The great building task for the industrialized and industrializing nations is clear. Building modern hospital and well-staffed healthcare systems in every nation on Earth will meet such an urgent need to preserve human life—one that cannot be met by any other attack on the pandemic—that it alone deserves the name of an infrastructure platform for the further progress of the human race. And only an agreement among the most technologically advanced and economically developed nations can launch such a global mission, which is no less ambitious than a Moon-Mars mission and necessarily involves the same beneficial effects of technological breakthroughs.
If this task is taken up, as proposed by the Schiller Institute and Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites, 10 MW of new power will be needed to supply every set of hospitals with 1,000 beds, provide a lot of fresh water to them, heat and light the housing for their staff—hundreds of gigawatts of new power, and widely distributed throughout the developing nations in particular. World food production will effectively have to double since “food is health,” to quote Committee leader Dr. Joycelyn Elders. Approximations of Tennessee Valley Authority-scale development projects will evolve from the projects undertaken for the best of disease monitoring, testing and above all modern treatment capacities.
A new nuclear technology platform is waiting to be put in factory production to supply this huge project: small modular nuclear reactors. NuScale, the only company with a prototype approved by regulators thus far, is being offered the cooperation in production it needs by the Canadian firm Prodigy Clean Energy, while other Canadian companies and provinces develop their own small modular reactor (SMR) projects. Prodigy intends to build SMR marine power stations in shipyards. The Danish company Seaborg Technologies plans to fit ships with small nuclear reactors, to send power to countries across the developing sector, and believes it can start providing that power by 2025, according to Neutron Bytes blog May 14. This is a 100 MW molten salt-cooled reactor. NuScale’s target for 60 MW operating reactor modules is 2026. Russia is already capable of producing small floating nuclear reactors.
All the other target dates can be brought forward as soon as the technologically leading nations—China, the United States, Russia in particular—agree to jointly generate credit for the modern health systems to care for pandemic victims.
Standing against this mission for humanity, is the new Malthusianism which wants to sacrifice human life to “the planet” and a myth that human science and technology are impotent and destructive. As made clear already in 2019 in an article in the medical journal The Lancet by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 5 billion people who don’t have modern healthcare can’t have it because “if we do it in a model that has been developed in rich countries, it will break the climate—and we can’t afford that.”
Nor are we, say the Green New Dealers, permitted to double world food production to cope with widespread food insecurity and famine—and food is health. According to the investors’ group FAIRR, “The oil in the ground was being mispriced. It doesn’t have value. It’s obsolete, and therefore it’s stranded. The same is going to happen for agriculture and animal agriculture.”
The same Green New Dealers nonetheless think we should scour the Earth for vast, now unknown supplies of rare and strategic minerals and metals, in order to build billions of completely unneeded electric vehicles over the next three years—and they call their charging stations “infrastructure”!
Scrapping the Green New Deal, we can build a real new infrastructure platform for the world’s people and the economies of nations, as the Schiller Institute proposes to the Global Health Conference in Rome this week.