By Jack Lifton*22 Feb 2007 at 04:06 PM GMT-05:00**D*ETROIT (...

By Jack Lifton
*22 Feb 2007 at 04:06 PM GMT-05:00*

*D*ETROIT ( ResourceInvestor.com ) -- The
component of the global warming agenda that is purely political is the
driving force behind the contemporary uranium "boom." Doomsayers and
scaremongers are shouting, not whispering, that we must stop using the
sources of heat, which have been discovered, chosen and used universally to
power our industrial civilization during the last two centuries, and choose,
overnight, something else, which is now in limited use (nuclear power) or is
basically just emerging from the laboratory (solar power) or is understudied
but dramatic in appearance (wind, tide and geothermal).

Rather than trying to catch the uranium roller coaster on a down loop
investors who think about the long-term need to take a serious look at the
naturally occurring radioactive metal, thorium, which but for the exigencies
of the last truly global war and the need for some nations to defend
themselves from other nations that would conquer them in the name of the
latest and greatest social movement, or that old time religion, would have
been the metal of choice for the development of nuclear powered electric
generating stations.

Is it time for thorium to make its re-entry on the global stage? The answer
is yes, and therein lays an opportunity.

Just about one year ago I wrote an article for *Resource Investor* entitled
" Thorium: An Alternative to
Uranium."
A lot has happened since then with regard to both uranium and thorium, but
only the run up in the price of uranium has been covered by the financial
press. Even that run up has been covered by short sighted analysts as if an
increasing demand for uranium is a given. I want to bring the readers of *RI
* up to date on the very significant events that have occurred in thorium
power technology and the re-assessing of America's thorium reserves since
then.

There is no serious fundamental immediate or near-term basis of supply
shortage to account for the tripling of the price of uranium in the last
year. There are no more uranium fuelled nuclear power plants today than
there were a year ago, and no new plants have been ordered in the United
States. It is in fact not at all clear just who or what is buying uranium to
increase the demand so substantially in such a short time. Uranium mining
stocks are being traded in a frenzy that masks the discussion of whether or
not there is any need for such an investment in uranium production. It is
therefore absolutely necessary for investors to keep in mind the distinction
drawn by television investment evangelist, "Mad Money Jim Cramer," that
short-term ownership of a stock is a trade as opposed to a long term hold,
which is an investment. **

There are lots of hazy stories around to justify the uranium frenzy. I have
been told, for example, that uranium fuelled nuclear power plants scheduled
to be decommissioned will now be kept in service, but this does not require
any new supply! I have also read that China will build 20 new pebble-bed (
i.e., cheap to construct) reactors to produce electricity in remote regions
without the need for coal or oil in the next 20 years. But even Chinese
long-term thinking wouldn't justify buying so much nuclear fuel in advance,
would it?

What has happened is that investors and mining companies are speculating on
a nuclear power boom that they think will shortly begin due to the
widespread concern, even fear, generated by the study of global warming,
which holds that:

1. It has been proven scientifically that the earth's climate is
entering a period of rapidly escalating global warming;


1. It has been accepted that if this global warming has been caused by
anthropogenic (i.e., man made) activity, and the IPPC is 90% certain
that this is scientifically proven, then the primary bad actor is the carbon
dioxide naturally formed by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas to
produce electric power and vehicular propulsion, and;


1. If the burning of coal, oil and natural gas for these purposes is
not eliminated, or, at least, substantially curtailed (or, if it is held at
present levels and all the carbon dioxide generated by stationary power
plants is somehow "sequestered," i.e. stored) then the global economy
will suffer irreparable damage as the climate shifts permanently causing
massive changes in the habitability and agricultural usefulness of the
earth's surface, and therefore coal, oil and natural gas must be replaced as
sources of heat as soon as possible.

The only well understood, well-known and developed technology that can
possibly, in a relatively short time frame, substitute for the generation of
heat by the external combustion of carbon-based fuels is based on nuclear
reactors, the heat from which can (and, indeed, now does) produce
superheated steam to turn turbines to produce electricity. By locating
nuclear power plants on shore lines, the electricity they produce could be
used not only directly for commercial, municipal and residential power, but
also to electrolyze water (including sea water) to produce hydrogen as a
clean burning fuel for vehicular propulsion. The burning of hydrogen by
internal combustion engines produces only water as a waste product, and the
principle, and only draw back to the mass production of hydrogen powered
internal combustion engines is the lack of a fuel production and
distribution infrastructure.

Speaking of hydrogen for a moment, I think that investors should, perhaps,
now be looking at Hydrogen Engine Center,
Inc.(HEC), a company founded
by an engineer who was with the Ford Motor Company
when that company actually had a plan to maintain a leading place in the
development of alternatively fuelled power plants. Ford discontinued the
program, but the engineer did not. HEC is making and selling hydrogen
fuelled internal combustion engines (ICE) right now, and its website has
some good discussions of sources for hydrogen, other than the electrolysis
of water, which I think are worth looking at. I am "warming" up to the idea
of hydrogen powered internal combustion engines for mobile (vehicular) power
plants both as direct motive power and as on-board sources of electricity
generation either for direct application to the motive wheels or for
recharging batteries as needed.

When I read the website of this company, and I read news articles about BMW,
a first class automotive engineering company, putting hydrogen powered big
engine (V-12!) cars on the test road, I am tempted to reassess my original
scepticism about hydrogen as a direct fuel for ICEs in cars. What I haven't
changed my mind about is the mistake that the Ford Motor Company made in
choosing development intensive paths instead of this one, hydrogen powered
ICEs, for immediate consideration.

Now back to the main discussion. There are sufficient global uranium
reserves to supply the needs of all the nuclear power plants that our global
industrial civilization could build even if it is decided politically,
because economically it is nonsense, to replace 100% of carbon burning plant
currently generating electricity. There is also sufficient uranium to fuel
all of these plants for centuries. Clearly the price of developing all of
the known uranium reserves and looking for more will not be an issue if
governments decide that this emergency is upon us.

The speculation that nuclear reactors will produce electricity so that, even
if carbon burning power plants are phased out, there will be no reduction in
available electric power is also driving into high gear (excuse the pun)
research into the critical components for vehicles that can no longer use
carbon-based fuels such as high capacity, long service life, rechargeable
lithium-ion battery technology for plug-in hybrid electric ground vehicles
(cars, trucks and trains) using storage batteries and a small internal
combustion engine to generate electricity.

These are already seen to be themselves only an intermediate technology
awaiting the arrival of a hydrogen distribution system in the next
generation that will allow internal combustion engines burning hydrogen to
either generate electricity directly to drive ground vehicles or be used to
charge higher capacity batteries than we now have for propulsion systems.

Mobile hydrogen burning fuel cells may replace the projected substantial
size battery packs and even on board hydrogen burning internal combustion
engines for charging them if a fuel cell catalyst system can be found that
doesn't involve the need for huge amounts of platinum group metals that
simply do not exist in the quantities required for global use even if
hydrogen burning internal combustion engines completely replace hydrocarbon
(gasoline and kerosene) and oxygenate (ethanol) burning ones thus
eliminating completely the need for catalytic converters, which today are
the principle demand drivers for platinum group metals.

In 1939, it was publicly announced that the fission of some of the isotopes
of a few heavy elements had been induced by a man made experiment, which was
in fact designed to build heavier elements not break apart the ones being
targeted. It was immediately obvious to a few specialized scientists that if
a system could be constructed in which the newly named "nuclear fission"
were produced and controlled, i.e., it could be started and stopped, then a
new source of, essentially, limitless power (heat) could be constructed that
would not need to burn carbon-based fuels.

At the same time it was theorized that if sufficient quantities of the rare
isotopes of uranium or thorium that exhibited the property of being fissile
could be concentrated then it should be possible to, by known engineering,
produce a special minimum quantity of them, a critical mass, in which once
fission had been triggered by an outside source the fission would generate
additional fission, through a chain reaction, so rapidly that a large
quantity of the potential energy. Perhaps as much as a few percent would be
released in a fraction of a second.

This theory so impressed the world's then best known scientist, Albert
Einstein, that he signed a letter to then president Franklin D. Roosevelt
that stated that he agreed that if such a bomb were constructed it might be
possible, for example, to contain it in a seagoing vessel, which, if brought
into a port and detonated, would destroy the port. World War II had already
begun in Europe and Asia when Roosevelt's scientific advisors concluded that
Einstein's conjecture was not only possible but that research into
constructing such a weapon was probably already under way in both Germany
and Japan.

Thorium although it had a relatively abundant fissile isotopes was
immediately relegated to a back seat, because its properties dictated that
although it could be used to manufacture a nuclear reactor it could not be
used to or be useful in the construction of a fission weapon! **

Thorium powered reactors were designed and built during and just after World
War II to test power an ocean going vessel and to create the first civilian
use only nuclear power plant at Shippingport, Pennsylvania.

Early proponents of civilian nuclear power did not want to manufacture
devices from which weapons grade materials (i.e., highly enriched uranium or
the new synthetically produced and highly fissile plutonium) could be easily
extracted, because at the beginning of the "atomic age" it was believed that
only a massively expensive and sophisticated industrial nation could afford
to build the enormously costly and limited use base to produce weapons grade
materials.

So, the development of thorium-based nuclear reactors was continued for a
while in parallel with those using uranium and/or plutonium-based
technologies. Then a series of intelligence underestimates and political
errors combined to terminate government support and funding of what parallel
development there was and to propel uranium to the first and only place in
the race.

First, the devastated, and by American standards, primitive Russian
industrial base produced and detonated a test atomic bomb in 1949. Then
Great Britain whose scientists had contributed to the bomb's development way
out of proportion to their numbers, but whose industrial base was considered
to have been shattered by the war, followed the Russians shortly after with
a successful test of their own even though Britain had been cut off from
research and development information almost as soon as the war ended.

The atomic arms race was on, and it became the obsession of the world's
politicians that the future must belong to the leader in numbers of atomic
weapons. Thorium reactors were quickly forgotten for the same reason as they
had once appealed. They could not be used, in any easy way, to make weapons
grade material. Uranium and its daughter element, plutonium, were crowned
the undisputed queens of nuclear power.

The governments of the nuclear powers went on a 50 year binge of hypocrisy.
They talked about clean cheap safe civilian nuclear power but they skewed
the nuclear power industry through subsidies towards uranium. This kept the
weapons grade uranium and plutonium pipeline with a backup system and kept
the nuclear fuel reprocessing industry in business economically. Most
insidiously the public was trained to view safety as the prevention of
detonations (not possible) or leaks (less likely than at carbon-based power
plants) rather then the prevention of any possibility at all, of producing
weapons grade material. Thus thorium was relegated to the back of the
funding line.

The United States and the Russian Federation today have many times the
number of nuclear weapons either one would need to destroy civilization. In
addition Great Britain, France, China, Israel, Pakistan, India and bankrupt
and starving North Korea have nuclear weapons and delivery systems for them.
All it seems to take today to build a nuclear weapon is a uranium-based
reactor, time and a knowledge base. The world does not need any more nuclear
reactors based on uranium and/or plutonium!

The speed with which it is claimed that global warming is advancing dictates
that we need immediately to begin to switch over to nuclear reactors to
produce the heat upon which the generation of electricity is based.

It is too dangerous to build or allow remaining in operation nuclear
reactors that can produce weapons grade material. The answer is
thorium-based nuclear reactors.