STUFF

Fukushima reactor design is from the '60's. Smallest safety margin of any similar device, probably can't contain 90% of meltdowns. As we unfortunately are witnessing. US has 6 identical and 17 very similar plants.

China is building 2 "pebble-bed" nuke reactors. Instead of fuel rods, billiard ball-size fuel balls cloaked in protective graphite. Reactors stop on their own in emergency shutdown, avoid meltdown. Cooling by helium gas instead of water. Germany, US and S. Africa have tried the tech, but abandoned over tech problems or finance. A test reactor near Beijing operated for a decade without mishap. Waste also less radioactive than rods. China also buying one of world's largest U deposits in Namibia for $1.23B. They also will start taxing rare earth metals next month, adding >$100M/yr to costs. Finally, they imported >1mbpd crude from Saudis in Feb, up 10% year on year. Angola their 2nd top supplier @ <700kbpd.

Iraq sees oil production, export capacity doubling by '14. Indonesia crude output in Feb down 7% yr on yr to 785kbpd from 841. Venezuela wants to send 1mbpd to China w/in 3 yrs but would need a drastic increase in production (their output is declining). The US approved its 6th deepwater permit since the Gulf moratorium. Also, the oil/gas industry has nearly 7,200 permits to drill on US public lands that it has yet to use. Possible shortage of rigs, experienced fracking crews. Russia to double its oil exports to Japan to >100M bls this year and may redirect some of LNG planned for Europe to JP and may get Japanese firms to join Gazprom in exploring 2 massive gas fields.

17% of Germany's electric last year came from wind, solar, hydro and biogas digesters. They had >200k citizens in their streets over the weekend protesting nuke power.

First Wind dedicated Oahu's first large-scale wind farm. 30MW on 575 acres. Clipper Wind turbines. 20 cents/kwh PPA from Hawaiian El. Also a 10MW batt storage system to smooth power flux. Hawaiian El's Oahu peakload 1.25GW.

Scientists in US using bacterium to make hydrocarbons from CO2. Other biomolecular engineers at UCLA working on getting butanol production off of edible feedstocks and onto ag wastes and algae. Cool Plant Biofuels, backed by Google, to produce fuel from the same kinds of biomass.

Freshwater content of upper Arctic Ocean is up 20% since the '90's. I think that means glacier runoff and maybe more precip.

Happy trails, pards.