China is aware that its coal is running out and that it needs new sources of energy. The rest of the world blunders along on the assumption that fossil fuels will remain plentiful.
Guest essay by David Archibald
At a conference on coal gasification in Colorado Springs on 12th October, the lead speaker was Dr Yong-Wang Li of Synfuels China. The third slide of his presentation contained this statement:
That includes coal. There are people being born in China today who will see the end of coal. This agrees with my own analysis which has China having burnt through half of its coal endowment by 2025:
Coal production in China is relatively opaque. Last month the E.I.A. revised its estimate of Chinese energy consumption from coal by 14%. Despite China’s agreements with the Obama administration to curtail carbon dioxide emissions, and its finite reserves, China is further increasing its coal consumption by building coal-to-synthetic natural gas (SNG) plants. Possibly more than 30 will be built, increasing coal consumption by more than 400 million tonnes per annum. According to theory of the consumption of a finite resource, production cost rises once half of the resource has been consumed. On that basis, the cost of doing everthing in China will start rising appreciably from 2025 and China’s relative competitiveness will start declining.
As Dr Li noted, China has to develop new energy resources. At least China is aware of their problem. In 2014, the team developing the Chinese thorium molten salt reactor were told to do in ten years rather than the original 25 years they had given themselves. Researchers working on the project said they were under unprecedented “war-like” pressure to succeed. Ideally, for China, the decline in coal production coming from the mid-2020s will be seamlessly replaced by a ramp up in nuclear power production from thorium reactors.
The Thorium approach is great for China and If our own moribund Department of Energy would get its act together, we too might benefit from Dr Sorensen’s initiatives.
Dr. Sorenson may have the best plan for an ideal thorium reactor. ThorCon power has the most practical plan for a good enough thorium reactor. thorconpower.com
With a relatively modest investment, they think they can get to market in under a decade. Check out their presentations.
They’ll start with molten salt uranium reactors and transition into thorium breeders when the fuel costs justify it.
Nuclear fission is the ace in the hole for future energy needs. Ideally cleaner solutions will be developed in time to be used, but if it comes down to either having shortage of power or using conventional water cooled reactors, water cooled reactors will be built, and waste will be stored in the ground (there is plenty of space underground for thousands of years waste to be safely stored) with or without approval of environmentalists. There is no point worrying about whether or not we will have power in the future. We will, that is a given. Some people are just serial worriers.
This curve is not realistic.
Within 10 years Africa will boom to levels of what we see in India today.
I pray that they do, as it will mean greater prosperity for many suffering people.
China needs to worry. Countries like the USA though, have enough coal, oil and natural gas to last 100s of years of their own usage .
Even in that graph from Li’s presentation shows that coal production only declines in China. In the other regions, it remains the same, or in the case of North and South America (and Europe!), coal production actually increases.
They might get a little from Russia to ease their worries. Just a short train ride away.
At current production levels, coal reserves in Russia could help support its coal needs for around 443 years. Russia, with a share of 18.2%, is second only to the US (27.6%) in terms of global proven coal reserves at the end of 2012. Domestic coal reserves totaled 157 billion t, comprising sub-bituminous and lignite grade coal reserves of 107.9 billion t and anthracite and bituminous grade coal reserves of 49.1 billion t. However, the projected total domestic coal reserves are expected to be in the range of 4 ? 5 trillion t, chiefly spread across eastern Siberia (84%) and the far east of Russia (6%). The Kuzbass coalfield has the largest share of coal reserves (56%), along with the Kansko-Achinky coalfield (12%), Zabaikalsk area and Khakassia with 6% and 4%, respectively.
While Russia eyes a major share of the growing demand for coal from the Asian markets of China, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam, it faces tough competition from the US and the European coal export markets.
http://www.worldcoal.com/coal/17102013/The_mining_landscape_Part_One_140/
While the lignite grade does not warrant shipping, the Sub-bituminous does and 157 billion compares to the U.S. Geological Survey estimated in-place resources of 1.07 trillion short tons of coal in the Powder River Basin, Wyoming and Montana. Of that total, with a maximum stripping ratio of 10:1, recoverable coal was 162 billion tons.
And then there’s always some reserves in Antarctica, should push come to snub.
Moving coal isn’t free.
A ton of coal mined profitably in Wyoming for $10/ton ends up being $60+/ton by the time it reaches Florida and $80+/ton by the time it reaches Europe/Asia.
The IPCC emissions projections inore the fact that inexpensively extracted coal is not distributed equally throughout the world.
If we look at the part that matters with coal…proximity to population centers…then inexpensively extracted coal appears to be located as far as possible distances from population centers. Transportation costs end up pushing alternative forms of energy…not extraction costs.
@harrywr2
The question domestically then becomes is it cheaper to ship the coal to the power plant, or build the power plant next to the mine head and ship (transmit) the power to market? It’s all about delivered cost.
With the US debt on target to reach 20 Trillion by the end of Obama’s term. The attraction will become overpowering. The US will need some one to hold their bonds, and China and India will need Coal.
The UK also has around 800 years worth of Coal and a lot of debt. Much of their heavy industry has already been shuttered.
I don’t think it will be hard to see which way the wind is gonna blow.
I don’t think it will be hard to see which way the wind is gonna blow
I’m not sure you are correct here. The idiots currently leading the western world have achieved a level of stupid incompetence way beyond anything seen before.
Unless the USA invites in a significant fraction of the world’s population…
China doesn’t any pending energy problems – they’re building dams all over the top of the world.
http://www.internationalrivers.org/resources/mountains-of-concrete-dam-building-in-the-himalayas-3582
Necessarily, they’re also re-routing water to run the generators. What could go wrong? If you’re India you probably think a hell of a lot can go wrong.
I wish the debate was about depleting resources instead of bogus climate alarmist stories, then we could begin to look at which renewables should be developed as part of the solution.
the “problem” is man’s ingenuity. Fracking shale to recover previously unavailable methane has increased natural gas reserves for at least 50-70 more years of extraction in the US alone. For now the EU remains fracking averse, but that could change if Gazprom shuts its valves. Who knows how much “non-renewable” gas and oil remains in the world. The CO2 it creates is only a problem for the CAGW orthodoxy.
Having owned a small share in sone gas and oil wells in Texas for over 85 years now, it is clear that they recharge over time. As gas and oil are not fossil but derive from Earth’s core by neutron repulsion reactions, there is no visible end to this source.
Re oil and gas wells recharging … bull feathers … take a course in geology and learn some science. I always get annoyed at the nonsense on oil posted by folks who never found a barrel of oil.
Stewart, are we to assume that you have found a barrel of oil? I think that you are the one who might need to do a little more research. There have been numerous oil fields that have produced far more oil and for far longer periods of time than originally had been predicted. Why this sometimes happens has numerous explanations depending on the situation. In most cases that I have knowledge of, the theory has been that high pressure acting on oil in deeper areas not included in the original estimate has been pushed the into shallower voids that are currently being exploited. I have never heard of “neutron repulsion reactions” from the earth’s core replenishing oil reserves. But I personally wouldn’t be insulting someone who has had a long time interest in a property that had overproduced. Whatever the reason… reserves are often underestimated and that is the primary message that I take from Highley7’s post.
Yep,agree.
China already has — there is more Wind generation Nameplate Capacity in China (105 GW) than Nuclear, and China will add 15 more GW this year. In the next 5 years China will reach or exceed 200 GW of installed nameplate Wind Generating Capacity
China has installed 11 GW of PV in 2014, bringing the total from 17 GW to 28 GW in 2014. By June of 2015 China had reached 35.8, putting China on track to install 15 GW in solar PV in 2015.
Get real; all that widespread wind and solar infrastructure only accounts for 7% of their installed capacity, and actually provides just 1% of their energy consumed. Even when the installed capacity for wind is at 200 GW it will still be severely limited in the amount of electricity it can actually deliver due to its inherent drawbacks. And to top it all off, every single wind turbine will need to be replaced at least 5 times in the 100 years they have to replace coal.
http://www.eia.gov/beta/international/analysis.cfm?iso=CHN
@RW Turner
They said that 10 years ago about solar and wind. Solar is on an exponential increase in China — not linear, and Wind is holding at 15-20% year over year (also not linear)
As far as 20 year replacement — even some of the old tech turbines at Tehachapi have lasted 40 years
FYI — wind is always blowing SOMEWHERE — at 350 ft altitude alot of somewhere, even though it may be calm at ground level — Stanford published an analysis that interconnected wind farms can be used as BASELOAD power at 30-40% of Nameplate Capacity
I think it’s a bit telling that this is predominantly (China acutely also understands the economic cost of coal pollution) an Economic and schedule driven policy by China — it makes better economic sense to install 50+ GW of Solar and Wind per year than Nuclear
When the govt pays people to put the things up, is there any surprise that lots of people are putting things up.
As to the wind blowing somewhere, so what? If it’s not blowing where you are, it’s useless to you. That’s because electricity can’t be shipped more than a couple hundred miles.
@MarkW
The max distance is 300 miles (90,000 square miles) for HVAC, but much much farther with HVDC
But that is not material, because the likelihood that the wind is EVER not blowing across that entire area is basically zero.
Perhaps you should research the rayleigh and weibull distributions of windspeed, and whether there is wind above 4m/s across multiple weather stations in a 100 square mile area — weather underground may be a good place to start. Now the stations are usually 3m to 10m elevation which will skew the results to seem more calm — and there is a significant increase of wind speed with altitude.
There may be some newer data sets from wind surveys — 50 meter height and 1 hour samples over the course of a year.
Karl, where is that “somewhere” where the wind always blows? If I look at production graphs of Germany or neighbour countries I see quasi zero production at times.
The country which first develops a standard design Thorium power plant will steal a march over other industrialized countries. They will give themselves a competitive advantage which will be very hard to deal with.
It’s not the Reactor design that is the ‘long pole in the tent’ — it’s the fuel
U-232 is a huge gamma emitter, and Pa 233 has a half-life of 27 days and is a neutron absorber which doesn’t help but actually hurts with the continued conversion of Th to U-233, and leads to transuranic isotope creation
I would appreciate a short lesson on the chain reactions and issues you know of. I need simple language though. Thanks.
We’re talking about Thorium, are we not?
ECB, try http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com/downloads/American_Scientist_Hargraves.pdf
@ur momisugly Coach
Yes Thorium — but thorium doesn’t work well by itself as a fuel, that’s why it uses it’s own daughter product Uranium 233 to provide neutrons to continue the cycle
U-232 is also a daughter product as is Protactinium 233
U-232 is a high intensity gamma emitter — great to keep from being easily used in weapons, not so great for handling
Pa-233 is a neutron absorber
Karl,
“U-232 is a huge gamma emitter,”
I think you mean U-233, produced from Th-232 by neutron capture. From what I have read, you are correct; the thorium fuel cycle is very hard. It makes more sense to first develop molten salt reaction for uranium, then eventually adapt them for thorium. There is no short term need for thorium, since molten salt reactors can use a much larger fraction of the uranium than conventional reactors.
Oops. I made the fundamental error of posting then checking. Although U-233 is the main uranium isotope in the thorium fuel cycle, Karl is correct that the troublesome gamma emission is from U-232.
That’s why liquid fuel that can be continually reprocessed on-line is the way to go.
Julian Williams in Wales
You say
Globally there is no problem of “depleting resources”. There is sufficient coal for at least the next 500 years.
Economically the only ‘renewable’ worthy of consideration is hydropower.
Richard
In some locations geothermal and tidal are economically viable.
And wave power may be economical with cheaper replacement components.
Not yet but soon.
Those places with large tidal surges rely on harmonics to acheive. Any change to the tidal basin will change the dynamics and quite possibly eliminate the harmonics that create the big surges.
Agreed, Richard. The only problem, as with alleged food shortages, is distribution from where there is plenty to where there is a shortage. And payments, of course. But if the thieving warmists could be eliminated along with their taxpayer subsidies, money would no longer be a great problem.
rich, M, Mike,
I would add – remote locations, with a low usage [and good battery back-up]; these may use solar & wind, if correctly designed.
More likely, they will be ‘hybrids’, with likely an on-site diesel generator, plus renewables.
And that highlights the need for hot spinning nuclear/fossil reserve for when it’s dark – and calm.
Europe is on the road to banning diesel fuel aided and abbeted by the UN. They have been preparing the ground in the usual manner. Publicity on the BBC and French TV. Papers issued in the ‘journals’ etc. A ban is likely in the next 5 yrs using the Obama method of increasing taxation.
True : we have enough coal for 500 years. But energy is so important for our human existence that it won’t do any harm thinking about it now and slowly begin to find alternative resources. I, personally, dream of mankind, as well as our technological civilisation, lasting a good deal longer than 500 years.
AndyE:
Nobody can know what – if any – need for fossil fuels will exist in 500 years time.
300 years ago transport relied on horses and it was feared that today’s amount of transportation would be impossible because there is not enough land to grow all the hay. But today’s transportation does not rely on horses.
Nobody is stopping you spending your money to research whatever you think may be needed 500 years in the future. I object to my money being wasted on that activity.
Richard
Talking about horse, in the late 1800s, city planners were very worried how they would clear all the shit from the roads, and what would they do with all the muck, but within 25 years, the modern motor car arrived, rendering the horse and carriage obsolete (although it was slowly replaced).
New technologies are always just around the corner. there is no need to think that what we are using today, will be in use at the end of this century, so there is no need to be worried by diminishing resources..
The fear of using up carbon based fuels has been around since shortly after the first oil well was drilled:
Who remembers this?
But Carter wasn’t even close to the first to make this claim:
• 1857 — Romania produces 2,000 barrels of oil, marking the beginning of the modern oil industry.
• 1859, Aug. 25 — Edwin L. Drake strikes oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania
• 1862 — First commercial oil production in Canada, also 1863 in Russia.
• 1862 — Most widely used lamp fuel (camphene) taxed in US at aprox. $1 a gallon; kerosene taxed at 10 cent per gallon.(Kovarik, 1997)
• 1863 — John D. Rockefeller starts the Excelsior Refinery in Cleveland, Ohio.
• 1879 — US Geological Survey formed in part because of fear of oil shortages.
• 1882 — Institute of Mining Engineers estimates 95 million barrels of oil remain.With 25 million barrels per year output, “Some day the cheque will come back indorsed no funds, and we are approaching that day very fast,” Samuel Wrigley says. (Pratt, p. 124).
• 1901 — Spindletop gusher in Texas floods US oil market.
• 1906 — Fears of an oil shortage are confirmed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Representatives of the Detroit Board of Commerce attended hearings in Washington and told a Senate hearing that car manufacturers worried “not so much [about] cost as … supply.”
• 1919, Scientific American notes that the auto industry could no longer ignore the fact that only 20 years worth of U.S. oil was left. “The burden falls upon the engine. It must adapt itself to less volatile fuel, and it must be made to burn the fuel with less waste…. Automotive engineers must turn their thoughts away from questions of speed and weight… and comfort and endurance, to avert what … will turn out to be a calamity, seriously disorganizing an indispensable system of transportation.”
• 1920 — David White, chief geologist of USGS, estimates total oil remaining in the US at 6.7 billion barrels. “In making this estimate, which included both proved reserves and resources still remaining to be discovered, White conceded that it might well be in error by as much as 25 percent.” (Pratt, p. 125. Emphasis added).
• 1925 — US Commerce Dept. says that while U.S. oil production doubled between 1914 and 1921, it did not kept pace with fuel demand as the number of cars increased.
• 1928 — US analyst Ludwell Denny in his book “We Fight for Oil” noted the domestic oil shortage and says international diplomacy had failed to secure any reliable foreign sources of oil for the United States. Fear of oil shortages would become the most important factor in international relations, even so great as to force the U.S. into war with Great Britain to secure access to oil in the Persian Gulf region, Denny said.
• 1926 — Federal Oil Conservation Board estimates 4.5 billion barrels remain.
• 1930 — Some 25 million American cars are on the road, up from 3 million in 1918.
• 1932 — Federal Oil Conservation Board estimates 10 billion barrels of oil remain.
• 1944 — Petroleum Administrator for War estimates 20 billion barrels of oil remain.
• 1950 — American Petroleum Institute says world oil reserves are at 100 billion barrels. (See Jean Laherre, Forecast of oil and gas supply)
• 1956 — M.King Hubbard predicts peak in US oil production by 1970.
• 1966 – 1977 — 19 billion barrels added to US reserves, most of which was from fields discovered before 1966. (As M.A. Adelman notes: “These fields were no gift of nature. They were a growth of knowledge, paid for by heavy investment.”)
• 1973 — Oil price spike; supply restrictions due to Middle Eastern politics.
• 1978 — Petroleos de Venezuela announces estimated unconventional oil reserve figure for Orinoco heavy oil belt at between three and four trillion barrels. (More recent public estimates are in the one trillion range).
• 1979 — Oil price spike; supply restrictions due to Middle Eastern politics.
• 1980 — Remaining proven oil reserves put at 648 billion barrels
• 1993 — Remaining proven oil reserves put at 999 billion barrels
• 2000 — Remaining proven oil reserves put at 1016 billion barrels.
• 2005 — Oil price spike; supply restrictions and heavy new demand
• 2008 — Oil price spike; supply restrictions and heavy new demand, global economies collapse when oil reaches over $140 USD/bbl.
Making plans for 50 years in the future is of questionable value, making plans for 500 years in the future is a fools errand.
Can you make a list of the technologies that will be available 500 years from now?
Just do what we can to improve the economy today, which will provide our descendants more resources with which to deal with the problems we can’t forsee.
As long as iPhone production continues on time, I’m good.
http://image.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/183121/158087222/stock-photo-family-looking-at-their-smartphones-at-the-dinner-table-158087222.jpg
Yes that family is having wonderful family time together, conversing and laughing with each other. No, not in the old fashioned way of using their mouths and vocal cords (how primitive) but with their thumbs and index finger, smart phones and social media sites.
Oh look, the granddad was just texted a picture of his grandson in his lap doing something cute. Looks like his son and grand-daughter got the same picture. Maybe someone should text it’s time to eat before the food gets cold.
We will have to wait until Helen Caldicott and her fellow anti-nuclear hysterics leave the planet so we can have a proper debate about nuclear energy here in Australia. We really should be using our uranium deposits for our own generation and use our coal for conversion to liquid fuels. It is strategically foolish for this island nation to rely almost exclusively on imported liquid fuels.
Which island nation is that, Lawrie?
Mike
I think the Rugby Union World Champions call it West Island.
A large, but culturally backward [lacking the haka, mostly] repository of Northern hemisphere ne’erdowells, with interesting food – and vaguely enticing beer.
Some year ago, a Pan-Am pilot is reported to have called Sydney ATC, and announced, ‘Clipper 13, Sydney – I have your island in sight. Am I cleared to land?’
AT, ‘Clipper 123, Thanks, loud and clear. Please circle our island twice, and we’ll see you in.’
Both wonderful countries, and I wish we English played rugby as well as either – one day, again . . .
Auto, goin cold turkey of some stunning rugby.
“It is strategically foolish for this island nation to rely almost exclusively on imported liquid fuels”
+1
It’s amazing the things one can predict with such certainty when one hasn’t the slightest grasp of elementary price theory.
Bingo!
Nice thing about predictions, you don’t need the slightest grasp of anything, just keep throwing predictions against the wall until one gets someones attention. If it does, then wait to see if it comes true,. If it does, claim you are a genius, if it doesn’t, pretend you never made the prediction and move on to your next prediction.
This can all be found in the FREE “Charlatans Handbook of Free Enterprise” – $24.99 for shipping and handling of course.
as coal becomes more expensive the market automatically provides incentives to find alternatives.
the problem comes when governments try and artificially manipulate the market for policy reasons. graft and corruption flourish in the region between the artificial market and the true market.
this is the elephant in the tea shop. when you make something artificially expensive to try and limit its use, this creates a huge opportunity for crime to buy product at the market price and sell it at the artificial price and reap huge profits.
It is this huge profit potential that provide the incentive for crime. in effect, when governments seek to manipulate prices to enact policy, they create tomorrows criminals.
Higher prices also encourages the development of resources that were to expensive to exploit at lower prices.
like millions of bird choppers and gazillion dollar inflight bird cookers.
Fred —> You mean like George Soros??
A few weeks ago an Australian cole mining operation was sold for 1 Australian Dollar.
The big gamble:
The massive amounts of steel nescessary to expand and renew the ancient Silk Road and the Chinese alternative for the Panama Channel.
China needs at least 6% economic growth to keep its population happy.
Not much of a gamble if you ask me.
Only the coal reserves in Norway will last 3.000 years. Just google it. No coal shortage for milenia to come.
As for copper reserves we have 500 tons available for every human on the planet.
100 years is a very long time in technology terms. 100 years ago, the current state of the art in personal transportation was the Ford Model T. The airplane just getting it’s wings, and nobody was thinking in terms of international commercial aviation. Times change. In 100 years time, a coal fired power plant may well be a technology which has simply obsoleted out, like the coal fired, steam powered railroad locomotive.
And a hundred years before that, we weren’t far removed from the stone age. My bet is the last two centuries were an outlier.
Maybe by then some of these greens will discover the miracles of technology and learn to teleconference
Seems to me that the technological difference between 1900 and 1950 is vastly greater than that between 1950 and 2000 (or, for that matter, between 1850 and 1900). I think my grandmother saw much bigger changes in her lifestyle (ubiquitous walking -> ubiquitous cars; hauling well water -> dishwashing machines) than I have seen in mine. The biggest change I’ve seen over my 60+ years has been access to information; even the clothing fashion changes have been trivial compared to the changes Grandma saw.
The computer revolution alone is bigger than the all the changes from 1900 to 1950.
@mellyrn
I remember my grandmother (Austro-Hungarian born 1888) commenting on the moon landing in 1969.
She thought it was a “bad thing” to be messing with the moon. Certainly saw a LOT of change in her life.
@ur momisugly MarkW: In what terms? Grandma went from kerosene lamps, hand-pumping the household water, hitching up the horse and buggy in order to travel farther than a walk, and communicating long-distance by mail or at best telegraph, to electric lights, dishwashing machines, driving (a Metropolitan) and having a (nonshared) phone. About the only thing significantly different in my life now from when I was a child is the Internet (I consider a microwave a slight improvement over an electric stove, versus the electric stove over a wood-fired one; and a personal phone a slight variation from “household phone” compared to “house phone” versus “no phone”). She had radio and TV, late in life; my computer is my radio/tv substitute.
Presently the entire Apollo program will be closer to 1900 than the present. Considering the huge leap from Kitty Hawk to Tranquility Base, something really amazing and unexpected is going to have to pop up by ~2040 just to keep up. Most changes in the last half-century seem to be refinements of existing tech, rather than anything terribly new, Internet excepted.
What early SF works anticipated the Internet?
Will Coal still be used as a major ingredient in steel-making?
Isn’t it also used to make many Chemicals and Plastics?
Underground coal gasification has the potential to significantly increase coal reserves by processing deep coal and seams too small for conventional mining. It may be kicking the can down the road, but it makes the road a very long one.
conference on coal gasification in Colorado Springs….
had to laugh when I saw who the sponsors were
Global coal reserves are frickin huge …/story. No, really. No one on this planet will be changing away from coal because of reserve exhaustion. Other techs will be available long before that happens.
Thanks, Dr. Archibald. Very good article.
Thorium might be one of the answers to the question of low-pollution energy production.
Don’t worry, Australia still has at least 10 years worth of coal, if extracted at 9000 billion tons per annum, which will give China a bit more breathing space.
And that is just the known reserves.
Assuming the air is still fit to breathe.
The main cost of a thorium (or uranium) powered electrical generation is the steam plant. It comprises about 80% of the cost. Polywell Fusion (if it works) can use direct conversion for Boron 11 fuel.
http://protonboron.com/portal/
First it was peak oil, now it’s peak coal.
As always, those who are pushing a solution that nobody wants have to convince others that everyone else’s data is in error.
About the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and so on to . . .: from Wikipedia:
Peak Copper
In 1924, noted geologist and copper-mining expert Ira Joralemon warned:
“… the age of electricity and of copper will be short. At the intense rate of production that must come, the copper supply of the world will last hardly a score of years. … Our civilization based on electrical power will dwindle and die.”
Meanwhile:
stark warnings for copper
In case the above isn’t clear enough:
The “ages” do not end because of a lack of the commodity.
We extract copper from unimaginably low ore grades compared to a few decades ago. Yesterday’s tailings are tomorrow’s resource. In Kalgoorlie (Western Australia) there was a project to reprocess the tailings (the creatively named “Kaltails”) from old gold operations. It ran for quite a few years.
Plus copper gets recycled quite a bit. I find the idea of resource depletion for non-energy fuels rather bemusing. With the exception of a few objects sent into deep space (others are mostly destined to return to earth from whence they came) and helium, very little is lost from this globe. Ultimately I imagine the majority of metallic resources will be largely recycled when energy is cheap enough. That’s assuming it isn’t still cheaper to mine them instead.
Meant to say non-energy resources.
I’ve been lobbying to have the names of dumps changed to “future resource locations”.
The fear of peak coal has been with us since Victorian times.
Jevons, W.S. (1865) The Coal Question: An Enquiry Concerning The Progress Of The Nation And The Probable Exhaustion Of Our Coal-Mines
Macmillan And Company, London and Cambridge 1865 467 pages.
China’s strategic power production
China recognizes the essential need for power for economic growth and is forcing rapid power plant growth. See China Shows How to Build Nuclear Reactors Fast and Cheap
Other developing countries including India, Brazil similarly need to rapidly increase power for economic growth.
Environmentalists are forcing US into steady relative decline by blocking power plants.
Some years ago now, probably during 2011, I mentioned Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors on this site. I don’t think anyone had ever mentioned them here before then. I have watched Thorium Remix 2011, so many times I nearly know the entire 2 hour dialog.
So it is good to see it mentioned here often now. Knowing that LFTRs will someday move us into the thorium age is what gives me hope, and makes me think my grandchildren will not live in an energy starved world.
My problem with a thorium group is it they try to confuse thorium with liquid fuel. I believe liquid fuel reactors we’ll start with uranium from our current store of nuclear waste. There’s enough uranium there to last for hundreds of years.
There is also 20 years of natural gas waiting in the Siberian Arctic.
As idiotic Leftist Western governments waste $trillions on insanely expensive, inefficient, diffuse, intermittent and unreliable wind/solar boondoggles, China is racing along in developing thorium MSRs, that will be cheaper than coal, unlimited, reliable and clean…
China is absolutely ecstatic watching Western countries waste $trillions on CAGW rules, regulations, mandates, expensive wind/solar programs, etc., which simply makes their products uncompetitive and drives production and market share to China..
China will eat our lunch again, as Western countries contemplate whether jack o-lanterns are a contributing cause to global warming….
Leftists have gone completely insane.
Didn’t China and Russia used to be the left? Seems like they are more capitalistic than a large part of the “western” world that has fallen into creeping socialism. It takes me back to school days studying different forms of government. Even back then (50+ years ago), for developing countries in particular, a “beneficial dictator” was touted as the most effective form of government. We students laughed at the time, but I have stopped laughing recently.
The molten salt reactor CAN run on Thorium, although it makes little sense to do so, since it presents proliferation issues (plutonium is produced). For some reason some folks think the world will
be running out of uranium, which is nonsense – the oceans are full of it and molten salt reactors burn uranium so completely that just the nuclear wastes now available will provide all of the power this planet requires for 72 years, or the U.S. for 1000 years. Most uranium mines have stopped operating because of the oversupply of uranium.
It ain’t gonna take no 25 years for this technology to develop – that’s preposterous – Transatomic Power has designed the reactor and is now testing new components that make the molten salt technology practical for the first time. Their plan, which is on schedule, looks to a prototype reactor within 5 years.
There is yet another company pursuing the design – Terrestrial Energy. Their plan is to commercialize
withiin 5 years as well. China should just wait and buy from us.
“The molten salt reactor CAN run on Thorium, although it makes little sense to do so, since it presents proliferation issues (plutonium is produced).”
It doesn’t produce plutonium. See the document I referred to above.
2 Nov: ClimateChangeNews: Alex Pashley: China, France agree Paris climate deal must deliver regular reviews
At the Great Hall of the People, the seat of China’s legislature, Hollande told a news conference the declaration established a “likelihood the Paris conference will succeed,” AP reported…
Both sides promised within five years to publish carbon-cutting strategies out to 2050.
However, they qualified this trend must be “at a rhythm consistent with strong economic growth and equitable social development”…
In a separate deal, France and China also signed a nuclear cooperation agreement on nuclear waste recycling that could be worth $22 billion, Bloomberg reported…
Greenpeace analyst Li Shuo: “With the recent decline in coal consumption and robust renewable energy development, China is positioning itself at the front of climate leadership”…
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2015/11/02/hollande-bends-beijing-to-tougher-climate-curbs/
@ur momisugly arthur4563
“The molten salt reactor CAN run on Thorium, although it makes little sense to do so, since it presents proliferation issues (plutonium is produced).”
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The main Plutonium isotope produced via the Thorium cycle is 238Pu. This is not a fissile material but it is much more expensive than bomb stuff (fissile 239Pu). The current price for 238Pu is more than $1 million per kilogram. Plutonium would be a valuable by-product from Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors along with Platinum and some other useful elements.
http://www.nature.com/news/nuclear-power-desperately-seeking-plutonium-1.16411
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator