Trump Admin Finalizes Plan to Open Up Drilling on the Alaska Wildlife Refuge
The Trump administration has finalized a plan to open up the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge to drilling.
According to The Hill:
The Trump administration announced Monday it would open up 1.5 million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil and gas drilling.
AdvertisementA document signed by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt would open up the entire 1.56 million-acre area of the refuge’s Coastal Plain. The whole refuge is 19.3 million acres.
The administration argues the decision will lead to jobs, but green groups and opponents for years have warned of a devastating environmental effect from opening up the area to drilling.
“Over the course of this oil and gas program, it could create thousands of new jobs and generate tens of billions of dollars,” Interior Secretary David Bernhardt told reporters.
Critics are livid over the potential impacts the oil exploration and eventual infrastructure will have on local wildlife.
What do you think about the administration’s plan to open up oil exploration in the refuge? Tell us in the comments below!
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Excellent. We need the jobs and with the current state of drilling technologies, the risk will be minimal. Let the tree huggers bark up another tree.
Excellent job Mr. President.
It’s about time, better to keep the jobs and revenue here in the US, so we are less dependent on middle east oil. Most drilling technology today needs a small footprint as opposed to mining for copper, lithium, which require mass amounts of energy for the entire energy lifecycle. Solar panels, are messy and the sludge to make them ends up in the rivers in china as water pollution. wind turbine blades only have a lifecycle of 20-30 years then you have to bury them, not to mention they slice and dice eagles, hawks, and other raptors that are on the endangered species list.
What do I have to say?
#DRILLBABYDRILL !!
Eventually electric vehicles will be great, but people have too much invested in our current fossil fuel vehicles to discard them until they wear out. Also, all the oil and gas produced in the USA denies our enemies funding for their wars against us. Unfortunately the so called Environmentalists know very little about Science.
President Trump and all US citizens need to know that Obama gave China some of the USA’s Nuclear Technology in 2010 and ordered Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to work with them to develop it. China controls the Earth’s supply of Rare Earth Elements (REE) which are required to manufacture most of the most important 21st century technology that we have developed. The USA did lead the world in REE production until the EPA made it too expensive to mine and refine REEs here because of the radioactive thorium and uranium that are associated with it. China has been dumping this radioactive material in Mongolia for many years. However Alvin Weinberg at ORNL developed and tested from 1965 until 1969 a meltdown proof molten salt cooled Breeder Reactor (MSR) that could use 100% of all thorium and uranium as fuel. Unfortunately our foolish politicians stopped funding the development of the MSR very likely because they only wanted Uranium 235 (U-235) fueled reactors that could breed U-238 into plutonium 239 (Pu-239) for nuclear weapons. Weinberg wanted to use the less expensive and 3 times more abundant thorium to breed into fissile U-233, which is much more difficult to use in bombs, to produce Peaceful Power in the MSR. Actually the MSR could breed either fertile U-238 into fissile Pu-239 or fertile Th-232 into fissile U-233, but our politicians were not interested in peaceful solutions during the Cold War.
Now our scientists at ORNL have always thought the MSR was the Nuclear Reactor we should have been using because it can use 100% of the thorium and 100% of the uranium found in nature for fuel. The Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR)s we use today to produce electricity cannot breed additional fuel and can only use the U-235 uranium isotope for fuel and only .7% of uranium is U-235. Coal ash has long been known to be radioactive so ORNL did a study of it in 1987 and found that there is enough thorium and uranium in the ash when used to fuel their MSR to produce eighteen times the energy produced by burning the coal. The study also found that coal ash contains large amounts of REES, aluminum, and other strategically important chemicals which we depend on China and other countries for.
Our EPA claims that waste from nuclear power plants and coal ash are huge problems. The Democratic Socialist Party wants to fight Global Warming and stop burning fossil fuels. President Trump wants to create more jobs, employ everyone in Coal Country, and compete with China. The answer should be obvious. The MSR can use all our nuclear waste and coal ash as a source for fuel. The coal miners can start cleaning up all of the coal ash and produce strategically important materials from it. We can compete with the Chinese and would not depend on them for anything. The MSRs are much safer and smaller than PWRs and do not require any cooling towers. They could be inexpensively mass produced and 250 MSRs could produce 50% of all our electric power 24/7. The Democratic Socialist Environmentalist Solution would require half a million gigantic wind turbines, enough solar power farms to cover a small state, and would be incredibly expensive. You can google “MIT ORNL China MSR” to see if the Chinese are going to use this gift from Obama.
The only real problem with using the MSR to dispose of our nuclear waste is that while it could use all of the fertile and fissile uranium and plutonium in our so called spent fuel rods, doing that would require using MSRs to provide 100% of our electic power for a few hundred years. I doubt that Alvin Weinberg considered we would continue making the same stupid mistakes for so long when he designed the MSR. Just how much is that technology worth?
Electric vehicles???? Batteries are expensive and use scarce material unless you are talking about lead acid batteries. Even those are horrible on the environment. Just like windmills when the government no longer subsidies them, no more windmills or electric cars. Wake up people.
Awesome idea.
Open it up, the environment is self healing and will do fine under existing guide lines
Eventually, there will be a technology to replace fossil fuels but, until then – Drill baby drill!
Well, the oil pipeline in Alaska didn’t harm wildlife like the enviros said it would. Plus not a peep out of the so called environmentalists and the Audubon Society about the thousands of endangered birds and bats that the wind generators are killing every year. It’s time that they shut up and start living up to their own standards.
Ah. Small wonder the eco freaks are making chocolate in their drawers.
the wild life will adapt to the Few Drilling rigs and pipelines in the area. if they can adapt to Millions of miles of Highways and cities being built in their environment then a few oil rigs and pipes won’t bother in in the least. Tree Huggers need to get a life and leave everyone alone. they don’t have the Brains topour water out of a leaky Boot
With the instructions written on the bottom of the heel.
The area targeted for drilling is on mud flats (not the pristine forest we are always shown) and is only 70 nmiles from the existing pipe line. Remember when the current pipe line was supposed to be a disaster?
Now the caribou use it for warmth!
Since every prediction the enviroleft has ever made has proven false, should we anticipate a benefit for the wildlife like the population increase of caribou after the Alaska pipeline was completed, but they don’t like to talk about their failures.