A Reactor Designed to Burn Through It's Core: Design of a "CANDLE" Nuclear Reactor.

[NNadir]

The paper I'll discuss in this post is this one: Design concepts of small CANDLE reactor with melt-refining process (Obara et al Progress in Nuclear Energy Volume 108, September 2018, Pages 233-242).

Recently in this space, I posted a paper about the properties of molten uranium oxide, including a picture of an unfortunate example of a result of the actual macroscopic formation of that fluid, the "Elephant's Foot" (molten uranium oxide mixed with structural reactor materials) that solidified, upon cooling, inside the core of the Chernobyl reactor that blew up in 1986.

The Structure of Molten Uranium Dioxide.

In the last few weeks, a robot made it to the debris pile formed in unit 2 of the Fukushima Daiichi reactor which was destroyed by an tsunami in 2011. The tsunami killed about 20,000 people, very few of whom, if any, were killed by radiation - there may be a few who were, one has been reported at such - with the bulk of the 20,000 being killed by seawater, not that anyone is calling for the phase out of coastal cities as a result.

Tepco makes contact with melted fuel in unit 2

A video of the robot manipulating the damaged fuel is available on the internet.



What I personally learned from these two events, the event at Chernobyl and the events at Fukushima is that the worst cases for nuclear reactor failures were less onerous that the best case for the normal operations of dangerous fossil fuel and dangerous "renewable" biomass combustion since wastes from these two forms energy kill more than 7 million people per year even if no accidents occur.

The rest of the world may have drawn a different conclusion than mine, choosing to destroy the planet as a whole with climate change, irrespective of the 56 million people who died from air pollution since the melt down of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plants following a tsunami that killed 20,000 with seawater.

Worldwide, it has also been popular to allow ignorant and foolish people to lead countries whose importance to climate can not be overstated, Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and in countries that will suffer greatly from climate change, Rodrigo Duterte in the Phillipines, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey.

Nevertheless, in the popular imagination it is popular to believe that what is popular is good.

Many years ago, for business purposes, I bought a new car, a Mercury Sable, which was an upgraded "luxury" version of the (then) "best selling car in the world," the Ford Taurus. It was the worst car I ever owned. After 50,000 miles, I could no longer drive with clients in the car because everything was broken, and I do mean everything, the seats, the electric windows, the air conditioning. Even the rear view mirror had fallen off. The engine blew well before 80,000 miles, despite the fact that the car was well maintained.

Cars, by the way, suck, but in the popular imagination in this country, no one can imagine that we can live without them, even though car accidents kill way more, vastly more, people than nuclear accidents.

The "best selling idea" in energy, by the way, is the dubious and frankly, ignorant, conclusion that so called "renewable energy" is the best way to address climate change.

Renewable energy has not done anything significant to reverse climate change, it is not doing anything significant to address climate change, and it will not do anything significant to address climate change.

The reason is physics.

Here is the data as of this morning, after the expenditure of trillions of dollars on this planet on wind and solar energy in this century alone, from the Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory showing the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere:

Week beginning on February 10, 2019: 412.41 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 408.55 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 387.17 ppm
Last updated: February 17, 2019

Don't worry, be happy. We're selling lots of electric cars these days, worldwide.

The increase registered for the week beginning on February 10, 2019 over the same week of February 2018 is one of 2245 such readings recorded since 1975 at the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory. The value, 3.86 ppm over last year, is the 26th worst of all time, placing it in the 98.9th percentile for worst ever.

Again. Don't worry. Be happy. Solar City. Elon Musk. Tesla car. Space X.

Irrespective of the popular fascination with Chernobyl and Fukushima, which generates the extremely stupid but popular claim that "nuclear energy is too dangerous," without asking the question "compared to what?" first, my own interest in these incursions into the melted fuel at Fukushima and Chernobyl is concerned with what these materials can tell us about the behavior of nuclear fuel at very high temperatures.

The Fukushima robot did not bring a sample of fuel out of the core, but ultimately it will, since much of the fuel seems to be gelatinous or powdery as shown in the video. We know, of course, that the fuel released considerable amounts of the volatile elements cesium and iodine, but it would be useful to understand the chemical state and elemental distributions of the fuel itself, generated under real failure conditions.

The reason this is interesting to me is that I have convinced myself that it absolutely necessary - if we ever become interested in practical approaches to addressing climate change - that very high temperature nuclear fuels be utilized to remediate the ongoing climate catastrophe which is getting worse, not better.

All the things I have thought about nuclear energy will die with me soon enough. Last night however, my wife and I had the pleasure of traveling to my 19 year old son’s university - we needed to go over some paperwork - and having dinner with him. He is much smarter than I will ever be or ever have been, but, as I have lived longer and thus currently have seen and read more, and thus I have more information despite being of lower native intelligence, I gave a little lecture on neutrons over lemon meringue pie, capture cross sections, scattering cross sections, Breit-Wigner resonances, blah, blah, blah...since right now I know more about neutrons than he does.

My son will work with neutron fluxes this summer at a national laboratory, and when he comes back from his internship, he'll know more about neutrons than I ever will, I expect. This knowledge will give him the tools to help his generation recover from what my generation has done to his, which is to steal from them the stability of the entire planet.

I'm not particularly concerned with dying with all my best ideas, since I've had the happy circumstance of learning that very few of my ideas prove to be actually original. My fondness for breed and burn nuclear reactors based around molten metallic plutonium eutectic fuels is a little different in that tiny fraction of the nuclear engineering literature I've accessed, but good ideas, even great ideas have a way of surfacing independently of particular individuals. This was true even of Issac Newton. Calculus was discovered independently of Newton's discovery by Leibnitz, because the time to discover calculus had arrived in Europe.

I'm very lucky too, in that I have a son who can easily grasp any technical thing I say. I email him scientific papers of interest, and sometimes he actually reads them. Anything of value I have to say, will be all that lives of me, in him and his brother, after they dispose of my dead body. Of course, he's not me and will have his own ideas. He's better than me; which is in my view what a father should want, children who are better than he is. I'll die happy, I think.

All this brings me to the paper I evoked at the outset of this post.

One of the prominent researchers in the concept of "breed and burn" nuclear reactors is the Japanese scientist Hiroshi Sekimoto.

He wrote a marvelous little book about his ideas, and I've had the pleasure of leafing through it. You can too, if you want. The whole book is now available on the internet; I just downloaded the whole thing in a few seconds to replace my scanned copy:

Light a CANDLE: An Innovative Burnup Strategy of Nuclear Reactors

Light a candle...

We live in such dark times, environmentally dark times. History, I think, will not forgive us, nor should it.

And now, the paper evoked at the beginning of this post. The introductory paragraph:

The CANDLE (Constant Axial shape of Neutron flux, nuclide densities and power shape During Life of Energy production) burnup concept was first proposed by (Sekimoto et al., 2001). In a CANDLE reactor, the constant shapes of neutron flux, nuclide number densities and power density distributions shift in the axial direction. The CANDLE reactor core can be divided into roughly three regions: the breeding region composed of fresh fuel, the burning region which produces the main portion of power in the core, and the spent fuel region containing fission products. During operation, the main portion of the neutrons and energy are produced by fission of the fissile materials in the burning region. In the front side of the burning region, the fertile materials absorb leaked neutrons from the burning region to transmute into fissile materials. Therefore, the distribution of fissile materials shifts to the burning region. The spent fuel region is the region left behind by the burning region, composed mainly of fission products and depleted fuel. In this way, the burning region moves along the core axis.

The advantages of this reactor are summarized in the following paragraphs of the paper. Among these, the most important listed to my mind is that the reactor can operate for decades without refueling - the length of time it does so being controlled by the height of the core - and that it can burn either depleted uranium - now considered by people who don't know very much to be "nuclear waste" - or natural uranium without any enrichment. Another advantage is that since the fuel is not fissionable without a "spark" - I'd use plutonium for this purpose - the risk of a criticality accident does not exist.

With a "breed and burn" approach, it is technologically feasible that the uranium already mined, along with the thorium already mined and dumped as a side product of lanthanide mining to make things like stupid electric cars and useless wind turbines, might allow for the cloture of every coal mine, every natural gas well, every oil well on the planet.

Here is a segment of the text that addresses the problem of what to do with the used nuclear fuel after the nuclear reaction have burned through the core, which ultimately it will do. In this case the fuel is clad, as is the case of existing reactors, although I imagine cases were cladding is not so much an issue as are fluid barriers.

A CANDLE reactor can achieve 40% burnup of spent fuel without reprocessing and enrichment (Sekimoto et al., 2001). To realize a longlife CANDLE core, it is important to maintain fuel cladding integrity under ?40% burnup (Sekimoto, 2010). Several solutions to overcome this challenge have been proposed. The first is the recladding method, investigated by (Nagata and Sekimoto, 2007). In this method, fuels in the process of burning are removed from the core, gaseous fission products are also removed from these fuels, and the fuels are recladded. Then, they are reloaded into their previous position in the core. The effects of recladding in this method were small; the shape of each burnup distribution was almost the same, and burnup was increased by 1%. Another solution to maintain fuel cladding integrity is to apply the melt-refining process introduced by (Abdul Karim et al., 2016), (2017).

It would be an interesting and better world if dangerous fossil fuel companies were compelled to imagine what to do with their fuel after it's burned, but they aren't. With the practical acquiesce of everybody on earth - the popular approach while we wait for the grand "renewable energy" nirvana that never came, is not here, and will not come - they simply dump their fuel into the planetary atmosphere, where it impacts every man, woman and child on the planet, and will impact every man, woman and child for many centuries (unless future generations have the resources to clean up our mess) and in fact, every living thing on the planet, now and in the future.

From the text:

A CANDLE reactor can achieve 40% burnup of spent fuel without reprocessing and enrichment (Sekimoto et al., 2001). To realize a longlife CANDLE core, it is important to maintain fuel cladding integrity under ?40% burnup (Sekimoto, 2010). Several solutions to overcome this challenge have been proposed. The first is the recladding method, investigated by (Nagata and Sekimoto, 2007). In this method, fuels in the process of burning are removed from the core, gaseous fission products are also removed from these fuels, and the fuels are recladded. Then, they are reloaded into their previous position in the core. The effects of recladding in this method were small; the shape of each burnup distribution was almost the same, and burnup was increased by 1%. Another solution to maintain fuel cladding integrity is to apply the melt-refining process introduced by (Abdul Karim et al., 2016), (2017)...

I have not accessed the Abdul Karim references yet but will.

They are here:

Application of melt and refining procedures in the CANDLE reactor concept (Julia Abdul Karim et al Annals of Nuclear Energy Volume 90, April 2016, Pages 275-283)


Effects of cooling interval time in melt and refining process for CANDLE burning (Julia Abdul Karim et al Annals of Nuclear Energy Volume 105, July 2017, Pages 144-149)

I love the PI's name, Julia Abdul Karim, another person engaged in saving the world.

I have had a lot of exposure to concepts in pyroprocessing over the years, and am quite fond of it, although truth be told, I'm rather fond of pyroprocessing techniques that are truly in process, that is, while the nuclear fuel is being consumed, employing the interesting and useful stuff we found out by accident from the events at Chernobyl and Fukushima, albeit in a way with negative consequences.

I've also come up with some concepts in reprocessing existing used nuclear fuel that I think might be novel - at least I haven't found such an approach mentioned in the literature as yet - that has some features of pyroprocessing but strictly isn't. I'll tell my son about them someday, after he has time to divert himself from things like his technical problem de jour, a homework assignment on property fluxes in matter and heat transfer in a chemical reactor for which the mathematics - integration of gradient expressions - is giving him a confusing result.

He's smarter than I am. It will work out.

I hope the next generation, for whom I have great hope, will all prove smarter than we have been. (For God's sake, we have a useless and ignorant criminal parasite in the White House, and we allowed this to happen. The orange nightmare is the reification of the intellect and attention of my generation.)

We also allowed climate change to happen, by the injudicious use of selective attention, the same kind of selective attention that results in focus on things like Hillary Clinton's email server, and, oh yeah, Fukushima and Chernobyl.

Anyway, the text continues:

The melt-refining process was developed in an EBR-II reactor project (Hesson et al., 1963). In this process, fuel pins are decladded, all volatile and gaseous fission products are substantially removed, and at least 95% of the reactive fission products are removed; no separation will occur for noble fission products in the melt-refining (Hesson et al., 1963). They investigated the possibility of introducing this process into a large-scale CANDLE reactor (Abdul Karim et al., 2016), (2017), and were able not only to maintain fuel cladding integrity in the high burnup condition, but also to improve the burnup performance of the large-scale CANDLE reactor. In previous studies (Greenspan and Heidet, 2011), (Heidet and Greenspan, 2012), performed by Ehud Greenspan and Florent Heidet, respectively, the melt-refining process was also applied successfully to large-scale breed and burn reactors to extend the lifetime of the fuel and achieve high burnup. This raises the question of whether it is possible to apply the melt-refining process to a small CANDLE reactor, which generally requires high neutron economy.

The neutron economy problem arises because some fission products have a high neutron capture cross sections, and it is important to remove those that do, even though neutron capture can greatly shorten the half-lives of some radioactive elements, a process that falls under the general rubric of "transmutation of" (so called) "nuclear wastes".

The Candle Reactor proposed here is small, about 1/10th the power output of typical existing commercial pressurized water reactors and/or boiling water reactors that are in common use around the world, saving human lives that would otherwise be lost to air pollution. It's power output is about 300 MW thermal. How this thermal energy might utilized is open: The outlet temperature of the lead bismuth eutectic coolant is said to be 800K, or 523C, temperatures which may prove useful for highly efficient production of electricity via combined cycle schemes, but it too low for advanced thermochemical carbon dioxide or water splitting to make portable chemical fuels and materials.

Some graphics from the paper follow.

This one gives a feel for the core size, which one may compare with the dimensions of say a field of useless greasy steel, aluminum and plastic bird and bat grinders in the sky, which might produce as much power briefly when the wind happens to be blowing, and nothing at all when it isn't. The core of this reactor could fit in the foyer of a McMansion owned by a person who imagines his or her Tesla car might save the world.



The caption:

Fig. 1. Basic axial configuration of the core.

The structure of the cladded fuel and information about heat flows:



The caption:

Fig. 2. Schematic fuel cell layout.

A flow chart of core calculations:



The caption:

Fig. 3. Flowchart of reference core calculation.

The caption:

Fig. 4. Cross-section view of single sub-channel model geometry.

Core temperatures:



The caption:

Fig. 5. Temperature distribution in the axial direction of sub-channel.

The caption:

Fig. 6. Schematic of melt-refining process operation for CANDLE reactor.

The size of fuel zones:




The caption:

Fig. 7. Melt-refining regions in the core.

They used to call Charles DeGualle "deux metres" (two meters) reflecting his height. This core, designed to produce energy more reliably than a field of bat and bird grinders in the sky, this for a period of decades, while producing no dangerous fossil fuel waste, is slightly taller than Charles DeGualle was.

The calculation flow chart for the recycled fuel.



The caption:

Fig. 8. Calculation flow chart of CANDLE reactor with the melt-refining process.

The "burnup" of nuclear fuel is a calculation of the amount of energy that the fuel produces in use, a unit very much like familiar terms like "miles per gallon" or "km per liter," for gasoline. In the following graphic, the unit of burnup for nuclear fuel is the GWd/ton, which is a unit of energy per unit mass and not peak power has is so often, and so misleadingly (mis)used to describe so called "renewable energy" devices. Five hundred GWd is 4.32 X 10^(16) joules, or 42.3 petajoules. A common, but somewhat silly unit of energy that finds its way into the international energy parlance is MTOE, million tons of oil equivalent. It is equal to 42 petajoules. It follows that the burn up of one ton of depleted uranium in this reactor core, a little taller than Charles De Gualle was, is the equivalent of 1.03 million tons of petroleum.

How the environmental advantages here can escape the public imagination is completely incomprehensible to me.

The graphic:




The caption:

Fig. 11. Core averaged burnup distribution.

The consumption of "depleted uranium:"




The caption:

Fig. 13. Core averaged number density distribution of U-238.

The production of plutonium:




The caption:

Fig. 13. Core averaged number density distribution of U-238.

Power density in the core:



The caption:

Fig. 15. Core power density distribution at BOC [W/cm3].

BOC refers to "Beginning of Cycle" where the cycle in question is the fuel cycle.

Whether anyone believes me or not - and I am intimately familiar with the mentality and dogma of anti-nukes, which frankly leaves me ethically appalled - this kind of work is the key to saving the world, which is not to say that we will save the world.

I love to brag about how smart I think my sons are - they are smart - but they are emerging into a world from which much has been stolen.

It is my hope and expectation that my son the engineer will use his mind in the same way that these scientists are, to looking to the practical considerations by which the world might be saved, because, again, if it is saved, approaches like these will do it.

I trust you'll have a pleasant Sunday afternoon for what remains of it, and a lovely evening as well.

[WheelWalker]

1. Thank you very much for the illuminating exposition.

I look forward to your posts.

[NNadir]

2. It's my pleasure. I don't really expect to have that many people...

...who read what I have to say, since I have the distinct feeling that much of what I write is unpleasant, and we live in times when people hear only what they want to hear and not, at least in my view, what they need to hear.

Mostly I write these posts to fix certain ideas in my mind; breed and burn reactors are, I think, the only viable key to addressing climate change, whether anyone believes it or not, and when I see something written about them, I like to pay attention.

I certainly learned a few things reading (and writing about) this paper.

When I do have a reader, I very much appreciate it.

Thanks for reading and for your kind words.

[CentralMass]

3. I do read your posts and think that you are a very intelligent man with some great ideas.

At least the ones that my math and chemistry knowledge can digest

I also admire and respect the pride that you have in your sons. I feel the same way about my daughters.

I am not anti-nuclear, if it can be done safely, however I see alternative renewable energy sources as an important part of our future. There was a study done on the potential kinetic energy in the the offshore wind of the eastern seaboard of the United States that showed that, if tapped. it could produce as much electrical power as all the power plants in the U.S. combined. Solar and onshire wind provide many opportunities as well.

[NNadir]

4. Thank you, but the wind industry is neither sustainable...

...nor is it environmentally acceptable.

The fondness for it is tragic beyond words.

There are many reasons why offshore wind is even worse than on shore wind energy.

It's 2019. We're at 412 ppm CO2.

I've been hearing the conditional verb "could" about wind energy for at least 30 years.

It has never, despite incredibly constant and loud cheering, produced in a single year 1/10th as much energy as nuclear energy has been consistently been producing for the last 30 years despite endless specious vilification.

There are not and never will be any energy technologies that can match nuclear energy for sustainability. If any other technology were required to meet the standards people routinely attach to nuclear energy, this arbitrarily, they simply would cease to exist.

[CentralMass]

5. Well, Great Britain currently produces 18% of their electrical demand from wind.

Last edited Tue Feb 19, 2019, 05:25 PM - Edit history (1)

Yes, off shore wind farm are more costly to develop but the technology is improving, knowledge growing.

There is a lot of promising developments in windpower going on.

Texas is producing 17% of its electricity from wind.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/texas-got-18-percent-of-its-energy-from-wind-and-solar-last-year/
"Last year, Texas generated 18 percent of its energy from wind and solar — with wind providing the vast majority of total renewable generation. The 18 percent number matters because for years critics of renewable energy have argued that grid costs and reliability will spiral out of control before we hit 20 percent wind and solar. But in Texas, retail electricity prices have actually decreased, coming in well below the U.S. average."

Iowa produces 36% of its electricity from wind

https://www.windpowerengineering.com/business-news-projects/iowa-hints-at-how-it-became-a-nation-leading-wind-power-house/
It is also creating jobs.
"Nearly 9,000 Iowans are employed by wind power equipment makers, and thousands of other construction and technical jobs are created when new wind farms are built. Circling back on workforce development, numerous Iowa community colleges provide programs that facilitate the training needs of wind energy companies. Iowa Lakes Community College’s program was the first of its kind in the nation."

[John ONeill]

6. Wind

Wind might on average produce twenty or thirty percent of the power in Texas, the United Kingdom, or Iowa, but that average includes long periods in which it does almost nothing. For example, Iowa is part of the Miso, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, which pools power production from Manitoba right down to Louisiana. Today wind power at times got up to 15% of the power provided there, over 60% of the nameplate capacity of the available wind farms, but for much of the day, wind was only one or two percent. There will always be such lulls, even if, as is often proposed, power could be seemlessly shunted to and from anywhere in the continent. During those lulls, coal and gas are burnt instead.
Here are links to the power production, and also the associated CO2 emissions, of the Miso area, and also of Ontario, which gets much of its power from nuclear reactors. As you can see, emissions from the Miso are about seven times higher than from Ontario. It's a similar story in Europe, where France and Sweden, using nuclear power, have vastly lower emissions than Denmark and Germany, usually touted as renewable energy paragons.
https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=country&countryCode=US-MISO&remote=true
https://www.electricitymap.org/?wind=false&solar=false&page=country&countryCode=CA-ON&remote=true

[NNadir]

7. This "percent talk" is obscene.

It is obscene because energy demand worldwide is rising, and the fastest rising source of energy on this planet is not wind, nor solar.

It's natural gas, which grew in 2017 - the last year for which we have comprehensive data - by a factor of 4 greater than wind, solar, geothermal, tidal combined.

Worldwide, the solar, wind, geothermal and tidal industry grew 1/7 the rate of worldwide energy demand in 2017.

Combined this trash technologies, wind, solar, geothermal and tidal combined didn't grow as fast as petroleum.

In this century, world energy demand grew by 164.83 exajoules to 584.95 exajoules.

In this century, world gas demand grew by 43.38 exajoules to 130.08 exajoules.

In this century, the use of petroleum grew by 32.03 exajoules to 185.68 exajoules.

In this century, the use of coal grew by 60.25 exajoules to 157.01 exajoules.

The solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal energy on which people so cheerfully have bet the entire planetary atmosphere, stealing the future from all future generations, grew by 8.12 exajoules to 10.63 exajoules.

10.63 exajoules is under 2% of the world energy demand.

2018 Edition of the World Energy Outlook Table 1.1 Page 38 (I have converted MTOE in the original table to the SI unit exajoules in this text.)

We're at 412 ppm of carbon dioxide. Do we give a shit? Do we care?

I really question when people are going to abandon this obscene percent talk and wake up.

Before being subject to all kinds of unjustified selective attention with respect to risks, the nuclear industry grew to 28.8 exajoules in less than 20 years, led by the United States, which built more than 100 reactors while producing the lowest priced electricity in the world.

It is, what it has always been, a gift by the finest minds of the 20th century to an increasingly ignorant generation that somehow has convinced itself that only nuclear energy need be perfect or other forms of energy can suck money and human lives without restriction.

The fact is that if wind energy were clean - it's not because steel, aluminum, plastics, carbon fibers, and environmentally the most questionable, lanthanides are all carbon intensive materials - it would still be incapable of meeting the increases in world wide energy demand, not the totals, just the increases.

Concrete, a giant feature of this offshoire tragedy in Britain and elsewhere is also a huge contributor to climate change..

I have analyzed in this space, the lifetime of wind turbines in that offshore oil and gas drilling hellhole, Denmark. It's about 18 years on average. In less than 20 years many of the world's wind turbines will need replacement, and the garbage the old ones have become will need to be hauled away.

After the combustion of dangerous fossil fuels for cars, heating, power generation, the two material costs, steel and concrete are the largest contributors to climate change, steel at well over a billion tons out of the rising 35 billion tons we dump on future generations each year, concrete another billion or so.

Thus the low energy to mass ratio connected with the wind industry means it's a rather dirty industry, even if one chooses to ignore, as everyone does - it's baleful impact on the avian biosphere.

Given that after decade, after decade after tons and tons of "percent talk" about wind and solar things are getting worse, not better we really should rethink our dogma.

Reality may suck, but it is reality.

[defacto7]

8. Another excellent entry NNadir, and highly appreciated.

I do very much like hearing of your dreams and hopes for you sons. As I'm writing, I'm listening to my 16 year old playing Rachmaninoff on the piano in the background and you reminded me that I should ask him if he'd finished his calculus homework. "Yes dad, hours ago, gees." I used to play Rachmaninoff while my dad read too... the cycle.. it creeps on... and on... our legacy and our hope.

All in all, I don't care if the message is a somber one as long as it's based on reality. What's the use building a future on false notions. Thanks for a shot of reality.

Have a good week my friend.

D7

[NNadir]

9. Thank you for your kind words.

It's important that we do our best to raise our children with as much skill and information to deal, however much is possible, with what we are leaving them, because what we are leaving is frightening.

You're doing your part. Thanks for that my friend.