A Warning to Russia About LENR [Updated]

Many thanks to ECW reader Veblin for posting an interesting article in the Alway Open thread. It comes from a Russian language news website, Svodka.net, and is titled (Google translated) “How tricolor race wakes new energy revolution – LENR“. The piece is addressed to Russian President Vladimir Putin (no author is listed), and it’s tone is one almost of rejoicing that the era of Russian dominance due to its oil and gas wealth is coming to an end. It’s quite a long piece, and not always clear due to the computer translation, but the gist is not hard to determine. Here are some excerpts:

“Revolution in nuclear energy – low energy nuclear reactions (LENR). Her success in the world means almost total disruption of oil and gas, primitive economy of the Russian Federation, and you can successfully built. This means not only the end of the power of your group, but the end of the Russian Federation in its present form. With the most unpredictable (but sad) for Russian consequences. . .

“The rapid development of this area means:

“- A sharp drop in global demand for uranium, plutonium, thorium, oil and natural gas as a source of heat and electricity for urban, industrial and rural areas. . .

“- All accelerating the transition to new energy vehicles, railways, navy (civil and marine), military equipment. Hydrocarbon fuel will retain its value for Aviation and Astronautics (kerosene) and old vehicles, the number of the latter would be to decrease rapidly. Come era of electric vehicles – they become profitable and cheap. . .

“- New energy allows you to quickly solve the important problem – cheap and abundant energy for robots, robotics.

“- All this will cause accelerating decline in prices for oil and natural gas, stop (no longer needed) “shale revolution” will cause an excess supply of hydrocarbons to the world market. Although they retain their value as a source of raw materials for the chemical industry, but the price of oil and gas will fall as well as once fell spices and charcoal.

“- Starts ruin the nuclear industry of the old type, falling prices for uranium, thorium, and plutonium. . .

“You can say that the discovery of Pons and Fleischmann were detained at a quarter century. What they did and Rossi, as you can compare with the opening in February 1939 of uranium fission Fishem and Meitner (Germany), and with the launch of the first nuclear reactor in Chicago Comstock in 1942.”

I haven’t been able to get too much information about the website. It doesn’t seem to be a very widely read publicaiton — the Alexa Rank is about 200,000 (about the same as ECW), so this article may not get much attention in the Russian speaking world. The subtitle is “Ukraine News and World”, so maybe it’s a Ukraine-based Russian language publication.

I know there are divided allegiances within Ukraine — some want closer ties with the EU, while others feel closer to Russia — but the country been at the mercy of Russia for a long time for fuel supplies. I am sure many Ukrainians would be delighted if they were able to have energy independence, and there fore LENR could be very attractive for them.

The author admits that we are in the early days of an LENR revolution, and that change will be slow but predicts that eventually dire consequences for the petroleum giant Gazprom, and for Russian federation, and seems to be happy about it. Whether LENR is going to have all the predicted consequences listed here remains to be seen, but certainly if LENR gets a foothold in energy production, Russia will not be the only petroleum- and nuclear fission-rich nation that will be paying attention and will need to make adjustments for a new reality.

UPDATE: I’m grateful to a Russian ECW reader who provided some useful information here. This article first appeared here, and the author of this article is Maxim Kalashnikov, a Russian blogger of some renown, apparently. Wikipedia describes Kalashnikov as “a Russian patriotic writer, publicist, and political activist”.