And the building that housed it continued to be known as the Old War Office Building for many years. It’s now in private hands, apparently:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Office#War_Office_building

http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/pdfs/P4TP4U.pdf

The concept depends on the availability of essentially unlimited amounts of “clean” energy/electricity which he suggest could be from reactors of the type known as Integral Fast Reactors, as pioneered by Argonne National Lab with their EBR (Experimental Breeder Reactor) in the 1980s and 1990s.

These are similar to, but distinct from, the slightly better known MSRs (Molten Salt Reactors). The latter are often mentioned in connection with thorium (although they do not have to use thorium).

Anyway, in the context of vehicle fuel, the advantage of the idea of using boron in the way Blees describes is that the boron, once “burned” (with the combustion products captured), it can be almost completely recycled and re-used, so you wouldn’t need unlimited amounts of boron into the future. Just enough to get going and additional amounts to provide natural growth.

As it happens, I think a large amount of the world’s boron is mined in the USA (in the form of borax), although there are deposits in other places, e.g. Turkey…..hmm….an American “ally” (?)…

So in the future, they may be talking about the periodic table wars, rather than the oil wars.

And Venezuela will not be spared by the aggregate demand of the high global consumption bourgeoisie we all find ourselves in, like it or not. We need diesel to go ‘green’ as all currently available battery technology is too heavy for trucks, lorries, and aviation. And globalisation is a function of its trucks and shipping. But that is another story.

Some of the e-tech minerals (e.g. indium and gallium) are classed as ‘near critical’. Which invokes Liebniz’s ‘Law of the Minimum’. If everything else is abundant: growth is limited by the least abundant mineral. But let’s not worry about that.

Lithium is hardly rare: estimates vary – but there was 365 years of lithium at 2015 rates of consumption. But a Greentech Media survey estimated with exponential increasing ‘green’ demand – that 365 year supply could be consumed in 17 years. Which gives us plenty of time to find some more: or something.

That “act of wild speculation” is not so wild when you consider that EVs need the 100% clean energy replacement of the grid – in five years according to LabourGND.uk – with an increased capacity of 20-33% …depending on whose estimates you rely on. It is not replacing like for like: that’s for sure. Complicated by the fact that 25% of generation power from nuclear is due to be phased out by 2025.

Just for EVs: the UK needs 264,600 tonnes of lithium: which the report says is three quarters of a years supply. When I checked with USGS and Statista: that seems more like several years supply (world supply 41,500 tonnes in 2017: USGS). This is not me wanting to be imprecise: everyone seems to be using different figures and I do not know which ones are real.

That only accounts for the EVs. The National Grid would need something like six months backup: if it is anything like the US grid. Here: Alice Friedemann has calculated the a Li-ion battery to hold a single days backup would be would cost $11.9 trillion dollars, take up 345 square miles, and weigh 74 million tons. This excludes ’round trip efficiency’ of 75% which means the grid would have to be another 33% larger. All this points to insane amounts of solar PV’s; wind farms; tidal barriers etc. And the impossibility of the 100% ‘actual zero’ decarbonised electrification of the grid in five – or even ten years.

Then there is the green imperialist ‘resource frontier’ that is pushed into every corner of the globe looking to maintain the eurocentric high consumption of the few. We drive the resource wars for green energy and the wars for oil to maintain our consumption rates. It is a simple correlation to make. It’s not just lithium: it is everything else to maintain our historically high rates of consumption and emissions – that are six times the world average …according to LabourGND.

So it seems like our ‘cure’ of going ‘green’ will have negative global ramifications on resource cursed countries for decades to come. Coups, proxy wars, and green imperialism in return for bourgeois bad faith socialism: seems fair to me. I thought everyone knew the GND was a green finance capitalist front. When the Green Finance Initiative and UK Export Finance follow UN directives to only fund ‘green’ initiatives – forcing resource cursed fossil fuel economies to go ‘green’ too – there will be plenty of blood money – sorry, green, sustainable development money – for us to live in bourgeois bad faith indefinitely. As the rest of the world is in green bond servitude to pay for it. Only, don’t tell the children. And don’t try and make an election issue of it. Just extend and pretend to the end.

Good points. Objecting from our comfortable Western seats to a distant country taking advantage of its natural resources could appear to be not just churlish, but downright hypocritical, all things considered.

And that Morales had recently opted for a joint venture project with a Chinese partner just before the coup is very interesting indeed. The plot thickens.

I have no problem with people voting a comment of mine down, but sometimes an explanation as to why a comment has been voted down would be helpful.

In the UK, it was the War Office, until 1964 when it became the MOD

And not according to the ABC and the rest of the corporate media in Australia, either.

Chile is not a good model for comparison as it already has a hardline far-right govt under Sebastian Pinera. Morales at least claims to be working for indigenous Bolivians, of whom he is one.

My understanding is that the altiplano region in Bolivia where the salt flats are located is a desolate area with a harsh climate. There is very little rainfall and soil is thin, making the area unproductive for agriculture or any other human activity. If lithium mining and production including refining can underpin Morales’ social reforms and give most Bolivians a chance of living well, it seems churlish of us outsiders to deny Bolivians that chance and opportunity.

The issue has to be over how much control the Morales govt would have exercised over the lithium mining, and what environmental protections Morales would have put in place. Significantly a few days before the coup, Morales had scrapped a deal with a German company and opted for a joint venture project with a Chinese partner which might have given the Bolivian govt a major say in how the mining was to be carried out.