

One would have thought that for someone who was “one heart-beat away” from being Commander-In-Chief, he would have known that FOR MANY DECADES all U.S. Navy submarines and aircraft carriers have been propelled by on-board nuclear-power plants!!!

[Indeed, the U.S. Department of Defense planned decades ago to make its inter-continental bombers powered by on-board nuclear plants but the “bean counters” calculated that it would be cheaper to use tanker aircraft to re-fuel the bombers aloft while enroute to their targets.]

In the now half-century that all U.S. Navy submarines and aircraft carriers have been propelled by on-board nuclear-power plants, there has NOT been a single accident involving that nuclear power.

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Second, with the exception of Three-Mile-Island which will be discussed momentarily, the U.S. civilian use of nuclear power has been spotless.

The public may not understand why American civilian nuclear reactors have been so safe.

It is because they have been operated by retired U.S. Navy nuclear personnel who, after 20 years of experience, took their military pensions and began working in civilian nuclear-power plants.

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The THREE Significant Uranium-Nuclear Power Accidents

Of the only three significant nuclear accidents in the world’s 77-year nuclear history, ALL THREE were the result of unpardonable human actions --

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Three-Mile Island (Pennsylvania) – 1979

There were more than 100 blinking lights and wailing sirens indicating the reactor core was NOT getting enough cooling water!!!

But the operators couldn’t believe their instruments!!! And, UNFORTUNATELY, assumed that the exact opposite was happening!!!

By the time corrective action was taken, there was a small release of radioactive gas and $2.4 billion of damage had been incurred. But no deaths were caused.

BTW, Three-Mile Island blew on 3/28/1979 while my first child (born 9/7/1979 two weeks overdue) was still in utero, and my wife and I were enjoying a "Last Hurrah" in Spain, Portugal and Morocco. Because of all the "scare pieces" in the media, we decided since NYC is downwind from Three-Mile Island PA, that we would NOT return from Europe until it was absolutely safe!!! After all, it is one thing to accept risk to yourselves, but quite another thing to risk harm to a fetus!!!

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Chernobyl (Ukraine, Soviet Union) – 1986

Soviet uranium-powered nuclear plants did NOT have containment chambers because Soviet engineers were so “cock sure” of their expertise!!!

And on that fateful 4/26/1986, TWO TEAMS of Soviet operators were warring with each other to use the plant for two contradictory purposes – the regular team supplying electric power to the grid and the other team experimenting to determine whether the momentum of the turbines would be enough to power the cooling system during an accidental shutdown!!!

[Why couldn't the Soviet geniuses have shut down power-generation by lowering the fuel rods into the cooling water and then, when all possible danger of a nuclear accident was "off the table," have fired up solely the turbines to ascertain whether their momentum was sufficient to power the cooling system during an accidental shutdown???]

The "real world" answer courtesy of the Soviet geniuses??? The momentum of the turbines was NOT sufficient!!!

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Fukushima Daiichi (Japan) – 2011

Yes, the Tōhoku earthquake measured 9.0 on the Richter scale – 2.63 times more powerful than California’s famous 1906 earthquake, the largest since California earthquake records began being kept in 1769 which was nearly a century before California was detached from Mexico and became part of the U.S. And 16.99 times more powerful than California’s most powerful earthquake since 1906.

And yes, the earthquake generated a 43-foot-high tsunami.

HOWEVER, Fukushima Daiichi was a conventional uranium-powered nuclear plant whose fixed uranium fuel rods had to be cooled by water and for a complete shut down, the rods had to be lowered into the cool water. NB: cool-water circulation was by electric pumps.

AND THE GENIUSES WHO DESIGNED Fukushima Daiichi put the emergency generators in the basement where a tsunami was sure to knock them out due to flooding!!!

AND THE GENIUSES WHO DESIGNED Fukushima Daiichi put the fuel tanks for the emergency generators at ground level where they were sure to be washed away by a tsunami!!!

NEVERTHELESS, the containment chambers survived the earthquake and the tsunami, while the highly-publicized but limited radiation contamination of sea water was caused by (1) limited venting LONG AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE/TSUNAMI to guard against a build-up of pressure in the containment chambers because of the continued lack of cooling due to the continued lack of electricity (caused by the design geniuses), and (2) water from the containment chambers leaking FROM PIPES OUTSIDE THE CONTAINMENT CHAMBERS just like your own home plumbing might spring a leak, especially after an earthquake.

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Thank you again for your e-mail.

Hopefully you can rest assured that not only has the world’s 77-year history with uranium nuclear power plants been so safe –

But you can be reassured that thorium-fission is incapable of exploding and that the earth itself is the largest thorium-fission reactor which is why molten lava billows from any rupture in the earth’s surface and why the center of the earth is 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit which is hotter than the sun’s surface.

Your friend,

John K.


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Valediction

If you have read this far, you deserve a Gold Medal!!!

Thank you for indulging an old campaigner who believes in leaving no “stone” unturned.

Respectfully submitted,

John Karls