You know, you guys should elect an engineer president.
Well that's what the Chinese do.
You know all our political leaders are lawyers
and all China's political leaders are engineers- heh heh- so- oh gosh.
We're going broke.
We're mired in debt.
We don't have as many scientists as we want or need.
And jobs are going overseas.
I assert that these are not isolated problems.
That they are the collective consequence of the absence of ambition that consumes you
when you stop having dreams.
If all you do is coast, eventually you slow down,
while others catch up, and pass you by.
Why nuclear energy?
Especially after what happened in Japan?
Why Molten Salt Reactor?
Why Thorium?
And last but not least, why China is the first one to eat the crab?
That's Chinese saying.
Uh, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has begun an effort to develop what they call T-MSR,
Thorium Molten Salt Reactor.
And it's really along these same lines.
And they are well funded.
And well staffed.
We have 300 people working full time on this.
They know that those are the same people who are going to turn around and operate and maintain
those reactors.
I give them great credit.
It's very compelling work.
Chinese are definitely in the lead right now on this.
1994 the State of California passed a law of the zero emissions.
And GM's EV1 came out in 1996 because they want very much like to catch the market of
the California.
The big oils heavily lobbying East Coast, not to follow the same track as California
did.
Finally, GM called back all the EV1s from the market, and crashed them in 2004.
It's- it's- it's something to me like- like- like World War 2 Nazi.
It's amazing.
It's a very scary story here.
Here is pure electric car developed by Chinese Academy of Sciences.
We used to have a dream- if we can produce clean electricity
then we can drive our electrical car.
However- if you look at this- as of today- it's all gasoline cars.
So it makes our job even impossible.
We need a revolutionary something happen.
Why thorium?
And why MSR?
Low pressure here, which give you more safety.
We also end up with the high temperature here.
We need high temperature.
Because, if you can go 900 degrees C, then we can use this energy to convert the CO2
which is not the waste at all- is raw material for chemicals, in fact.
We need the energy to convert them.
We need the high temperature.
There's all sorts of very, very interesting chemistry that we have never had the opportunity
to look at because we've never had a cheap energy platform at those temperatures.
With a heat platform like a Molten Salt Reactor
you can do any number of high temperature reactions.
We're still going to need liquid fuels for vehicles and machinery.
But we could generate these fuels from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,
and from water, much like nature does.
We could generate hydrogen by splitting water and combining it with carbon harvested from
CO2 in the atmosphere- making fuels like methanol, ammonia, and dimethyl-ether,
which could be a direct replacement for diesel fuels.
The whole planet's transportation system is gauged
toward the consumption of a fossil fuel.
There's an entire internal combustion infrastructure on the planet.
Imagine carbon neutral gasoline and diesel sustainable and self produced.
-a way of getting the full lifecycle out of the infrastructure we've already built up.
Because you don't want to just abandon the infrastructure we've already built up.
We have trillions of dollars of internal combustion machinery around.
But we need to at least stop putting more stuff into the air.
The opportunities abound.
I couldn't even tell you.
I just- There's so many possibilities.
I wouldn't-
I wouldn't even want to predict.
Wouldn't even want to.
Alright, so- This the work that's actually going on at NRL today,
this is not a theoretical possibility.
The ocean or rivers, as it's pointed out, is full of carbon dioxide and hydrogen.
There's lots of this everywhere on the planet.
In fact seven-tenths of the Earth's surface is covered with water.
We are looking at here at the electrolytic cation exchange module.
This is on version three.
Here's the skid that's used down at Naval Air Station Key West.
What's going on is pretty simple.
We're pumping electricity into this module up here.
We're pulling carbonic acid, HCO3, out of the water.
By the way, per unit gallon we get about a 92% removal from it.
Then we're using standard electrolysis to crack water in order to make hydrogen.
What do you do with it?
You string the carbon together with your hydrogen, and let's get into the fuels business.
Here is the spectrum for JP-5, which is the standard fuel used to run all the aircraft.
A bit like a classic bell curve.
What you're seeing is the spectrum based upon carbon content
of the individual hydrocarbons as you make this guy out of oil.
So this is anybody.
Exxon, BP, Shell, whoever you want to name it- pulling petroleum out of the ground, fractionally
distilling it, and making JP-5 according to the mil spec.
So what happens coming out of our machine down at Naval Air Station Key West?
Now look at this, we've got a decay curve.
Because we're manufacturing the fuels synthetically we're able to control the carbon content and
get a better concentration of the C10 hydrocarbons that we want,
than you can get from natural oil.
So what this turns out is that the synthetically made aviation fuel
actually has a higher energy density and is cleaner.
It doesn't have the sulfur compounds in it, it doesn't have the nitrates in it.
All of the really nasty stuff that comes out of burning a fossil fuel we don't have, and
we have a better power density profile making this stuff artificial.
If you can do just basic high school chemistry, if we can get hydrogen and CO2 from seawater
you have the fundamental building blocks right there
for making any hydrocarbon fuel you want.
Burn the fuel it will go into the air, it'll get absorbed into the ocean,
pulled out of the ocean, turned into fuel, burned and back into the air.
So your car works beautifully just as today but it's not running on oil.
But it's still running on the same fuel you have today.
It's not a real airplane, I admit it.
However, you're looking at it in the air- flying on fuel
that was made from sea water and electricity.
What do you do about civilian aviation?
Are we going to move to a world where only the highest of our elected officials fly around
the world when the rest of us get to walk?
Because there is no substitute for aviation fuel if you want to get in the air.
We're not going to have solar powered aircraft.
We're not going to have hydrogen fuel powered aircraft anytime soon.
We're looking at some total radical technology breakthrough if you want to fly.
The hydrocarbonic acid in the ocean is in equilibrium with the CO2 in the atmosphere.
It's a very simple test.
Seal up the fish tank, fill saltwater in the bottom, don't let any air into it.
Run your probes in there, pull carbonic acid out of the bottom.
Read your CO2 level on the air above it and watch the CO2 level in the atmosphere drop.
Every time you take a piece of carbon out of the ocean
it is the same as taking it out of the atmosphere.
It will pass from the air into the water.
When you send an aircraft up in the air and it's running on fuel you made by taking carbonic
acid out of the ocean, you have a virtual carbon cycle.
You are not adding CO2 at all.
It's carbon-free fuel that is carbon and burns in our existing engines.