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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (37832)	8/2/2008 10:06:42 AM
From: elmatador	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 219377

So far the Chinese have bought. We didn't make an effort to sell. Now China is exporting to Brazil com gusto. as a result Brazil seeks to triple exports to China by 2010 www.chinaview.cn 2008-07-04 13:08:28 Print BRASILIA, July 3 (Xinhua) -- The Brazilian government on Thursday launched a China Agenda program aimed at boosting bilateral trade between the two countries, said an official of the Ministry of Development. The initiative, which involves a series of coordinated measures by the government and private sectors, seeks to triple Brazil's exports to China by 2010 and encourage more Chinese investment in Brazil. The goal of the initiative is to increase Brazil's trade presence in the Chinese market, said Minister of Development Miguel Jorge. "Brazil's foreign trade with China will certainly increase, if we raise the technological content of our exports to the Chinese market with products of greater added value," Jorge said. The initiative also proposed measures aimed at bringing more Chinese investment to Brazil, reducing imbalance in bilateral commercial transactions and moving forward the discussion of sensitive issues that could constitute obstacles in the trade expansion between the two sides. The Brazilian government has identified 619 products that are in high demand in China as priority export items to the country. Meanwhile, the government has also proposed to include more manufactured products in its exports to China, 74 percent of which now are low-value commodities such as soybeans and pig iron. The Brazilian government hoped that the strategy could guarantee the country's energy security, resources sustainability and the expansion of external markets. It also expected the program could result in strong direct investment from China in the coming years. The trade volume between China and Brazil totaled 29.7 billion U.S. dollars in 2007, jumping 46.4 percent year-on-year, according to the latest statistics of China's Ministry of Commerce

To: TobagoJack who wrote (37832)	8/3/2008 5:50:23 AM
From: energyplay	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 219377

My guess (not too informed, by the way) is there is still more materials science to be done on pebble beds, maybe 3-4 years, maybe 5-7 years. Why ? 1) Material science takes almost as long as biotech. The world has become much better at material science and creating new engineered materials, but outside of alloys of well known metals and many plastics, this is still both and experimental and theoretical science - you have to experiment to gets lots of data, actually formulate and test some variations or tweaks to theory, and then experiment again. Then, once you know what you want, you need to find a way to produce it consistently and relatively cheaply. 2) Nuclear research and pebble bed specifically has been WAY underfunded everywhere in the world up until maybe 2003-4, roughly. Funding started going up about two years after there was talk about 'peak oil". 3) The Ft. St. Vrain stuff is very old, and probably did not collect the detail of data needed today. 4) I expect the German data is considerably better but that ended in 1988. 5) This effectively means China is building the first one. Sounds fun, but it isn't - you get all these chicken and egg problems, like where do the Wright Brothers take flying lessons when there weren't any airplanes ? You also get to make all the standard 'mistakes'. Hmm, you can tell from the above that I am an engineer, not a scientist. I like to build things that work, not find out all the ways something won't work, and publish a paper on those ways. ****** I expect what China will do is to build about 2-4 first generation designs, run them a few years, then build about a dozen second generation reactors based on maybe 2 or 3 designs, and then have a third generation which can go everywhere and then build 100s of these. Many of first generation will likely be decommissioned and/or rebuilt in around 10 years, having produced power and been useful experiments. In 15 to 20 years, pebble bed designs will be a major export for China. Meantime, China will also build plenty of conventional reactors, based on standard designs. >>>It's a damn shame more research was not funded in the 1990s for this, the tools, like scanning atomic microscopes, computers, etc, were all available, and there were scientists available from cuts in defense spending worldwide. But no one funded this except the Germans, and I expect they had to stop funding to pay for re-unification. ### I think your coal investments are very safe in the meantime...;-)