Just a reminder. Ethanol from cellulose is still a food. Starving people can use ethanol for days at a time to provide a lot of their survival energy requirements. Poisoning this ethanol so that humans can not drink it is the same as grinding corn and mixing it with dirt.

At one point STATOIL was making animal feed out of natural gas it seems. Even if poisoned with methanol, the delivered ethanol could be fed to the micro-organisms that were used to produce "Pruteen" another animal food that was more expensive at first than infected sheep brains. First the Pruteen product failed for lack of a market and then the beef industry failed because of crazy cows and dead people.

In the mid 1900s, an american oil company was experimenting with growing digestible food organisms on oil.

Norway has much Thorium so why deplete the soil of needed energy from cellulostic wastes instead of being the first to operate a quickly installed CANDU reactor on thorium. The reactor can be started with a mix of French reprocessed used light water reactor fuel and thorium oxide and then operated with a mix of its own reprocessed fuel with new thoria added.

A COKE can full of Thorium oxide is all the fuel that is used every day and it produces less than the same weight of radioactive elements. Tell me where is the "big pile" of nuclear wastes! There are more pounds of radioactive elements in many ash piles of coal fired power plants for the same amount of electricity produced.

China is extracting some of its nuclear fuel from these ash piles. They are also using processed used light water fuel combined with "waste" depleted uranium in its CANDU reactors. The used light water fuel has so much energy in it that it has to be diluted with enrichment "waste" "low energy"(depleted in U235) uranium for use in the reactors. A small, mostly automated chemical process could extract most of the fission products add a bit of new thorium, anneal and test the old fuel elements and then refill them with the purefied fuel. The fission product atoms are mostly stable after a few months but some are not but can be separated from most of the others.

The Strontium 90 can be sold to the president of France so that he can drive a very safe nuclear powered car. When the car is not running down the road it can supply power to the grid and heat to the house. Strontium 90 from the French reactors will also be needed for other officials. The CANDU reactor will produce about 100 pounds of strontium 90 a year. And this should be used immediatly because its power decreases to half in 28 years.

Sr90 can be used in small submarines and submersibles without the shielding and controls needed for reactors. Less than an inch thick of lead or two inches of steel is needed for shielding. It is not quite as convenient as isotope 238 that has a half life of 88 years and requires less shielding. The heat can be used to drive a stirling engine through heat pipes with an efficiency better than most automobile engine averages.

Isotope 238 or Sr90 can be used to build continuously flying small aircraft, mostly unmanned,.

At the very least, the Sr90 can be installed in not very deep holes beneath public buildings to supply a small amount of artificial geothermal energy which can also produce a very small amount of emergency electricity in addition to heat to heat water and the building. ..HG..