Nurse ratchets doubled my dose and unfogged the specs, but I'm...

Nurse ratchets doubled my dose and unfogged the specs, but I'm still can't seem to get to that tunnel vision bit - I still see things with an open mind. The world has changed it's enery thinking, AEC has capitalised by leading that change. MKY has the same lateral thinkers on board - I'm prepared to be surprised.

The last two para's you might find interesting....nuclear reactors for civilian use were originally designed to utilize thorium......The tide is now turning back to thorium...the ordering of one or more thorium reactors is imminent in Norway and India.


Base Metals Power Metals and Metals That Bring Power to the People
By Jack Lifton
03 Apr 2008 at 07:15 PM GMT-04:00

Resource-rich America could cash in and bring immense value to the dollar by simply producing resources for the growing heavy industries of Asia and South America.


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DETROIT (ResourceInvestor.com) -- The current credit crisis, or indeed any credit crisis, in the financial markets of the G7 economies, the biggest individual nationally based one of which is the United States, traditionally mean trouble for the mining industry. When credit dries up the whole system goes solid, as opposed to liquid. Even the best credit risks cannot get capital easily, if at all, or at affordable cost. Traditionally, and fairly, commodity metal mining has been classed as a high risk investment, so that its cost of capital is at the high end even in times of easy credit.

The herd mentality of Wall Street’s youthful market analysts, which leads them to recite the mantra “The trend is your friend” as they pour other people’s money into investments based on such irrational metrics as ‘eyeballs per page, clickthroughs, and subprime mortgages, and as they insured against price volatility or downturns by financial ‘instruments’ such as collateralized debt obligations, which in a crisis turn out to be without a mechanism to price them, and so to have no value, also causes them to reject capital intensive OEM heavy industries such as automotive, foundry, and mining, which have no short term gain potential or in the case of commodity metal mining have been subject to large price variations in short ‘cycle’ times.

It does not seem even to have struck the youthful, and mostly without any long term memory, Wall Street analyst crowd as paradoxical that the commodity supercycle, as they call the recent long-duration Asian demand led growth in commodity metals, is based solely on the rapid development in Asia of those same OEM heavy industries, seen in Asia as a foundation of a modern nation-state, which they, Wall Street’s bankers, reject as having any future value in the US. Wall Street assumed apparently that the US would become a nation of only consumers of heavy industrial products, so that it was unnecessary to support domestic self sufficiency in the production of natural resources as raw materials for such industries. It is a mystery as to what Wall Street thought, or whether they think at all, about how a nation with only a service economy could possibly support the highest standard of living in the world for more than 300 million people. At this point I imagine that a sophisticated banker curls his upper lip, sneers, and says “globalization” or ‘the free market’ will resolve these imbalances.

It does not even seem to have crossed the of-the-moment minds and thinking of Wall Streeters that resource rich America could cash in and bring immense value to the dollar by simply producing those resources for the growing heavy industries of Asia and South America. Neither has anyone in the American banking system or the American political class paid any attention to the growth of environmentally clean American mining during the past fifty years. Incredibly, myopic American bankers and hypocritical political servants of environmentalist elites point to the most polluting mining in the world, in the People’s Republic of China, as the ‘only way’ that ‘they’ can produce the raw materials they need. It never dawns on these genuinely ignorant individuals that the American mining industry is the most advanced in the world at producing raw materials without either short term or long term effects on the environment, and that the uncapitalized effects of the mining of natural resources in China, Russia, and much of Africa make the raw materials produced there, in the long run, the most expensive ever mined in terms of environmental damage alone!

Those who believe in global warming’s existence and that it is a bad thing seem to bend over backwards to excuse China, the world’s actual largest producer of global warming gases and air pollution, in general, from any responsibility moral or economic, while they criticize every move by the domestic American mining industry for what it might do to the environment in case of an accident or the total failure of layers of very expensive protective technologies, which actually meet the requirements set out by the extremely politicized EPA.

The latest worry on Wall Street about commodity metals is that a reduction in demand caused by either a slowing of the Asian economies or a linkage of the global economy to an American recession, or both, could cause the current high dollar-prices of metals to go a lot lower or, in the worst case, crash.

This isn’t going to happen because the construction necessary to meet the global demand for basics such as energy, transportation, and clean water must be planned and undertaken over a very long term, and besides the massive new demand from Asia, now, and from Africa in the longer, but near, term there is the immense pent-up demand from America and Europe for maintaining their already aged infrastructures as bridges and dams fail, insufficiently supported or maintained construction and construction equipment, such as cranes, collapse, roads crumble from overuse without proper maintenance, power plants reach the end of their service lives, and power grids fail from wear and overloading.

There are two categories of metals, and one of minerals which already have a permanent and rising demand floor due to the above drivers:

Power metals and minerals,
Metals that bring power to the people, and
Structural metals for infrastructure and logistics.
Power Metals and Minerals

I define “power metals” as those from which subnuclear binding energy can be extracted directly by relatively simple, though by no means inexpensive, chemically based processes in a so-called nuclear reactor. There are only two abundant power metals found in nature, uranium and thorium. There is a third power metal, man-made plutonium, but I am going to ignore and not discuss plutonium here today as I believe that no more of this metal should be produced as an end in itself due to its ease of use in making explosive fission weapons.

The nations with the highest demand growth for energy, China, India, and Brazil already have on order the majority, perhaps more than 50, of the world’s new nuclear power plants for the production of electricity for civilian use. Recently Great Britain, Canada, and even the US have announced significant programs, which will result in as many as 25 reactors to be built over the next 20 years both as replacements for existing reactors and as additional nuclear based electrical generating capacity. It is likely that we are approaching a nuclear reactor building renaissance, which will see as many as 200 new and replacement reactors built over the next generation if the movement to slow the production of carbon dioxide from the burning of the power minerals, i.e. those minerals which can be burned in air to produce more energy output than was required to set off their self sustained oxidation (i.e., to set them ‘alight’) gains a serious foothold in the nations of the world the economies of which are demanding more electric power than can now be produced. The power minerals are coal, oil, and natural gas.

It should be noted by investors that nuclear reactors for civilian use were originally designed to utilize thorium, but that military requirements and planning caused a shift

to all uranium ‘burning’ plants to insure a supply of weapons grade materials.

The tide is now turning back to thorium, which is more plentiful than uranium, and the use of which for civilian reactors is now being actively pursued by Norway, India, Russia, Canada, and the USA. It is believed that the ordering of one or more thorium reactors is imminent in Norway and India. The US probably has the largest reserves of thorium, and may well become the center of the thorium nuclear fuel design, manufacturing, and reprocessing industry.