I have been waiting for about 20 years for this paper to appear. [View all]

Listen folks, most of what one hears here and elsewhere about addressing what is possibly the most serious issue before humanity since humanity passed out of Africa to the larger world, climate change, is pure bullshit.

I cannot be dissuaded from taking this position, not by people who insipidly mutter "Fukushima" or "Chernobyl" of (even more stupidly) "Three Mile Island," not by people who think that the existence of plutonium inevitably will lead to nuclear war. The entire history of nuclear war, has not killed a tiny fraction of the people killed by fossil fuel wars; the entire history of the accumulation of so called "nuclear waste" has not killed as many people as will die this afternoon from fossil fuel waste, and has killed each and every afternoon of this century.

The last hope of humanity is to convince ourselves to consider things as the are and to prioritize them over the things we imagine through a prism of fear and ignorance.

Because so many of us are in our own ways as ignorant as right wing anti-nuke and antivaxxer Bob Kennedy the 2nd, here's where we are as of this morning with respect to the concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste CO₂:

Week beginning on April 07, 2024: 425.90 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 422.68 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 401.36 ppm
Last updated: April 13, 2024

Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa (Accessed 4/13/24)

Back in the late 1950's and early 1960s, the American scientists ran an nuclear reactor known as the LAMPRE, (Los Alamos Molten Plutonium Reactor Experiment).

It was in the era of dynamic creativity in the development of nuclear energy which has been described beautifully in a monograph by the former director of ORNL, Alvin Weinberg, who died at the age of 91 in 2006: The First Nuclear Era.

That dynamism was quashed by appeals to fear and ignorance; it was an intellectual infrastructure that was destroyed along with the manufacturing and operational infrastructure in nuclear energy with the result that the planet is in flames.

Now we are in the "build back better" phase of the nuclear intellectual infrastructure; at least I hope we are. To build back, we must reach back to what was lost.

For many years I have in my Google Scholar alerts, a "liquid plutonium" search term; because I despaired of anyone anywhere ever looking as deeply into molten metal fuels. I badger my son, a nuclear engineering Ph.D student, about it from time to time, although his research interests are in nuclear materials as opposed to fuels. (In molten fuels, materials science is indeed critical, liquid plutonium is an excellent solvent. It dissolves steel and many other metals.)

Anyway, this morning the paper I was hoping would show up did.

Here's the link: Molten Fuel Fast Reactor: Concept of Core, Fuel Efficiency, and Safety (V.S. Okunev, 2024 6th International Youth Conference on Radio Electronics, Electrical and Power Engineering (REEPE))

The abstract: