Power & Energy

Schiller Institute Internet Dialogue — ‘Need Creative Genius of the World to Bear on Haiti and Afghanistan’

September 26, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Activity of the Schiller Institute, Agriculture, COVID-19, Economic development updates, General updates, Healthcare, Healthcare, Power & Energy, Space updates, The Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites, World Land-Bridge updates

Sept. 25 (EIRNS)—Today the Schiller Institute held an international webinar titled, “Reconstructing Haiti—America’s Way Out of the ‘Global Britain’ Trap.” The two-and-a-half-hour discussion featured elements of a proposed development outline for Haiti, as well as immediate emergency action required, and brought together experts, with ties to Haiti, in engineering, medicine and development policy. Today’s deliberations stand in stark contrast to the events of the week, which included the U.S. forced deportation of thousands of displaced Haitians from the Texas-Mexico border, back to Haiti, to disaster conditions from the August earthquake and before.

The six panelists were Richard Freeman, co-author of “The Schiller Institute Plan To Develop Haiti,” which EIR will publish this week for its Oct. 1 issue; Eric Walcott, Director of Strategic Partnerships, Institute of Caribbean Studies; Firmin Backer, co-founder and President of the Haiti Renewal Alliance; Joel DeJean, engineer and Texas activist with The LaRouche Organization; Dr. Walter Faggett, MD, based in Washington, D.C., where he is former Chief Medical Officer of the District of Columbia, and currently Co-Chairman of the Health Council of D.C.’s Ward 8, and an international leader with the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites; and moderator Dennis Speed of the Schiller Institute.

Freeman presented both the dimensions of both the extreme underdevelopment forced for decades on Haiti, and also the essentials of a development program for that nation, in the context of development of all the Island of Hispaniola, and the Caribbean. He presented a map of proposed rail, nuclear power sites, safe water systems and other vital infrastructure. He showed maps of proposals that Chinese firms had made in recent years, but which fell into abeyance.

Firmin Backer pointed out that the USAID has spent $5.1 billion in Haiti over the 11 years since the 2010 earthquake, but what is there to show for it? Now, with the latest earthquake on Aug. 14, we can’t even get aid into the stricken zones, because there is no airport nor port in southern Haiti to serve the stricken people. We should reassess how wrongly the U.S. funding was spent. Firmin reported how Haiti was given some debt cancellation by the IMF years back, but then disallowed from seeking foreign credit!

Eric Walcott was adamant, “We need the creative genius of the world to bear on Haiti and Afghanistan.” He said, “leverage the diaspora” to develop Haiti. There are more Haitian medics in New York and Miami than all of Haiti. He stressed that Haiti is not poor; the conditions are what is poor. But the population has pride, talent and resourcefulness. Walcott made a special point about elections in Haiti. He said, “Elections are a process,” not an event. He has experience. From 1998 to 2000, Walcott served as the lead observer for the OAS, for elections in Haiti.

Joel DeJean, an American of Haitian lineage, was forceful about the need to aim for the highest level in that nation, for example, leapfrog from charcoal to nuclear power. He advised, “give China the opportunity” to deploy the very latest nuclear technology in Haiti—the pebble-bed gas cooled modular reactor. We “don’t need more nuclear submarines, we need nuclear technology!” He called for the establishment of a development bank in Haiti, and other specifics.

Dr. Faggett summed up at many points, with the widest viewpoint and encouragement of action. He served in the U.S. military’s “Caribbean Peace-Keeping Force,” and was emphatic about taking action not only in Haiti, but worldwide. He referenced President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, saying that “you can tell a lot about people, by how they take care of the health of their people.” He reported that, at present, aid workers in Haiti, are having to shelter in place, because of the terrible conditions.

But, he said, we should mobilize. Have “vaccine diplomacy,” and work to build a health platform in Haiti, and a health care delivery system the world over. He is “excited about realizing Helga’s mission,” referring to Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Chairwoman of the Schiller Institute, who issued a call in June 2020, for a world health security platform. At that time, she and Dr. Joycelyn Elders, former U.S. Surgeon General, formed the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites.

Afghanistan’s Drought and Water Crisis Worsening; 2,000 Health Facilities Close

October 27, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Afghanistan, Agriculture, COVID-19, Economic development updates, Finance, General updates, Global Diplomacy, Healthcare, Healthcare, Our initiatives (petitions, etc), Power & Energy

Afghanistan’s Drought and Water Crisis Are Worsening; 2,000 Health Facilities Close –

Oct. 25, 2021 (EIRNS)–Afghanistan’s collapse in physical economic and agricultural production, the implosion of its health system, as well as the threat to human life, has gotten worse over the last two months. The nationwide drought is intensifying, while the West applies a tourniquet to the flow of necessary funds.

Physical economic conditions never stay in a “metastable state;” they either get better or worse.

In June of this year, then-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani officially declared a drought in Afghanistan. This was based on information from several agencies, including the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), which declared that “80% of Afghanistan is exposed to serious drought”—30% to “severe drought,” and 50% to “serious drought,” comprising 80%—and the remaining 20% part of the country was exposed to “moderate drought.”

Richard Trenchard, the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization director for Afghanistan, stated in late September, “This is the worst drought in 35–36 years. Many public institutions which provide a safety net, have ceased to function. Farmers have very little to fall back upon.”

Farming is being destroyed. The UN reported August 25, “Some 40 percent of [Afghanistan’s] crops have been lost to drought in the second massive water shortage in three years—further heightening food insecurity.” The World Food Program already reported that 14 million people in Afghanistan are food insecure, a number that is doubtless rising.

But the shortage of water is affecting not only agriculture, but the whole economy and society, which depends on water. A 2008 report reported “that drinking water supplies reach only 23 percent of Afghanistan’s total population… The country’s total sanitation coverage [is] only 12 percent.”

Two critical infrastructural sectors expose some of the crisis.

Afghanistan has only a combined approximately 100 private and public hospitals for a nation of 40 million people, a meager amount. The nation’s health system is run through a network of 2,200 “health facilities,” about 200 of which appear to be primary health clinics; it is not clear how large the other facilities are. These 2,200 facilities are run through an institution called Sehatmandi which is administered by the World Bank through the Afghanistan Reconstruction Fund and the Afghan Ministry of Public Health. It is funded through the World Bank, the European Union, Canada and Global Financing Facilities.

When the Taliban came to power in the period of August 17–18, these funding institutions cut off money. On September 30, Alexander Matheou, the Asia Pacific director of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies stated that “over 2,000 health facilities have closed.” He added that more than 20,000 health workers in the country were no longer working or were working without being paid; more than 7,000 of them are women. “People might agree to work without salaries for a few more weeks,” Matheou stated. “But once medicines run out totally, if you can’t switch on the lights, if you’ve got nothing to offer somebody who comes to your clinic, then they’ll shut the doors.”

Under intense pressure, on September 20, the Global Fund and the United Nations Development Fund signed an agreement to supply $15 million to the 2,200 health facilities. This is a drop in the bucket.

International donors pledged in October $1.2 billion to Afghanistan. But there are three roadblocks: 1) it is not clear how much of the pledged money will be really delivered; 2) it takes sometimes months for the money to get into the system; and 3) above all, the clinics are greatly inadequate, Afghanistan needs hundreds of new advanced hospitals, tens of thousands of skilled doctors and nurses, and so forth.

In the meantime, COVID is looming. Nine of Afghanistan’s 37 COVID hospitals have closed. Afghanistan has put a reported only 2.2 million COVID jabs into people; it has 1.2 million doses of vaccine waiting to be distributed, that haven’t been. They will expire by the end of the year.

This is pure and simple genocide.

As for water, Afghanistan has an annual surface water runoff water volume of 57,000 million cubic meters per year, which comes out to approximately 1,425 cubic meters/year per capita. This is insufficient, but would be a start. However, Afghanistan does not have an adequate water basin catchment system, and precipitation is not evenly distributed geographically.

In 2016, India spent $275 million to complete what is now called the “Afghan-India Friendship Dam” in Herat province on the Hari River. It will irrigate 75,000 hectares of land. But otherwise, new dam construction and broader water management hardly exists.

The U.S. is blocking more than $9 billion in Afghanistan’s central bank that belong to the Afghan people. The World Bank, IMF, and EU are blocking hundreds of millions more. (See the Schiller Institute’s demand for release of the Afghans’ funds at this link.)

These more than $10 billion, were they deposited in a fund under sovereign Afghan control, could be used to build hospitals, administer the COVID-19 vaccine; begin emergency food and water distribution; make down payments on dams and water management projects; build power stations, etc. Immediate building in Afghanistan must start.

Support Grows to Develop Fusion Energy

April 16, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Economic development updates, General updates, Power & Energy

Support Grows for Developing Fusion Energy

Apr. 15 (EIRNS)–The National Academy of Sciences is holding a seminar on April 20 to familiarize people with the results of a recent Academy report on fusion. The report–“Bringing Fusion to the U.S. Grid,” breaks away from the endless march of reports recommending more decades of studying plasmas, to broadening the federally-funded fusion programs to work toward the goal of building a pilot plant by the 2040s. Although the timetable is unnecessarily long, due partly to the expectation that funding levels will not allow a faster pace, it is the most prestigious call for a fusion energy program, rather than a pure science program. Members of the Academy panel that produced the report will lead the briefing.

Last September the House passed the Clean Energy and Jobs Innovation Act. (it is an Authorization bill, so it does not appropriate funds. It is a policy document) The bill contains an “Alternatives and Enabling Concepts” for fusion, to support non-tokamak experiments. There were promising approaches that were shut down and funding cut off starting in the 1980. One of the aims of adding an additional $170 million in funding to the fusion portfolio, is ‘to support the development of a U.S-based fusion power industry developing.

The increased interest in fusion has largely being driven by the next generation of fusion scientists; young people in university programs or in their own laboratories. One young man expressed it this way: “People don’t get into this career just to study the science that one day, long after they’re dead, lead to a fusion reactor. They want to get going and change the world.”

EU Gas Shortage: What About the Netherlands?

October 24, 2021by madeleine in Finance, Green New Deal, Power & Energy

Brussels is blaming Putin for causing gas shortage in the EU. As ridiculous as this can be, the established media and politicians trumpet this lie around. But nobody mentions that the Netherlands, once a major provider of gas to Europe, is curbing its production right now.

The Dutch government had decided to shut down the Groningen gas field, because of fear of earthquakes, and began to wind it down last year. Earlier this month, Dutch Home Affairs Minister Kajsa and Economic Affairs Minister Stef Blok said that the government will not increase natural gas production from the Groningen fields to head off the impact of soaring gas prices. The gas taps will only be turned on again if there are very cold winters, not for price rises, the ministers said.

If reactivated fully in an emergency, Groningen could alleviate the scarcity. It delivered 88 billion cubic meters at its peak in 1976 and above 30 billion cubic meters just five years ago. Natural gas production in the Netherlands has been falling in recent years, and in 2020 totaled 20 billion cubic meters. This was the lowest production of natural gas in the Netherlands since the turn of the century.

Gas consumption in the EU amounted to 521 billion cubic meters in 2019, and it dropped to 380 cubic meters in 2020, due to lockdowns. As demand resumed this year, and Gazprom increased its supply, the Dutch could help fill the gap. But maybe the Dutch government wants to let “creative destruction” get its way…

Rosatom Launches `Atoms for Humanity’

April 29, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Economic development updates, General updates, Power & Energy, Russia

April 28 (EIRNS) — According to Nuclear Engineering International, this “global nuclear awareness” initiative by Rosatom will be launched April 30. The theme is that modern nuclear technology is clean and reliable, but is much more than green electricity. It is a versatile tool to solve the most urgent challenges.

“Rosatom believes that it is high time to put a human at the center of nuclear debate. The Atoms for Humanity is a unique collection of stories capturing ordinary people from all over the world sharing how nuclear transforms their lives and helps fulfil dreams, both big and small,” the agency said in a release.

The project launch event, “Why Humanity Needs Nuclear”, will take place on 30 April. Kirsty Gogan, an internationally sought-after expert with over 15 years in advising the government on climate and energy, will host the discussion. Other speakers include Rosatom and World Nuclear Association executives, environmental experts, and “heroes of Atoms for Humanity documentaries”.

Tri-Alpha Energy Claims Plasma Breakthrough, Stabilizes With Higher Temperature

April 13, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Economic development updates, General, General updates, Power & Energy

Tri-Alpha Energy Claims Plasma Breakthrough, Stabilizes With Higher Temperature

April 12 (EIRNS) – Many privately-funded fusion power experimenters are making noted progress in the absence of much government support to U.S. fusion R&D; one of them said in an April 8 release that it had been able to produce stable plasma at temperatures over 50 million degrees. As techcrunch.com reported, the company “sees commercialization by 2030” as a result. This is an experimental reversed-field fusion device operated by Tri-Alpha Energy, also called TAE Technologies.
Leaving the commercialization claim aside, this report is of something highly unusual in the history of fusion research: A superhot plasma which becomes more stable, easier to confine, at higher energies and temperatures. To quote from techcrunch.com: “`This is an incredibly rewarding milestone and an apt tribute to the vision of my late mentor, Norman Rostoker,’ said TAE’s current chief executive officer, Michl Binderbauer, in a statement announcing the company’s achievement. `Norman and I wrote a paper in the 1990s theorizing that a certain plasma dominated by highly energetic particles [perhaps a hydrogen-boron plasma—ed.] should become increasingly better confined and stable as temperatures increase. We have now been able to demonstrate this plasma behavior with overwhelming evidence. It is a powerful validation of our work over the last three decades, and a very critical milestone for TAE that proves the laws of physics are on our side.”
“Self-stabilizing plasmas” were goals that the Fusion Energy Foundation, during the 1970s and 1980s, consistently described and urged fusion researchers to be striving for. {The article is linked here.}

Fusion: Successful Test in Superconducting Magnetic Confinement by ENI

September 10, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Economic development updates, General updates, Power & Energy

Fusion: Successful Test in Superconducting Magnetic Confinement by ENI—

Sept. 8, 2021 (EIRNS) — Italian energy company ENI announced a successful test in fusion magnetic confinement through high-temperature superconducting technology. The test was accomplished by CFS (Commonwealth Fusion Systems), a spin-off company of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, established in 2018, of which ENI is a shareholder.
            A statement on ENI’s webpage says that “CFS has successfully completed the test aiming to demonstrate the operation of the innovative magnet for plasma fusion confinement, for the first time made with HTS (High Temperature Superconductor) technology.
            “The test concerned the superconducting technologies and it showed the possibility of maintaining the magnet in the superconducting regime with a high stability of all the fundamental parameters for its use in a fusion power plant. The innovation will contribute to a significant reduction in plant costs, ignition and maintenance energy of the fusion process and in the general system complexity, nearing the time and reducing the effort to build a demonstration plant that will produce more energy than that required to maintain the fusion process (net energy production plant). This will subsequently allow constructing and conveniently deploying power plants throughout the world, connecting them to the electricity grid without expensive custom-made generation and transport infrastructures.
            “On the basis of this important achievement, CFS confirms its roadmap and intends to build the first experimental device with net energy production named SPARC by 2025, followed by the first demonstration plant, known as ARC , that could start feeding energy into the grid over the next decade, according to schedule.
            “SPARC will be built by assembling a total of 18 identical HTS magnet coils (similar to the one tested), in a toroidal configuration (a doughnut shape named “tokamak”) to generate a magnetic field with the strength and stability necessary to contain a plasma of hydrogen isotopes at temperatures of around 100 million degrees, at which the fusion of atomic nuclei can occur with the release of a very high quantity of energy.”

Hunger, Sanitation, COVID–Top Concerns in Haiti

September 3, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Agriculture, COVID-19, Economic development updates, General updates, Global Diplomacy, Haiti, Healthcare, Healthcare, Power & Energy, The Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites

Sept. 1 (EIRNS)—A focus of humanitarian aid to Haiti right now is to get food, water, tarps, tents and medical supplies into those remote rural areas in the mountainous Southern peninsula, only accessible by helicopter. Partnering with USAID or with other Haitian or foreign charities, eight military aircraft from the U.S. Southern Command are carrying supplies to these small communities to meet their immediate needs and stock them with supplies to face the months ahead. Multiple trips are made daily from the Port-au-Prince airport. Residents of these communities have lost everything– crops, livestock and even the ability to leave, as roads have been destroyed by the earthquake or mudslides caused by Tropical Storm Grace.

Food is urgently needed. According to the World Food Program, in the three most severely-affected departments, Sud, Grand’Anse and Nippes, the number of people in need of urgent food assistance has increased by one-third since the quake, from 138,000 to 215,000. A year ago, the UN had warned that 4.4 million Haitians (42% of the population) faced acute food insecurity; and the country ranked 104th out of 107 on the Global Hunger Index. Now, Lola Castro, WFP’s regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean, said in a statement that “the earthquake rattled people who were already struggling to feed their families. The compound effects of multiple crises are devastating communities in the south faced with some of the highest levels of food insecurity in the country,” News Americas reported her saying Aug. 30.

The WFP is committed to providing food, shelter and medical aid to 215,000 people in the three southern departments—although the need extends well beyond those three. The UN’s Office of the Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has launched an appeal for $187.3 million in order to reach 500,000 affected people, although the agency’s Aug. 31 report indicated that at least 650,000 are in need of emergency humanitarian assistance. The World Bank’s sustainable development and infrastructure program did an initial damage assessment of $1 billion but this is expected to increase with more extensive assessments.

In its Aug. 31 report, OCHA also pointed to the growing risk of a major COVID-19 outbreak. Such preventative measures as mask wearing and social distancing are “compromised due to the current operational context,” OCHA notes, adding that less than 1% of Haiti’s 11 million inhabitants has been vaccinated. Nor are there vaccines! The country has received only 500,000 doses through the COVAX facility. PPE is scarce. Poverty, poor sanitation, lack of clean water and the fact that people are gathering in close quarters seeking food assistance and shelter are all risk factors. Argentina’s Telam news agency quoted OCHA warning that the possibility of “new and more contagious and dangerous variants reaching the island is particularly worrisome during the weeks and months following the earthquake as the country’s healthcare system lacks the ability to respond to a COVID outbreak.” Detailed OCHA fact sheet is here.

UN Agencies Warn That Conditions Do Not Exist to Repatriate Haitians

October 2, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Agriculture, Economic development updates, General updates, Global Diplomacy, Haiti, Healthcare, Power & Energy, The Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites

Oct. 1 (EIRNS)–As Mexico began sending some Haitian migrants back to Haiti, and demands grow in other countries in the region to do the same (e.g. by a senior Bahamas Royal Defense Force official, who cited U.S. repatriation as a model), four United Nations agencies—the International Organization for Migration, and the UN Refugee Agency, Children’s Fund, and Human Rights Office—issued a joint statement on Thursday warning that “conditions in Haiti continue to be dire, and not conducive to forced returns.”
            The statement reminds governments that “international law prohibits collective expulsions and requires that each case be examined individually to identify protection needs under international human rights and refugee law.” And that “discriminatory public discourse portraying human mobility as a problem, risks contributing to racism and xenophobia and should be avoided and condemned.”
            Various official statistics on poverty and violence in Haiti are cited, such as that “some 4.4 million people, or nearly 46% of the population, face acute food insecurity, including 1.2 million people who are in emergency levels and 3.2 million people at crisis level.” The effects of the August 14 earthquake are already “straining any [national] capacity to receive returning Haitians,” they note.
            They call on governments to “uphold the fundamental human rights of Haitians on the move,” but like the more-humane governments in the region, the UN agencies limit the scope of what they are proposing to remedy this horrendous situation, to calls for regional cooperation on managing this crisis, and offering protection mechanisms or other legal stay arrangements for more effective access to regular migration pathways.”

Missing is the only action which can eliminate the cause of this and similar migration crises: eradicating the conditions of utter misery, drug-trafficking and violence created by the failed free trade, liberal monetarist system which make life unlivable for millions in many countries.

South Africans ‘Stand Up for Nuclear’ at Annual Rallies

October 2, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Economic development updates, General updates, Global Diplomacy, Green New Deal, Power & Energy, So. Africa

Sept. 30 (EIRNS)—Despite the green psychosis that has overtaken South Africa, more than 400 South Africans participated in the annual “Stand Up for Nuclear” events on Sept. 18 in Pretoria and Cape Town, and at the proposed nuclear site, Thyspunt.

Despite demands from the international bankers that coal be abandoned—even while South Africa is overwhelmingly dependent on coal for generating electricity—South African public opinion about nuclear energy is still ambivalent, at best. “Stand Up for Nuclear South Africa” and related efforts intend to change that.

Participants in the Sept. 18 events included nuclear industry professionals, politicians, educators, and students.

The main event was a three-mile walk across the township of Atteridgeville in Pretoria to the Phatudi Comprehensive School, where Zizamele Mbambo, Deputy Director General of Nuclear in the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy, gave the keynote address.

On the streets, the activists—equipped with loudspeakers, banners and posters—demanded that government include nuclear in the green finance taxonomy. They engaged the surrounding communities on the merits of nuclear energy, including its huge potential to end load-shedding (power shut-offs, now 25% of the time) and reduce the cost of electricity.

The coordinator for Stand Up for Nuclear South Africa, Princess Mthombeni, told Executive Intelligence Review that “we are planning other initiatives such as the upcoming energy debate, as well as outreach programs that aim to engage communities and other stakeholders such as trade unions.”

Stand Up For Nuclear SA is a program of trade union NEHAWU’s Professionals Technical Committee, in collaboration with other organizations including South African Young Nuclear Professionals Society and Women in Nuclear South Africa. NEHAWU is the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union.

Stand Up for Nuclear is also held annually in more than 80 cities around the world, including New York, Seattle, Paris, and London; the number is growing. The South African organizers say that it has been led since 2016 by Environmental Progress, an American environmental movement led by Michael Schellenberger, to inform societies about the harmful effects of the indiscriminate expansion of renewable energy and the necessity of nuclear power.

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