As a lazy man who likes to repurpose his work whenever possible, I want to share a note that I just sent to some of my nuclear friends who question my analysis about the actions of fossil fuel interests to restrain the growth of nuclear energy.

Rod, I have never been a big fan of conspiracy theories. Particularly those that claim the fossil fuel industry is blocking nuclear power. I think most industrialists are about making money.

The leaders of all commodity businesses spend a good deal of time thinking about things like “overcapacity”, “supply and demand”, erecting barriers to entry, and beating their competition. You are correct that they are “about making money”, but the rise and fall of market prices as a result of those factors play a huge role in how much money they make each day.

That is not “conspiracy theory” talk anymore than it would be conspiracy theory talk to note that members of the New York Giants spend tens of hours per week, even during their off season, studying “film” of their opponents, trying to identify weaknesses and figuring out ways to take advantage of their own strengths in order to come up with as many Ws as possible.

Unlike most nuclear people, I have spent a fair amount of time in board rooms, strategy sessions, marketing meetings, and investor presentations. In addition, I developed a hobby of investing and reading the business press when I was just a plebe at the Naval Academy.

Here is a short story from Daniel Yergin’s The Prize, one of the seminal books on the energy industry.

“At the beginning of the 1960s, Iraq revoked 99.5% of he concession held by Iraq Petroleum Company, the company originally created by Calouste Gulbenkian, leaving it only the region where it was actually producing oil. The IPC in turn ceased investing in new exploration and production in that area. The result was that Iraqi output, which could have surged along with Iran’s and Saudi Arabia’s creating an impossible problem of allocation, only edged up gradually through the 1960s.

At one point during those years, Oman, at the southeast corner of the Arabian Peninsula, emerged as a very interesting oil play. Standard Oil of New Jersey, as might be expected, had the chance to get in. But when the issue came up in the company’s executive committee, Howard Page recommended against it. He had spent so much time negotiating with the Saudis and the Iranians that it required little effort on his part to conceive of how furious they would be. He could well imagine, in particular, what Yamani (longtime Saudi oil minister) would say to him if Jersey and Aramco sought to restrain Saudi output to make room for production from a new concession in a neighboring country. That would surely contradict Jersey’s principle number one, which was not to do anything that “would endanger our Aramco (Saudi Arabia) concession.”

But the members of Jersey’s production department disagreed with Page. After all, they were geologists, and as far as they were concerned, discovering and developing new reserves was what it was all about. Their ambition was to find new elephants, and they were very excited about Oman. “I am sure there is a 10 billion barrel oil field there,” a geologist who had just returned from Oman told the executive committee.

“Well then,” replied Page, “I am absolutely sure we don’t want to go into it, and that settles it. I might put some money in if I was sure we weren’t going to get some oil, but not if we are going to get oil because we are liable to lose the Aramco concession.” With that logic, Jersey stayed out of Oman. the geologists, however, were right. Oman did become a significant oil producer, with Shell in the lead.”

(The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, Simon and Schuster, New York, NY, 1991. p. 535)

It is only a very minor step in logic to realize that at least some of the people in the oil and gas industry might have gone one step further than Page did. How difficult would it have been for Standard Oil to invest some money to buy the rights to drill and then NOT find any oil – at least officially. That would allow them to convince the world that they had explored Oman and found nothing of value. That way, they could have delayed the production and not had to compete for markets against the increased volume of oil.

Take one more step in logic to realize that at the same time (1960s) that people in oil and gas company boardrooms were worried about finding markets for increasing volumes of oil and gas from new plays around the world, the nuclear industry was ramping up. Even with all of the well funded opposition that it has faced, nuclear energy now supplies the world with the energy equivalent of 12 million barrels of oil per day, roughly equal to the energy output of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait combined.

Of course, the earth is in a far different condition today than it was in the 1960s. We are no longer discovering any readily accessible “elephants”. Many analysts believe we are either past, at or very near peak oil production. Though there is a temporary glut in natural gas in the United States, that is not true around the world. As I wrote in yesterday’s Atomic Insights post, many of the logical reasons why fossil fuel interests opposed nuclear energy development for so long have been overcome by events. Now, if they want to continue to prosper into the future, they need to be shifting some of their capital in a more productive direction.

Today an IFR would be seen as a big risk – not only capital cost but also FOAK risks. This almost certainly means that governments have to provide protection before private industry will take those risks.

I am too much of a libertarian to believe that governments should (or will) step in to provide funds or protection for nuclear energy. I would be happy if they simply stopped doing the bidding of oil, coal and gas (plus certain well established “nuclear” interests) by doing everything they can think of to slow down the expansion of nuclear energy.

Why have the efforts to restrict nuclear energy development been so well supported for so many years?

My theory is that hydrocarbon marketers have had a strong financial motive for supporting any group that seeks to reduce the supply of energy. Even when those groups seem to be fighting against the hydrocarbon industry, they are effectively helping to increase the profit margins for most producers by keeping supplies tight and prices high.

For the past fifty years, nuclear energy has been the new supply of energy that posed the biggest threat to hydrocarbon related profits, whether considering the profits going to producers or those going to speculators and financial backers. There are few natural limits to the rate at which nuclear energy can be supplied or to its sustainability; nearly all of the obstacles to its sustained growth have been imposed by humans in the form of excessive regulations, overly complex power systems developed in response to those regulations, legal opposition and organized protests.

Please understand that the term “fossil fuel interests” is not limited to US based oil companies. It includes market speculators, people who operate bulk transportation companies, and people from countries that make most of their income by exporting oil, natural gas or coal.

The most effective thing that any politician can do to lower energy prices is to support efforts that increase supplies, not by just drilling, but also by enabling new nuclear plant construction. The most cost effective way to do that is to reduce barriers that add huge costs and schedule delays, not to appropriate more money.

Nuclear plants are the energy equivalent of new natural gas reservoirs that can maintain a steady annual output for 60 years or more. There is little need for risky exploration; we know where the fuel is and we know how to build the plants. That prospect should be enormously attractive to anyone who enjoys the economic benefits that abundant energy can provide.

There was a time in the not too distant past – for the 20 years after WWII – when the world’s energy industry understood how to prosper in an environment where the price of their product dropped rather steadily as a result of increasingly available supplies. The path to prosperity for the industry during that period was to expand their markets and sell more volume every year.

That path is still available, but not if energy companies stubbornly insist on focusing on fossil fuels. There are too many limits on their supply, too many negative effects from their extraction and too many long term hazards from their waste products. In my analysis, the biggest current threat to hydrocarbon profits is a collapse of our industrial economy.

In our current economic situation, most energy suppliers would benefit if they added emission free, reliable, abundant nuclear energy to their portfolios. The recognition that the earth is endowed with fuel supplies that will last for thousands of years would enable a return to an optimistic prosperity where people do not spend so much time worrying about running out of fuel or worrying that their comfortable home or big car would become too expensive to operate.

Marginal fuel sources could be economically improved to become high grade liquids with the availability of low cost, no-emission, process heat.

If the world could move past the depressing, do less with less mentality of the people who believe that austerity and conservation are the words of the future, we could all live more productive, prosperous and enjoyable lives.

Will you join me in spreading this achievable vision for the future?

Last night, CNN Presents aired a completely one sided and inaccurate portrayal of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. It extensively quoted both Arnie Gundersen and Bernie Sanders and included a staged interview that made the Nuclear Regulatory Commission look both incompetent and unresponsive. That episode is scheduled to be repeated tonight. Here is a video excerpt from the story.

It has been just a little more than a week since the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued its first combined license (COL) ever for a new nuclear power station under the “new” one step licensing process that was developed in the late 1980s and issued as 10 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) part 52.

That COL for Southern Company’s Vogtle nuclear power plant units 3 & 4 was also the first time that the NRC has issued a construction permit for a new nuclear power station in the United States since 1978, the year before the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear power station experienced a highly publicized partial meltdown.

Since that expensive industrial accident – which only damaged a small portion of the internals of an industrial facility and did not hurt a single person – the effort to discourage the use of nuclear energy made the letters “TMI” one of the most frequently repeated acronyms in the United States. That happened decades before someone decided that they can also mean “too much information.”

Part of the effort to halt the growth of nuclear energy included a well-supported media campaign designed to question the credibility and integrity of nuclear energy professionals and to paint the industry as an uncaring behemoth that was more worried about profits than people. I have long suspected that a major reason there was so much pressure against the use of nuclear energy is that the technology strongly threatens the profitability of selling hydrocarbon fuels like coal, natural gas and oil.

After all, it uses an emission free fuel source that is currently selling for about 65 cents per million BTUs – and that price is for fuel that is fully refined and delivered to a power plant. Even when compared to the incredibly low spot market price for natural gas in the US of $2.65 (February 18, 2012) nuclear fuel is really cheap. When converted to the same units of energy, the current spot market price for Brent dated crude oil is $21 and the current spot market price for refined heating oil is $44 per million BTU.

Sure, people will correctly point out that the cost of constructing nuclear power plants is outrageously higher than the cost of constructing fossil fuel burners, but the fundamental truth is that nuclear plants use virtually the same machinery for converting heat into electricity as fossil fuel plants do. The real reason that nuclear plants cost so much more than fossil plants is that every step in the process takes a lot longer and gets a lot more scrutiny.

The hydrocarbon fuel business is one of the world’s largest and most lucrative enterprises. It is also tightly tied to governments around the world and, despite the fact that no one can really tell one gasoline or natural gas molecule from another, it is an industry that spends heavily on advertising in the popular media.

Aside: In fact, during the commercial break that immediately preceded the story about Vermont Yankee, CNN aired a Chevron commercial touting “clean natural gas”. I am sure that few viewers recognize that the natural gas industry would be the primary beneficiary of a decision to shut down that plant. The appearance of that commercial might have been pure coincidence, but due to the concentration of those commercials on venues like CNN, it was not a low probability accident. End Aside.

One of the aspects of the program that has gotten me fired up is the way that CNN was able to portray the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as an unresponsive industry lapdog that believes that open government means publishing documents on a web site. I happen to know differently – even as a blogger, when I contact the NRC Director of Public Relations, I get an almost immediate response.

I could not help but think that the response to a request from CNN for comment was a purposeful setup. My suspicions were reinforced the third time I watched the above video and paid close attention to the exchange between Amber Lyon and an unnamed NRC spokesman. It was almost inaudible, but the unnamed NRC spokesman stated that all five of the commissioners, including the chairman were, at the very same time that Amber was outside of the NRC’s office with a CNN film crew, testifying in front of a House committee.

That means that the film had to have been shot on December 14, 2011 when all five commissioners were invited to testify in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. That event was well publicized before it happened. There is almost no conceivable way that CNN producers would not have known that the commissioners were unavailable that morning.

It also means that video footage is more than two months old, yet the segment was timed to air just one week after a lot of positive news about the first approval for the construction of a new nuclear power plant since 1978.

A couple of hours ago, I sent my contacts at the NRC an inquiry to find out why the agency was so unresponsive to interview requests from CNN, a major news network working on a story with a strong potential for harming the industry, at such a key time in the deployment of new nuclear power stations.

Here is an excerpt from the response I received. It turned out that my contact was the person who made the decision not to engage CNN on camera.

My decision was based on long experience as a public affairs professional, with substantial news magazine experience, and on a conversation with our general counsel. It would have been wholly inappropriate to accommodate their request for the chairman to discuss the Vermont Yankee case while it was in the federal courts.

By the way, we have something up in For the Record reinforcing the reason for the decision.

I apologize for my earlier, incorrect guess that decision came from the chairman.

PS – There is another set of coincidences that I cannot resist pointing out. At the same time that the operators at TMI made their expensive mistakes, there was a relatively obscure movie running in the theaters that included a line about the way that a reactor accident could contaminate an area the size of the state of Pennsylvania.

That movie, The China Syndrome, suddenly became a box office hit when there was a nuclear reactor accident that just happened to be in the state of Pennsylvania. It starred Jane Fonda, a hereditary member of the Hollywood branch of the media establishment and a famous anti-Vietnam war activist, who combined her starring role in The China Syndrome and her experience as an activist to become one of the harshest critics of the nuclear industry.

More than a decade later, Jane married Ted Turner, the media mogul who built upon his family’s outdoor advertising business to found a superstation called TBS and followed that with founding CNN, the first 24 hour news network. Ted and Jane remained married for ten years until their 2001 divorce. Turner has gradually become a major player in the US natural gas industry. He owns enormous tracts of land in the western United States that are home to tens of thousands of natural gas wells.

Additional Reading

Yes Vermont Yankee published an excellent warning about the upcoming CNN segment titled CNN Hatchet Job About Vermont Yankee

NEI Nuclear Notes also recognized the threat and published a series of advanced warning articles:
A Preview of CNN’s Report on Vermont Yankee
Some Facts on Vermont Yankee That Didn’t Make the CNN Report
How Safe is Vermont Yankee? Ask the NRC, Not CNN.

Idaho Samizdat has a post titled Vermont Yankee in the Spottlight.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is one of the most venerated engineering institutions in the United States. Its pronouncements and considered opinions have a significant influence on our government’s policy, especially in such important fields as energy. In recent years, the MIT Energy Initiative, a multi-disciplinary team led by Professor Ernie Moniz has issued a series of reports about various energy sources in a series with titles that all begin with “The Future of ___________”.

Here is a quote from near the top of the executive summary of the report titled The Future of Natural Gas.

The overarching conclusions are that:

• Abundant global natural gas resources imply greatly expanded natural gas use, with especially large growth in electricity generation.
• Natural gas will assume an increasing share of the U.S. energy mix over the next several decades, with the large unconventional resource playing a key role.
• The share of natural gas in the energy mix is likely to be even larger in the near to intermediate term in response to CO2 emissions constraints. In the longer term, however, very stringent emissions constraints would limit the role of all fossil fuels, including natural gas, unless capture and sequestration are competitive with other very low-carbon alternatives.
• The character of the global gas market could change dramatically over the time horizon of this study

In contrast, the executive summary of The Future of Nuclear Power, published in 2003, made the following statement.

For a large expansion of nuclear power to succeed, four critical problems must be overcome:

It then proceded to provide explanations of why cost, safety, waste and proliferation were evaluated as being critical, unsolved problems that would slow the deployment of nuclear energy technologies. In 2009, MIT completed an update to the 2003 report that ends with the following statement.

The sober warning is that if more is not done, nuclear power will diminish as a practical and timely option for deployment at a scale that would constitute a material contribution to climate change risk mitigation.

There is a stark difference in tone between the two reports that is nearly impossible to miss. Natural gas, which is still so difficult to move from place to place that it is often flared off as a dangerous waste product, is described as having a future with “greatly expanded” consumption, with “especially large growth in electricity generation”, which just happens to be the focus market for businesses that understand nuclear fission technology. On the other hand, emission free, energy dense nuclear fission deserves “sober warnings” and needs a lot of improvement before it can grow.

I cannot help but notice that The Future of Natural Gas received financial support from the American Clean Skies Foundation (aka Chesapeake Energy – both Aubrey McClendon (Chairman, Chesapeake Energy) and Tom Price (VP, Chesapeake Energy) are on the ACSF board of directors), the Hess Corporation, and the Agencia Naçional de Hidrocarburos (Columbia).

The Advisory Committee for the study was led by Mack McClarty, a natural gas industry stalwart who also served as President Clinton’s Chief of Staff, and included such oil and natural gas promoters as Denise Bode currently leader of the American Wind Energy Association but formerly CEO of the ACSF, John Hess, CEO of the Hess Corporation and Greg Staples from ACSF.

On the other hand, The Future of Nuclear Power was sponsored by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, which seems to have no connection to the nuclear energy industry. Its advisory board included both Thomas Cochran from the Natural Resources Defense Council and John Podesta both of whom have a long history of expressing strong skepticism about the use of nuclear energy.

MIT will be hosting its annual energy conference on March 16 and 17. Early bird registration ends on Monday, February 20th. The conference agenda includes a session titled The Future of Baseload Power. Here is a brief video describing that session, which is on a topic that is right in the middle of nuclear energy’s wheelhouse.

As you can see from that video, MIT considers nuclear energy to be an “also ran” even in the battle for baseload electricity generation market share. As a side note, the scheduled keynote speaker for the Saturday session of the Conference is Marvin Odum, the President of Shell Oil Company, one of the largest natural gas extraction companies in the world.

Am I sounding too conspiratorial or can you connect the dots to see how money and sponsorship from the natural gas industry just might be swaying MIT’s predictions for the future of energy?

With permission, I wanted to share this note posted to a private email list to which I subscribe. I am not publishing the author’s name, but Dr. Moniz and some of his colleagues at MIT might be able to recognize who wrote the note:

Colleagues, I’m forwarding this to you, but not because I recommend attending. This is an annual student-run conference at MIT, and it is exceptionally well done organizationally. Anything involving “energy” at MIT goes straight through the MIT energy guru, Ernie Moniz. And nuclear is an afterthought at best with Moniz. In the first 5 conferences, I was told by several MIT nuclear engineering graduate students that nuclear got almost no play. Last year, driven by frustration, several of the NE grad students got on the inside and inserted a couple of panels in the program. I chaired one of the panels, a session on small modular reactors. The conference, and our panel session, were both very well attended. I guess that there were about 500 conference attendees, and maybe 200 at our session. My reward for attending was the opening night reception. The keynote speakers were Ed Markey followed by Moniz. The two of them kept pointing and winking and smiling knowingly at each other. As I dimly recall anything they said about nuclear was cast in a negative tone. It was nauseating.

It appears from this year’s program that the MIT NE students returned to the sidelines. I’ve searched the program for anything to do with nuclear power, but can’t find a thing other than Nu Scale Power’s participation in a poster session that will have about 100 other presenters.

How can one of our absolute best technical institutions act this stupidly? Their nuclear engineering program was probably the best in the nation, maybe along with Michigan, for a long time. MIT’s NE department has fallen on hard times with retirements and departures, but they are still top-drawer and may very well regain #1. Their drawing power remains outstanding. On the other hand, perhaps their institutional neglect of, or hostility toward, nuclear will catch up with them. In that event, perhaps they are headed to a long, slow decline in nuclear engineering research and education.

Just in case you do not follow the link on Ed Markey’s name, let me make it clear that Rep. Markey has a strong relationship with the natural gas industry. His congressional district hosts the oldest liquified natural gas import terminal in the United States.

The facility started operating a few years before Markey was first elected to Congress in 1976 and it has prospered for the past three decades, partially as a result of the significant constraints placed on nuclear energy development in New England and the early shutdowns of Yankee Rowe, Connecticut Yankee, Maine Yankee and Millstone unit 1. Markey’s antinuclear activism played a role in achieving those reductions in nuclear energy output that would have reduced the need to burn expensively transported natural gas imported from foreign countries.

Side bar: Long time Atomic Insights readers might remember a challenge to the MIT energy faculty issued last summer. My friends who seek to remind the world that the United States developed a rather amazing nuclear energy technology called the Integral Fast Reactor wanted a chance to discuss the MIT report on the future of the nuclear fuel cycle.

I just heard back from a contact at MIT that they are still thinking about responding, but not directly, perhaps sometime next fall. I have been following through every few months; each time that contact tells me that the timing is just not right or that the relentless march of semester schedules prevents action and organization.

There is one more connection worth drawing clearly. The IFR program was was killed just as it was getting ready to demonstrate a viable, passively safe, closed fuel cycle in 1994. The fatal blow was the Clinton Administration budget submitted for fiscal year 1994, which zeroed out all funding for nuclear energy research. That budget proposal was strongly influenced by the same Mack McLarty mentioned above as the leader of the Advisory Committee for the MIT study on the Future of Natural Gas.

Update: (Posted February 25, 2012) On February 23, 2012, John Deutch, who was a co-chair for MIT’s Future of Nuclear Power (see page iii), published a fawning op-ed about natural gas and North American oil as abundant energy sources. Here is a quote:

The outlook for gas is that we are going to have an extended supply available at a reasonable cost of extraction for the foreseeable future. This implies that gas prices will be low and that gas will become a substitute for renewables, nuclear, and coal plants, especially older ones. We will be generating electricity from gas at a much lower cost than other developed countries, our competitors, will have to pay.

In the meantime, there is a great deal more potential for oil production in North America from shale. North Dakota is becoming the third-largest state producer in the United States. North America will be producing a higher percentage of its oil requirements than it is currently and importing less oil from abroad. The economic consequences are enormous.

See what I mean about being captured? Perhaps “victim of groupthink” of the northeastern US elites would be a better description. End Update.

I am deeply troubled by the sabre rattling over the issue of Iran developing nuclear energy capabilities.

Tiny efforts like mine on Atomic Insights may not matter much, but it is time to do all I can to shift the conversation away from war mongering to something that is a more productive and positive use of our time and resources. It is time to ask people to place the rhetoric on pause and to go back just a few short years to recall the propaganda push that resulted in attacking Iraq – which ended up costing a few trillion dollars, several thousand American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives.

With few exceptions, the words that certain politicians and pundits are producing today sound like replays of the same tired words that the neocons used to justify aggression against Iraq.

Many Americans date their animosity toward Iran to the actions of 1979, when a group of students, with some apparent official support, invaded the American embassy and took 52 people hostage. Even though the crisis was a 444 day long, embarrassing episode in our history, the hostages were eventually released. America lost eight brave soldiers in a poorly planned and horribly executed rescue attempt.

On the other side of the issue, Iranians date their hostility to America to 1953, when the United States CIA took actions to stimulate the overthrow of the democratically elected leader named Mohammad Mosaddeqh. Our main beef with him was the fact that he had decided that the oil and gas under his country actually belonged to the people, not to the companies that had arranged some sweet deals during a colonial era. When he moved to nationalize the oil reserves, the UK and the US took action to install a dictator who was more compliant with our “interests.”

That part of the controversy is pretty well known and discussed. My contribution is to try to help people understand how much the current turmoil is being driven by selfish quests for oil, gas, markets, money and power while denying millions to billions of people access to the abundant energy that would take a good portion of the money out of the equation.

The rarely discussed aspect of the current Iranian situation is that many participants are more worried about the prospect of competing in the energy fuels market with an Iran that has a capable and growing nuclear energy industry than they are about the more remote possibility that Iran will waste its time and resources building and maintaining virtually unusable weaponry.

Iran has large, underexploited reservoirs of oil and gas. Some observers have pointed to that fact as being prima facie evidence that its nuclear energy program must be aimed at producing weapons. That argument is based on the illogical notion that any country with any sense would avoid using nuclear energy if it has plenty of oil and gas. The argument makes no sense – even if you have a lot of oil and gas, nuclear fission is a better heat source for many applications.

Why would any sane nation waste valuable materials like light, sweet crude and easily extracted methane gas on processes like electricity production or water desalination that can be done more economically and more cleanly by fissioning otherwise useless materials like uranium and thorium? (Oh yeah, some of the anti-Iranian sabre rattlers advocate the same dumb choice for us here in the US. I suspect it is because they profit from sales of oil and gas.)

If Iran is able to successfully develop an independent nuclear energy capability that does not need support from international purchases, it would free up a significant portion of its current oil and gas production and make it available for sale into the world market. That prospect is frightening to the people who like the current elevated price of oil (all over the world) and natural gas (outside the US) because more supply always drives down prices. There might be some occasional time delays in that effect, but as soon as our limited storage capacity fills up, prices fall until the demand and supply match.

Naming names, both Saudi Arabia and Israel have strong financial motives for trying to suppress Iran’s energy production capacity. Saudi Arabia has been battling Iranian oil in the market for several decades – as documented in Daniel Yergin’s classic book titled The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. Until recently, Israel’s rivalry with Iran seemed to be more based on religion and politics, but Israel has discovered a vast natural gas field in the Mediterranean that it would like to exploit and market at a profitable price.

There are certainly other issues on which some like to focus, but an awful lot of international intrigue can be stimulated when there are hundreds of billions of dollars in long-term fossil fuel based income at stake.

One more thing that worries anti-Iranian activists is the recognition that a nuclear capability enables an independently minded nation to thumb its nose at international pressure. It is difficult to embargo a country that has nuclear reactors, an indigenous nuclear fuel manufacturing capability, AND vast stores of oil and gas. Sure, the cost of the nuclear fuel might be higher than it would be if the country could purchase the fuel on the open market due to manufacturing efficiencies, but even at double or triple the world price, nuclear fuel is a cheap, clean source of reliable heat.

Aside: I discount all statements made about Iran’s lack of indigenous uranium. Not only does the country include a large and diverse land mass, but it also is home to Ramsar, which is known to have the highest level of naturally occurring radioactive material of any occupied area in the world. It is not possible to have insufficient uranium reserves when you have places in your country where the annual dose rate can be as high as 130 mSv. End Aside.

With sufficient sources of controllable heat, a nation that has a coastline will never want for fresh water. With water, land and hardworking people, a nation can feed itself, clothe itself, and keep its population safe and secure.

I suspect that most Iranians would prefer not to be isolated from the world, but history has shown that it is possible for a nation with rich natural resources (think South Africa) to go its own way for many decades. There is no reason to suspect that Iran’s actions to develop its nuclear capability are anything more than the logical actions of a nation that has been continually attacked for a half a century with covert actions, economic embargos and frequent threats of preemptive military attacks.

PS – One persistent piece of misinformation continues to be used as a justification for attacks against Iran. Thousands of repetitions in essentially all forms of media (printed books, newspapers, online, radio, television) have falsely accused Iran’s President of describing Israel as a “fake regime” that “must be wiped off the map.”

That is NOT what he said. News media fact checkers have no excuse for not knowing the truth; a credible story about the real translation was published in the New York Times in June 2006 titled Just How Far Did They Go, Those Words Against Israel?

In fact, Ahmadinejad actually misquoted a far more nuanced phrase first made by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1980 that called for regime change, not a military attack.

Khomeni’s original words translate to the following:

“This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the arena of time.”

Ahmadinejad’s speech in October of 2005 to an anti-Zionism conference included the following statement – translated from the original Farsi, of course:

“This regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.”

The New York Times, despite having printed the more accurate piece linked to above, was the original source of the misquoted statement that has so often been repeated. That first misinformed story appeared in an article dated October 27, 2005 titled Wipe Israel ‘off the map’ Iranian says. It is long past time for the grey lady of American journalism to atone for the mistake and work to halt the potential for massive quantities of bloodshed that it might encourage if not forcefully and repeatedly corrected.

Additional Reading

Go Build 4 Research Reactors – and plan for 20 power reactors. Article dated February 16 from Indiaatvnews.com provides an Indian perspective regarding recent announcement by Ahmadinejad.

New York Times Front Page February 16, 2012 – Aggressive Actions by Iran Signal Pressure on Its Leadership

George Monbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) provided a link to the following video in a tweet about the growing influence of Australian mining interests on the news media. Lord Monckton is one of the world’s most famous, and well paid, climate change deniers.

Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious science publications, has published an article that should give natural gas promoters in the environmental community an enormous dose of indigestion. It provides scientific evidence supported by hard data measurements that the act of extracting and “producing” natural gas for consumption releases enough methane into the atmosphere to negate any greenhouse gas advantages that its somewhat cleaner burning chemistry provides.

Air sampling reveals high emissions from gas field: Methane leaks during production may offset climate benefits of natural gas.

Here is a very important quote from the article:

Capturing and storing gases that are being vented during the fracking process is feasible, but industry says that these measures are too costly to adopt. An EPA rule that is due out as early as April would promote such changes by regulating emissions from the gas fields.

(Emphasis added.)

Please go and read the summary of the study. Find out why this is a heat seeking missile that the industry will be working very hard to dodge.

If you happen to be a money focused leader in an “environmental” organization, you might think of this as good news and a good opportunity to shake down a well-endowed industry in return for favorable commentary. Advertiser supported media moguls should also be excited about the prospects for all of the commercials they will be able to sell that attempt to cover this science with astroturf. (Please understand those last couple of sentences are designed to be understood as being full of irony.)