The Science council for Global Initiatives

Tom Blees is the author of Prescription for the Planet - The Painless Remedy for Our Energy & Environmental Crises. Tom is also the president of the Science Council for Global Initiatives. Many of the goals of SCGI, and the methods to achieve them, are elucidated in the pages of Blees's book. He is a member of the selection committee for the Global Energy Prize, considered Russia's equivalent of the Nobel Prize for energy research. His work has generated considerable interest among scientists and political figures around the world. Tom has been a consultant and advisor on energy technologies on the local, state, national, and international levels.

Well, the good news is twofold:

1) GE finally is applying for a commercial license for the PRISM. I suspect they've been goaded on by the imminent construction start of Korea's fast reactor that will be ready to start building by 2020. Whatever the reason, it looks like we'll get one or two metal-fueled fast reactors built in the first half of the next decade. (I don't take the recent no-nuclear pronouncement by the current ROK president too seriously, as the timeline for such changes exceeds administration lifetimes, and there's just too much planning done for ROK reactors—both domestic and for export—to throw that all away. We've seen these hiccups before [Sweden and France]. I suppose GE might be happy and hoping that such a presidential pronouncement might delay the start of ROK's fast reactor build, giving GE more time to get their commercial license in order to get the jump on them.)

2) Yoon's design work on the commercial-scale pyroprocessing facility at Argonne encompasses recycling both metal fuel and oxide fuel to metal. That facility will be ready to build before the fast reactors are built to use its output (though Russian and Indian fast reactors could use it before that if they want to).

Good News!