Last edited Sat Mar 21, 2026, 12:33 AM - Edit history (2)

......word "molten" that first caught my eye, asking the obvious question "from whence comes the heat" to make it molten. It got only better with "carbon capture" (an old favorite), "emission of gaseous tar", "impure hydrogen", "carbon monoxide", "poisoned catalysts", and "carcinogens". What's not to like ? Your mention of Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa was a tiny bit gratuitous but still pretty funny.

...FT process, "evil" in the climate sense, but not necessarily the province of horrid political regimes, is utilized whenever access to fossil petroleum (and/or "natural" gas) is limited.

German oil during the Second World War was driven by the fact that their only access to petroleum was in the Romanian Ploesti oil fields after the invasion of the Soviet Union, (which had been supplying oil to Germany before the Barbarossa attack as part of the 1939 "non-aggression" pact signed to dismember Poland). In fact, one of the motivations for the German invasion of the Soviet Union was to seize the Caucus oil fields, and it played a significant part, beyond Hitler's obsessions, in the German refusal to do what made military sense in the autumn of 1942, and withdraw from Stalingrad.

Similarly, decades later, Apartheid South Africa was limited by sanctions on ready access to oil.

I note that FT coal-to-oil was a big part of Jimmy Carter's energy policy after the Mideast embargos and gas lines in the US. We don't like to acknowledge as much, but if you look at late 1970's literature on energy, FT chemistry was widely discussed, and in fact funded, by the United States government. (These were pre fracking times.) Carter used this threat to put fear into Saudi Arabia and the Shah's Iran.

There is a risk that China - which has both the intellectual and industrial capacity and the coal to build FT plants - can easily build this capacity. China already leads the world in coal to hydrogen technology, and with hydrogen and carbon monoxide one can easily industrialize FT chemistry.

FT chemistry represents a further disaster in climate impacts, much worse than either coal or petroleum (and certainly gas) itself, but there are, regrettably, people more than willing to ignore the climate issue. FT chemistry is well known and it works. That is the real threat of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz over the long term.

The mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen is known as "syn gas" because it can synthesize any component of petroleum. However, it can also be utilized to synthesize the wonder fuel DME, dimethyl ether, a relatively small molecule with properties very similar to LPG, but with little or no climate risk. It is accessible from nuclear hydrogen and carbon dioxide, perhaps recovered from seawater. Heather Willauer at the US Naval Research Laboratory has demonstrated how to do this using nuclear power on aircraft carriers to make jet fuel, not DME, but FT fuel. (In this way FT fuel could - there's that awful word "could" again - in theory, lead to a closed carbon cycle. It has been run on a pilot scale, and is economic whenever the price of petroleum based jet fuel exceeds $6.00/gallon. There is no reason it could not be run to make DME to replace diesel fuel, LPG, dangerous natural gas, and in fact, gasoline in all current applications.

In 2011, the late great Nobel Laureate George Olah proposed a closed carbon cycle to address the on going and accelerating tragedy of what was then called "climate change," but today, having arrived is, in my opinion, better described as "extreme global heating" instead: Anthropogenic Chemical Carbon Cycle for a Sustainable Future George A. Olah, G. K. Surya Prakash, and Alain Goeppert Journal of the American Chemical Society 2011 133 (33), 12881-12898

The antinukes and "I'm not an antinukes" around here, who are bourgeois "we need our cars" kind of people in general, in my opinion "head of the ass" types, sometimes whine to me that nuclear power cannot power their fucking cars. It's just another indication of their very limited knowledge of energy science, their lack of imagination, and their idiotic childish paranoia coupled with an indifferent myopia with respect to broader humanity and world ecosystems in general.

This said, I personally don't believe that the car CULTure is sustainable in any form. We may need some self propelled machinery, farm machines, ambulances, buses, perhaps delivery vehicles if we can afford them, but we don't "need" cars. What we truly "need" can, and should be, run on DME sourced with primary nuclear energy's heat, in a process intensive setting, The belief that we "need" cars has had a tragic impact on the planet.

Thanks for your comment.

The Danish small reactor company Seaborg Industries (named after the great Swedish-American chemist) was working on using molten NaOH as a low-pressure, high-temperature moderator for their molten salt reactor design. They must have hit a roadblock, as they've now reverted to more conventional graphite, and also changed their name to Saltfoss Energy.
Similarly, Transatomic Power a few years ago proposed zirconium hydride (maybe stabilised with yttrium hydride) as a moderator. Eventually they had to admit that their neutronics calculations were way too optimistic, and they're now out of business. Aalo Atomics, more recently, were going to use uranium zirconium hydride fuel, like the TRIGA research reactors, but in a sodium-cooled reactor. There was some doubt about how soon the hydrogen would migrate out of the fuel at high temperature; in the end Aalo went for UO2 and graphite, mainly because supply could be guarranteed sooner. At least they'll be well set up to switch to a fast spectrum sodium design, if they're successful.

...topic. I would have never thought that NaOH, would be a good idea as a moderator. Although it might offer a decent epithermal spectrum, valuable for breeding with multi-cycled plutonium with a lot of ²⁴¹Pu and/or its source ²⁴⁰Pu, as MOX used fuel would have, it is highly corrosive, something that the coal people described in the OP glossed over but addressed as best they can.

It does seem that Leslie Dewan, financed by Peter Theil, was of hot interest for a time, with her claim that she could eliminate the need for used fuel repositories. It seems she made so basic calculational errors, which embarrassed MIT, where she was a star undergraduate and graduate student. They fell for Transatomic as well.

The piece I'm writing for my son involves putting medium lived ¹³⁷Cs and long lived ¹³⁵Cs along with non-radioactive (natural cesium) ¹³³Cs for certain neutronic purposes involved in making the bulk fission product cesium more highly radioactive for use. I believe that because of these special properties of radioactive cesium, its high gamma output, and ready solubility, make it extremely valuable.

Transatomic is a cautionary tale on hype.

In this case, there would be no need for nuclear waste dumps if similar applications can be found for the stream of elements across the periodic table found in used nuclear fuel. After nearly 40 years of working on the problem, I believe these applications exist. It may be possible in a sane world - although a sane world is less and less likely owing to the suicide of the United States and reactions around the world exploiting that suicide and suffering for it - for actinides and fission products to become extremely valuable materials.