Tom Blees

Tom Blees

Science Council

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

ABSTRACT

Energy prognostications from the International Energy Agency to the UN to US DOE all project nuclear power in mid-century as providing a percentage of the energy and/or electricity mix little different from what nuclear provides today. Nuclear power development plans of India, the USA, the EU and most others are timid at best. Many countries project renewables (primarily wind and solar) as providing up to 100% of their electricity (or even, implausibly, all energy needs). But the high-renewables scenarios break down under even modest scrutiny, and have been savaged both by energy professionals as well as by actual data from years of investment and effort, particularly in Germany’s Energiewende fiasco. Meanwhile, climate change proceeds apace.

All these prognosticators are about to be embarrassed and their predictions proven laughably wrong. This is because we’re at the brink of demonstrating a disruptive technology that will completely upend the nuclear power industry’s business model. Within less than five years, a nuclear power system will be demonstrated that is safer than any ever deployed, cheaper than any other form of electrical generation, highly resistant to nuclear proliferation risks, and able to be deployed rapidly on a global scale that dwarfs any past or current nuclear buildout. This is great news not only for developing countries in desperate need of cheap, reliable energy, but for the efforts to limit the effects of climate change and turn the tide in that struggle.