Finding an energy common ground between “Warmers” and “Skeptics”

Part of the problem with acceptance of Nuclear Power is the public’s perception of it as dangerous,
Myth: Nuclear Energy is Dangerous
– 104 Commercial Nuclear Reactors are operating in the United States
– 103 Military Nuclear Reactors are operating in the U.S. Navy
Regardless Nuclear still cannot replace hydrocarbon energy because it nor the electricity it generates can be used as a practical transportation fuel.

As a sceptic my view is that we don’t need a controlling hand on energy policy. If government interference was removed, companies could plan for the long term without having to worry about being gamed by the government. Look at what the Americans have done to BP after changing the rules on a protectionist whim.

I’m a “believer”.
We have tens of thousands of years of energy available in Thorium, and some U235 to get it started, with IFRs.
That might even be long enough to get fusion working, or to develop effective storage for solar…
The biggest problem here (Australia) is that the Greens and Labor have spents so much time demonising nuclear power that they can’t even bring themselves to look at it; they seem to think we would be better off freezing in the dark!

It sounds fantastic – too good to be true – endless supplies of cheap energy which cannot ‘go critical’ or produce material for nuclear bombs – very little radioactive waste to dispose of – and the concept has been around since the 1960’s !!! Why have we not been told about this sooner? I can’t help thinking there must be a great big technical snag somewhere – otherwise we can only assume that there has been some political reason why such reactors have not been built.
It occurs to me that if such power is made available in the near future then we might have something to thank GWA for after all.

As a confirmed AGW alarmist, I have no problem having nuclear power in the mix. It seems likely it will end up being part of the solution to the problem which (according to you guys) we don’t have.

What about Helium3? No nasty side effects….
http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2006/01/227-helium-3-fusion.html
http://www.explainingthefuture.com/helium3.html
of course, it’s very rare on Earth, the only way it is currently produced is via tritium isotope decay.

Professor Barry Brook is an AGW believer and has had quite in depth and technical discussion of the LFTR on his site BraveNewClimate for some time. The reactor looks like a very good solution for energy in both developed and developing nations. Sadly the problem facing the quick introduction of this technology is the lack of hands on experience in engineering and running these plants. Public fear of nuclear power has stalled the development of newer and safer systems.

Looking at the first diagram, it would appear that the radioactive coolant salt passes through a heat exchanger that “does not contain nuclear materials”. Even so, the fluid in the heat exchanger must become radioactive by virtue of it’s exposure to the radioactive coolant salt.
The “newly” radioactive fluid passes through a helium heat exchanger, during which the helium must also become radioactive, for the same reason.
So therefore the turbines and compressors become radioactive in their turn. Even if these stages of radioactivity transfer reduce, at each stage, they still occur and over a 50-year plant lifetime accumulation must reach considerable levels.
How is maintenance of the moving machinery safely done, let alone replacement of, say transfer medium pipes, especially at bends, which tend to erode under the influence of fluid velocity, over time?
Normal steam boiler superheater bends, for instance, tend to have a 10-12 year life, even if the designers have the forethought to increase the thickness at the bends, to allow for the erosion.

There are other viable alternate energy sources, such as LFTR, but I really don’t believe we are going to be able allowed to pursue any. Hydrogen was my favorite. For some reason, it has all but fallen from the discussion of alternate fuel. Why? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_vehicle
Why is it that our commercial fuel ethanol blends can only be made from corn? By using corn, the cost is increased over traditional gasoline and the efficiency is less. Land use is more and food production is less. I can’t believe this wasn’t purposeful.
Count me in on the LFTR or any other type of nuclear fuel. Sadly, I’m thinking it will lumped in with hydrogen or became bastardized as ethanol was.
We should all know by now, that the only way to CAGW heaven is through wind and solar. We can purify coal to where one can literally breath the exhaust of the clean coal without any adverse effects. We can decide to use spent rods or not, fire up an hydrogen vehicle, we can do fusion or fission, LFTR or PWR. None of these alternate energy sources will see the light of day if the alarmists have their way.

Any solution that doesn’t involve impossible sacrifice, and the guilt associated with failing to sacrifice properly. Is unacceptable, simply because people who don’t fail in their sacrifice, don’t feel guilty and people who don’t feel guilty are much more difficult to manipulate.
On a personal level the day I hear politicians and green activists openly discussing the nuclear option. Is the day I’ll start to feel a little bit scared, because then I will know that they genuinely believe there is a problem.

Nuclear energy, in whatever form, is definitely the way to go for energy that doesn’t produce carbon dioxide.

If it works, do it!

It sounds too good to be true, so it probably is.
At the political level, I am nervous of the “Baptists and bootleggers” phenomenon, whereby environmentalist groups and their ideological opposites (in this case advocates of nuclear power) make common cause. Just like prohibition, it is hard to see how good can come of such a marriage of convenience, or that it would last. The chief winner from prohibition was organised crime.

Thorium. HMM.
What about steam moderation? which can burn fuel far more efficiently?
Yes the technology is out there but the question is is is it economic compared to coal or gas?
I doubt it.
Even though I have recently had a couple of highly paid offers to act as consultant to the nuclear industry, which originally I trained in as a nuclear physicist, which is very flattering, I have my doubts. Nevertheless it seems that there is a shortage of skilled personnel, not surprising given the neglect of nuclear power the last fifty years.
It is not that nuclear cannot provide base load load above all else but as the French experience has taught us when other fuels are cheap it is very expensive: conversely people now say that France enjoys cheap nuclear power. Dependable yes but not that cheap.
Overall during the lifetimes of the stations, some fifty years, and allowing for fluctuations in fossil fuel prices it is probably more than twice the price per unit than coal or natural gas would have been.
Of course in times of artificial shortage of these fossil fuels due to chiefly political considerations it does look both cheap and secure. And seductive.
But politics change whereas demand for power does not.
A lot of people are very upset about burning fossil fuels because of the CO2 produced: others are worried about a shortage of fossil fuels in light of what they imagine the increased demand of the rapidly growing and industrialising world will be.
What me worry? about CO2? No and I don’t believe in little green fairies at the bottom of the garden either. And as to shortages of fuel or food it hasn’t happened yet and in the modern world and isn’t likely to.
Remember we have technology: provided wealthy Luddites allow us to use it. One result is that famine, once a genuine scourge of the human race is now only a weapon of war wielded by politicians to starve their enemies and amass wealth and power to themselves. As is energy starvation. You have to keep the people poor you know.
The Luddites are always with us and will do everything in their power to keep the people poor. Upon some imaginary excuse, which usually comes down to the fact that poor people should not live so luxuriously. They need to know their place you know: they are the poor and should not be allowed to become rich.
No my view, for what it is worth, is that for a century or two King Coal will remain just that but that if the 19th century was the age of coal and the 20 century was the age of oil the 21st century will be the age of natural gas. The known reserves are enormous and cheap to extract, but better still natural gas is not only abundant but can easily be synthesised into liquid hydrocarbons for transport and use.
No doubt nuclear fission may have its place but only as a bit player. As for solar, wind or more practically hydroelectric well they too may play a minor part.
As for nuclear fusion I remember DRAGON and worked on JET and it is just as far in the future as it was then.
I’m sorry but to use English vernacular I refuse to get my knickers in a twist over the End of Days due to our sinful ways, today by burning fossil fuel, as preached by Doomsayers, or by the no doubt well meaning but gravely mistaken worriers about
the future of the world.
Future generations will take it all in their stride.
Kindest Regards.

Whats up with this? “LFTR is attractive to both Democrats/warmers and Republicans/skeptics.” Since when does Democrat == warmer and Republican == skeptic?

Most technologies tried and abandoned are so for a reason; and reactors which use molten solids as heat-exchange medium are one of those. During the Cold War, both USA and USSR tried using low-melting-point metals as heat transfer mediums for nuclear submarine reactors. These would allow for a higher rate of heat transfer in a smaller reactor (size is a very important consideration in subs). The experiments were successful in making the reactors work (USS Seawolf using molten Sodium, Project 645 using a Lead-Bismuth alloy), but they were plagued by repeated breakdowns due to the fact that any small leak in the exchangers would result in a huge mess to clean up, and if you let the medium freeze in the pipes, you lost the reactor. These experiments were different from the LFTR reactor proposed in that they used conventional cores (Uranium bars), but their problems weren’t caused by their cores, but by the heat-exchange mediums (molten metals, molten salts). While it is possible these reactors could be made to work (the Russians kept at it in their Alfa submarines), it will not be a matter of just “$10B invested over 10 years” to “update this technology and make it ready for commercialization.” PWR reactors are used worldwide for a reason: their engineering is easier. We may need nuclear, but choosing it for political reasons (“Warmers and Skeptics can both agree on it”) is not going to make it a panacea; wind and solar have also been favoured for political reasons and look how marvellous that has turned out to be!

If we’re going to go nuclear, Thorium definitely seems to be the way to go. Jo Nova reckons that the US have spent $32BN in ten years on climate research. While the US has spent big, they came late in the game.
Tying the spend to overall GDP would indicate that there has been at least $100BN spent on climate research. Some of this will still have to be spent for things like the satellites, but I don’t see any reason why a substantial portion of the rest cannot be spent on further research on nuclear, and on electrical energy storage. Zinc/Air batteries sound very promising.
Having spent too much time in the past on reddit, I’d have to agree with Cassandra King. I don’t think a cheap source of energy is what the Greens want.

peat says:
August 9, 2010 at 10:28 pm
In this respect, the thorium reactor design is very intriguing, given that it utilizes a fission process that is hard to divert to bomb making. Of the many energy technologies pursued, this one to me seems very encouraging. $10B for its continued development is a drop in the bucket compared to what has been spent on fusion research, for which we seem no closer to the holy grail.
Considering that ITER, an international collaboration of many of countries , is expected to produce a working prototype fusion reactor on something like 15 billion total cost,
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/05/no-solution-yet-to-iters-budget-.html
Europe’s share of the ITER project will likely cost €7.2 billion, 2.7 times the original estimate. (The E.U. is scheduled to cover 45% of the project’s total cost, with the other six partners—China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the United States—contributing about 9% each.)
the 10 billion you quote is not as trivial as you claim.
One of the reasons the utilization of the tokamak idea is so delayed is because of parsimonious budgets.
That said, if this thorium fluoride reactor could be ready within ten years for commercial purposes it could well be an interim solution, until fusion becomes commercial. I also am worried of proliferation of reactors, particularly in our quake prone region through the Balkans and ME. This design seems to have self safety from construction and would be ideal for such locals.
It is good not to have all our eggs in one basket.
BTW I think the ITER fusion project is suffering the same problems CERN faced and had the accident with the accelerator: parsimonious budgets and bad decisions at the top from wishful advice. Instead of hiring the best in engineering and have them in site, because of economies, one outsources to university teams various components that have to be brought together and made to work supervised by too few real experts. It is easy for academicians to declare themselves “experts” as we have seen in the climate scene, in contrast to engineers who have come out of the tough way of open markets. These “experts” then give bad advice on construction and the advice of the real experts is overridden to the detriment of the projects.

The two main reasons why thorium reactors were never built are: 1. Thorium reactors did not produce plutonium which was necessary for keeping communism away from the free world. 2. During all this time, scientists were banking on fusion reactors.
The former reson is no longer valid while the second turns out to be the second biggest global scam ever, (after the AGW theory) because after some 60 years of money-guzzling research, fusion is still very far away.
Meanwhile, hydrocarbons have moved the world foreward, lifting many from below the poverty line up to a decent living standard. Enter the green movement, hijacked by the extreme left-wing left-overs of the soviet era, who, seeing their base (the poor) becoming richer and therefore, in their mind, capitalist, are trying to do their damnest to keep us as poor as possible, so as to keep their grassroot base as wide as possible. (Communism thrives in poverty, so they keep people poor))
So, what’s better than destroying the energy sources that are making the global populations achieve better living standards?
Thus, the green/red movement is:
Against nuclear energy. They have demonised nukes, even though it has proven to be the most safe and clean form of energy (vide France, Finland, India…)
Against oil, coal and gas. They invented the hoax of CO2=end of the world while in fact CO2=life.
In favour of donkey transport for the masses. But they still want to fly in airplanes, live in villas etc etc…………..
My bottom ine: Lets keep on utilising the solar power that arrived on this planet billions of years ago (oil, coal and gas) while researching and building nuclear power stations which make us politically independent from foreign tyrants such Chaves, ahemdinejad and gheddafi and mostimportantly provide a stable price of energy, removing the unkown factors that energy price hikes and result in global recessions, creating millons, billions of people poor and desperate, just what the green/red movement wish for.

Adam Gallon says:
August 10, 2010 at 12:42 am
I strongly suspect that the “Skeptics” would largely support any viable method of power generation, we certainly need to conserve fossil fuels for areas like transport, where (short of large sea-going vessels) nuclear reactors just aren’t a practical solution.
Mention “Nuclear Power” to the “Warmists” and you’ll hear howls of “Chernobyl” and “Three Mile Island”.
As has been mentioned previously, Green is the new Red.

If you take your right wing glasses off for a second, you would have figured out that “Greens” that claim to be all for taking action against AGW and in the same time are against nuclear or even against wind mills (because they “spoil the view”) are merely Greeenwashers who have zero basic understanding of the situation humanity is in.
As I like to say, if someone is talking about ecology and growth isn’t mentioned as the root problem of it all, then that person is either utterly clueless about what he’s talking about or he’s deliberately BS-ing you.

a jones says:
August 10, 2010 at 12:03 am
Remember we have technology: provided wealthy Luddites allow us to use it. One result is that famine, once a genuine scourge of the human race is now only a weapon of war wielded by politicians to starve their enemies and amass wealth and power to themselves. As is energy starvation. You have to keep the people poor you know.

That’s another utterly ignorant statement right there. The reason there is no famine right now (which isn’t even true, there are hundreds of millions of starving people out there in the world, it’s just that you don’t see them on TV as they are, how should I say it, not very interesting to well-fed people and such news don’t generate high TV ratings) is that we have this tremendous but one-time energy bonanza in the form of fossil fuels and fertilizers to use as an input. Once that’s gone, the yields will go down significantly, especially given what we have done to the soil, which has been basically sterilized and leached out of its nutrients in many of the bread baskets of the world. And all of a sudden there will be a lot of famine because there will be between 7 and 10 billion mouths to feed.

Think of a Coal Train 1,000 Miles long. That’s what China uses.
Every Day.
Our Coal Train is only from St. Louis to Memphis (330 miles long.)
We not only have to do something, we have to do “everything.”
And, pretty danged soon.

David, UK said on Finding an energy common ground between “Warmers” and “Skeptics”
If something is truly believed to be dangerous to human existence, you don’t impose a tax on it; you ration it, or in extreme cases you ban it

Precisely.

“What about nuclear? Some warmers support it (e.g. Dr. James Hansen)…”

You forgot to mention green guru James Lovelock who is also in favour of nuclear energy.
As well as the LFTR (liquid fluoride thorium reactors) there is also nuclear technology from Hyperion Power Generation who produce a “a tiny nuclear reactor the size of a bathtub that could produce enough electricity to power 20 thousand homes.
It would contain no weapons grade material, would produce very little waste and would be refueled every seven years.
It would be so safe from kidnapping it could be buried in the backyard. Terrorists would keep away because if they did get it, it would be the same as holding a piece of the sun.” more…

Most of the Solar projects I’ve been reading about, recently, seem to be coming in between $4.00 and $5.00/Watt. Most of this seems to be “installation.” I think we’re going to see Solar coming online for $2.00/Watt in a few years. Considered over a life-cycle that blows the doors off nuclear.
Wind is already cheap, and getting cheaper as the turbines get larger. Now, add in a “fast-follower” such as a 57% efficient turbine from Siemens running on biogas (obtained from the anaerobic digestion of lignin left over from the “cellulosic” production of ethanol,) and you’re starting to look at a heck of a low-cost, sustainable system.

In today’s Daily Telegraph there’s a report about the Iter fusion project. There’s good news, as now it seems its funding problems have been resolved. But it also reports that Greenpeace opposes it. What a surprise. I suspect that what these environmental extremists really hate is the thought of society becoming ever more prosperous by using advanced technology. That’s why they love Medieval technologies such as these pointless windmills.
My energy policy would be fairly simple:
1. Forget so-called alternative technologies, particularly wind power. Just by adding an additional power station you would make them unnecessary. Alternative energy is also very expensive and very unreliable. If you think wind power is a good idea, I suggest you monitor this web site for a few days. A table near the bottom lists the current percentage contribution of all power sources for the UK, including current, the last half hour and 24 hours. The wind contribution goes up and down like a yo-yo. Sometimes it’s literally zero (in effect, probably less than 0.05%) Worse than useless.
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm
2. For the next few decades, concentrate on using nuclear, using the best available technology such as that highlighted in this report.
3. Probably starting around 2050 (assuming, of course, that Iter is successful), start ramping up fusion. It promises clean, reliable and cheap energy that can be produced in vast amounts. If there are no fundamental engineering problems that cannot be solved, then I’m fairly confident that the world, starting around 2050, will be powered by fusion.
If fusion gets rid of these stupid, stupid windmills that disfigure the countryside and don’t work most of the time, that alone will be worth it.
Chris

Read this article, in its entirety
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=smarter-use-of-nuclear-waste

Poptech
Convert Nuclear to Electricity OK. Get some CO2 (I breath it out or its in the atmosphere) and separate the C from the O2 using the electricity. Get some H2O (it falls from the sky) and separate the H2 from the O using more electricity. Join the C’s and H’s to make a chemical CxHy using pressure and heat from making electricity from the nuclear reaction in the first place. Its called a hydrocarbon and you can have it in gas, liquid or solid (plastics). Its great for powering ships, planes, trucks and cars. Its dead easy to store and transport. The oil companies are great at this.
Nuclear power is eminently suitable for providing for all our energy needs including transport. I stopped counting when I got to approximately a Million years of energy availability in nuclear fission deposits.

Jimbo says:
August 10, 2010 at 2:02 am
I am sorry to inform you folks that the only way LFTR (liquid fluoride thorium reactors) technology will be adopted in the west is when power outages cause winter mass deaths due to the wholesale adoption of wind energy and solar panels. Many greens don’t want cheap, safe energy they want rationed energy via windmills for themselves and a drastic reduction in world population which excludes them.

The “excess deaths” during winter are much more likely to be caused by the effects of Peak Oil. And quite soon too. Just to let you paranoid %#$ know, nobody is any particular rush to phase out coals and gas powered power plants and replace them with solar and wind.

What if we could have nuclear power that was far “greener” than current technology, cost considerably less, was even safer and more proliferation resistant? What if this “greener” nuclear technology had already been proven in working prototypes?

You are thinking too rationally. If you want to appeal to alarmists, warmists, econuts, etc, then you’ll need to propose something far more fantastic. Something like a large orbiting solar array that can beam energy down to Earth via super efficient bird friendly Lasers. The more expensive and unobtainable the better. Extra points are given for technologies that haven’t been invented yet and which are unlikely to ever be invented and thus require infinite amounts of investment capital. It’s also important to focus on “sustainable” and “renewable” energy solutions which require unsustainable amounts of non-renewable precious metals from remote, inhospitable, and politically unstable regions of the Earth.
If you can suggest an alternative energy solution that follows these simple green-friendly guidelines then you just might win over our friends on the other side. However, suggest anything less and you will likely be accused of being in the pay of Big Oil, Big Nuclear, Big Tobacco, Big HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup), or George W. Bush. Your name will be permanently added to several high profile blacklists and fanatic climate stalkers will follow you around the globe and harass you about Exxon for the rest of your life. This is how the green energy market creates jobs, drives innovation, and saves the planet.

Greenies are unwilling to accept nuclear energy because that would achieve acceptable CO2 goals yet preserve capitalism.
What; did you actually think the left cared about the planet? Silly Billy!

Well Mr/Ms Meme what is your plan for population “control”? Sounds ominous to me – what happens if the proles around the world don’t follow orders? Mass culls? Forced sterilisation? All the stats show that the only things that slow down birth rates are affluence and women’s education, so rather than make sinister noises about control we should be focusing on improving standards of living in the developing world. Affordable energy, some kind of healthcare, and efficient food production are the keys, and buggering about with cap and trade only makes Goldman Sachs bankers richer.

We must not do these things for the wrong reason(s).
To appear to do so will undermine the credibility of future projects after the wrong reasons have been exposed as bunkum.
There are valid reasons for migrating baseload (and some other) electricity generation to nuclear. The main one that I can think of is that it conserves the raw “carbon stock” for use in transport fuels, chemical, pharmaceuticals, plastics, lubricants, … “Waste” (low-quality) heat from nuclear reactors may be used to convert e.g. coal and gas to liquid fuels and lubricants.
Do it for the right reasons.

ajones
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/09/finding-an-energy-common-ground-between-%e2%80%9cwarmers%e2%80%9d-and-%e2%80%9cskeptics%e2%80%9d/#comment-453070
“The British AGR reactor programme of the 1960′s used helium and after various teething problems have proven so satisfactory that they are probably good for another forty years.”
Looks like you need to do some serious and more accurate research on the history of nuclear power development in the UK ajones as once again you are way off base.
AGR stands for Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor and the coolant used in all the UK’s AGR NPPs is that evil, odourless, tasteless, atmospheric trace gas Co2 and not helium (looks like you may be confusing the AGR with DRAGON?).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_gas-cooled_reactor
Are you sure you are an ex-nuclear physicist? I’m sure I am. Are you?

“The “excess deaths” during winter are much more likely to be caused by the effects of Peak Oil. And quite soon too. Just to let you paranoid %#$ know, nobody is any particular rush to phase out coals and gas powered power plants and replace them with solar and wind.”

They are in the UK where they passed a climate change bill to reduce our CO2 emissions by 80% by 2050 on an October day that saw the first snow in London in about 70 years. This is the climate change bill that now has the force of law.
So if the climate does NOT change for the better after that? Will they arrest God? Or the Sun? Who do you arrest when the climate breaks the law?

“thegoodlocust says:
August 9, 2010 at 11:25 pm
Thank you so much for talking about this, I’ve been a proponent of thorium reactors for a while and if we build enough of these we can start converting our coal into fuel for our cars and get off of Middle Eastern oil.”
You mean Canadian oil, as that far surpasses the imported oil from the Middle East.
JimB

There are other reactor types too, like the Pebble Bed Reactor, safe, self-regulating technology that’s running in China today, and has been tested in Germany, and South Africa as well. Guess what, in each instance the “Radical Greens” are the strong opposition.
It’s about politics, not about the planet.

Poptech says:
Regardless Nuclear still cannot replace hydrocarbon energy because it nor the electricity it generates can be used as a practical transportation fuel.
_______________________________
I saw a documentary a few years back (called ‘Back To The Future’) that showed how small, portable nuclear devices would be available for powering things such as cars from about the year 2015 – not long to wait now!

GM says: (multiple comments)
My god GM, with your fatalistic view why do you bother getting up in the morning?
And why is it that folks such as yourself, who lecture the rest of us about human evils, never take the logical step to be a real leader and show us the way to save mother Earth. It’s simple, just put a call in for Dr Kevorkian.

Poptech says:
August 9, 2010 at 10:24 pm
Regardless Nuclear still cannot replace hydrocarbon energy because it nor the electricity it generates can be used as a practical transportation fuel.

Absolutely right. The technology to watch for transportation fuel is alcohol and biodiesel from genetically modified (GM) organisms. The transportation fleet is largely ready for it now including distribution infrastructure. Various plants & fungi produce it today just not very efficiently because alcohol and biodiesel are byproducts of metabolism. A little genetic cutting and pasting and they can become products instead of byproducts. Genetic engineering is advancing at such a rapid pace it reminds me of the early days of semiconductors replacing vacuum tubes. I consider Craig Venter’s artificial bacteria genome to be equivalent to the creation of the first transister. The only difference is that the artificial organism has orders of magnitude more potential for practical applications than the transister ever did.

ad says:
August 10, 2010 at 1:16 am
Alan the Brit says:
The only sensible solution to CAGW/CC is the creation of an unelected, undemocratic, unaccountable, unsackable, Global Government, run by Marist Socialist Intellectual Elitists who will tax the poor people in rich wicked free democratic countries & dole the dosh out to rich people in poor, dictatorial, leftist, self-enriching countries, & enrich the new Global Government to boot along the way – they need the money (don’t we all?)! Simples! What use is scientific advancement if politicos can’t control it?:-))
As a graduate of a Marist Brothers high school, i’d like to put my name forward to join the Marist elite that will run the planet.
Apologies for spelling mistake, at least the “socialist” bit was spelt correctly! I’m sure the muti-millionaire Socialists like Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Maurice Strong et al will put us all right.

That should read multi-millionaires – getting caught in the rain with the dog at lunchtime must have done it, either that or it’s yet another thing caused by Global Warming!

“Regardless Nuclear still cannot replace hydrocarbon energy because it nor the electricity it generates can be used as a practical transportation fuel.”
Fuel from Nuclear
I wonder if this would work with “Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors”?

GM
You’ve moved
“But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao (Holdren)
You ain’t going make it with anyone anyhow”

Incentive needed?
Abandon Earth or Face Extinction, Stephen Hawking Warns — Again
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/08/09/abandon-earth-face-extinction-warns-stephen-hawking/
It’s time to abandon Earth, warned the world’s most famous theoretical physicist.
In an interview with website Big Think, Stephen Hawking warned that the long-term future of the planet is in outer space.
“It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet,” he said.
“I see great dangers for the human race,” Hawking said. “There have been a number of times in the past when its survival has been a question of touch and go. The Cuban missile crisis in 1963 was one of these. The frequency of such occasions is likely to increase in the future.”
“But I’m an optimist. If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe, as we spread into space,” he said.
——————————-
Our species is once again under assault from elitists, this time under global organizations, who wish to separate us from any technology or chance to continue on as open societies. I call them Aliens, as they exhibit little, if any, traits of humanity.
It is they, and thier plans, we must survive.

The purpose of many of the crazies is not to solve the CAGW crisis, it is to generate taxes to do social engineering with. It is to take from the middle class and poor [because there are more of us] and give to some politician to buy votes.
The worst crazies want to roll back civilization so they will hate the reactor.
For may of the crazies the so called climate crisis is just an excuse not a reason.

People are NOT afraid of Nuclear Energy!
Their concern, their FEAR, is with respect to the people who a.) Select the site, b.) Build the facility, c.) Run the facility, and d.) Regulate the facility. They DO NOT fear Nuclear Energy!
People ARE NOT AFRAID of NUCLEAR ENERGY!
People ARE Afraid of FOOLS!

P.S. I pretty much disagree with everything that the previous commenter, Pascvaks, just said.

Okay, this sounds great, and I hate to nitpick about grammar, but phrases like ” A waste steam 10,000 times less toxic” are nonsensical. Actually, it’s not a grammatical error – it’s grammatically correct. However, it is mathematically incorrect, in a huge way.
For any exclusively positive measure, you cannot be more than 1 time (or 100%) “less than” some initial value. One time less than that initial value is exactly zero. Say X is the initial value, as in I have X grams of thorium. You, on the other hand, have 1 time less thorium than I have. So, mathematically, you have 1(X) less thorium than I have, for a total of X – 1(X) grams of thorium. You can easily see that what you have is exactly ZERO grams of thorium. You cannot have any less thorium than that, because there is no such thing as negative quantities of thorium.
In the article above, I presume that when the author is comparing the toxicity of the thorium reactor to conventional nuclear reactors, he’s using some measure of toxicity, probably a measure of radiation, specifically, so we’ll use “rads” as the unit of toxicity. So, lets’ say a conventional nuclear reactor gives off 100 rads. Thorium reactors, according to the author, would give off “10,000 times” fewer rads than conventional reactors. Okay, 10,000 x 100 = 1,000,000. And 100 – 1,000,000 = -999,900. Thorium reactors, therefore, give off NEGATIVE 999,900 rads. Not possible.
I suspect what the author MEANT to say was that conventional reactors are 10,000 times MORE toxic than thorium reactors, which is NOT the same thing as thorium reactors being 10,000 times “less toxic”. Technically, there’s a difference between “X times MORE” and “X times AS”, but at values this large and imprecise, the difference is far smaller than the estimation error, so we’ll ignore it and say that conventional reactors are “10,000 times AS toxic” as thorium reactors. The inverse of this statement is that thorium reactors are 1/10,000 as toxic (or 0.0001 times or 0.01% as toxic) as conventional reactors. That’s 0.9999 times (or 99.99%) less toxic. But “10,000 times less toxic” just SOUNDS so much better, doesn’t it? Anytime someone is using inaccurate language to make something sound better than it actually is, you’d be wise to take EVERYTHING he says with a grain of salt. Thorium salt, if you prefer.
Regards,
Trevor

The good folks over at The Resilient Earth blog had a writeup along the lines of Mr. Hart’s essay, describing this technology being used in Hyperion reactors:
http://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/americas-atomic-folly

I care about the environment and think CO2 is good for it. I’d rather be around a plant with CO2 waste vs concentrated radioactive waste.

James Sexton says:
August 9, 2010 at 11:32 pm
There are other viable alternate energy sources, such as LFTR, but I really don’t believe we are going to be able allowed to pursue any. Hydrogen was my favorite. For some reason, it has all but fallen from the discussion of alternate fuel. Why? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_vehicle
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Because, as the article says, the fuel does not exist, it has to be manufactured which is a very costly and energy intensive process. Further, there is no infrastructure to manufacture, transport, store or distribute it, and it would take 50 years of intensive construction, costing on the order of $1x10E15, to create the infrastructure necessary to displace liquid fossil fuels. The hydrogen has to be compressed to 4000 psi, and H2 – the smallest molecule, wants very much to escape its containment; it is very difficult to make the fuel systems leakproof (i.e. SAFE) and to keep them safe. The maintenance of leak-checking and repairing is continuous; do not think for a minute that a vehicle that is 5-10 years old with 50K – 100k miles (and corrosion) will not be pissing hydrogen from every threaded and compression fitting ! In other words, don’t smoke in your car, or park it in your garage !
Keith Battye says:
August 10, 2010 at 1:11 am
When you consider that the use of hydrogen in transportation is dependent only on cheap , reliable, methods of generating hydrogen then extensive electrical power at reasonable prices is really the only obstacle remaining. Small, discrete, hydrogen generators could be established in homes, depots, gas stations and so on using the electrical distribution grid. This would overcome the issues surrounding large scale storage and distribution of hydrogen.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
“Small, discrete, hydrogen generators could be established in homes, depots, gas stations”
Keith, that is laughable (ROFLMAO !)
First, to generate significant quantities of hydrogen – rapidly – for use at a public facility like a gas station would require a warehouse sized building to provide the necessary surface area for the reaction.
Second, the hydrogen at atmospheric pressure will have to be stored in large vessels requiring a small building or two themselves.
Third, the gas will have to be compressed to 4000 psi which requires an electric motor or engine driven compressor, the size of which (for a commercial scale, like a gas station) is the size of a full-size school bus ! And it’s loud, REALLY REALLY LOUD !
Fourth, the high-pressure gas requires its own high pressure storage bottle system (like giant O2 welding bottles) which, for a gas station would also be around the size of a school bus.
Now, on a private scale – such as in your home – you can take all day to make hydrogen for a car so you can fill it each or every other night (you will have to because the range of even a small compact car will only be 100 miles – at best !), so you won’t need as large a system, but you will still need the equivalent of three or four Suburbans, in other words its own small house. But make sure it is FAR AWAY from the house you live in, because if anything leaks or goes wrong it will blow up like something in an action movie (not to mention how REALLY LOUD the running compressor will be) ! Oh, and it will have to be built to Class I Division I electrical standards for hazardous atmospheres (very, very expensive).
BOTTOM LINE : Hydrogen as a motor fuel is a fools pipe dream, and those advocating it are no different than the fools who rushed to San Fran or the Klondike during the gold rush years – it was only the guys who sold them shovels and clothes who got rich…………. If you’d prefer a 20th century equivalent, they’re no different than those who said (or still say) that fusion power is just around the corner ……….
cedarhill says:
August 10, 2010 at 3:44 am
Politically, this will simply not change over the next four Congressional election cycles due to the lead times of bringing energy on line. If you think $4/gal gasoline was bad, how about your electrical bill exceeding your mortgage and food bill combined. That’s were we’re headed. It’s simply too late. Converting to Smart Meters and such will help in a small way but energy needs will not decline.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Converting to Smart Meters IS the problem !!!
Don’t confuse Smart GRID with Smart METERS. Smart Grid will be a good thing for system reliability, but Smart Meters will allow the utilities to know exactly how much electricity you are using, and when. When combined with “Innovative Rate Structures” this will allow your utility to charge a lot more $$$ for electricity during “peak periods.” So you may use the same total KW per month as you do now, but you’ll pay a lot more for it ! Smart Meters will also give the utility the ability to turn off your (modern) appliances like your fridge or AC or washer or dishwasher if they think they need to. Initially such curtailment will only be during times of dangerously overwhelming demand, but later on, there will be electricity quotas, and if you exceed your allowable quota for the period, the utility will either charge you an additional premium on all electricity above your quota, AND/OR they may even curtail your usage (via the Smart Meter), depending of course, on the exact “Innovative Rate Structure” your local government approves in your area.
There is no other purpose for Smart Meters than doing what I described above, and as a leader of a local utility put it : “it is all about changing peoples’ behavior.”
SMART GRID = GOOD
SMART METERS = THE SINGLE BIGGEST THREAT TO YOUR ACCESS TO CHEAP, ABUNDANT ELECTRICITY

The European arm of the new Global Government in waiting is flexing its muscles!
http://synonblog.dailymail.co.uk/2010/08/eu-taxation-without-representation-but-has-britain-got-what-it-takes-to-fight.html
I’ll say it quietly once again my dear colonial friends, YOUR NEXT!

I strongly recommend you take a look at this site.
http://focusfusion.org/index.php
Cheap to build, cheap to run, no practical limits on fuel source, small enough for a localised solution, radiation (and CO2) free.

A number of people have commented that some “greens” do not favor low cost clean energy because it will encourage more population growth and resource consumption. I think this is true. However, I hope those “greens” who feel this way will consider the graph showing birth rate vs GDP on this page. Birth rates stabilize with higher GDP. Is it moral to deny others the standard of living that you enjoy?
http://energyfromthorium.com/2010/07/11/ending-energy-poverty/

Most of the skeptics I know are all for clean energy. They just don’t think WE NEED IT IN SIX MONTHS OR WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE.

Charles Hart says:
August 10, 2010 at 9:50 am
A number of people have commented that some “greens” do not favor low cost clean energy because it will encourage more population growth and resource consumption. I think this is true. However, I hope those “greens” who feel this way will consider the graph showing birth rate vs GDP on this page. Birth rates stabilize with higher GDP. Is it moral to deny others the standard of living that you enjoy?

Yes, birth rates stabilize with development. What you conveniently leave out is that if we are to stabilize birth rates at 9 billion people and Western Europe (not even US) levels of resource consumption, we will need another 5 planets to provide for them. And this will be just for a century or two at most, until the depletion of various mineral ores put an end to technological civilization.
And this doesn’t even consider economic growth. Our current economic system is such that it requires constant expansions, which invariably means more physical stuff being consumed. It is foolish to think that you can stay at current levels of Western consumption and sustain the economic system, it will collapse without growth. So those 5 planets become even more.
Living in the fairy tale world where free markets always bring the best possible outcome and resources are infinite surely feels nice. Reality is different

A good primer on Thorium reactors is to be found here:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.html
It includes molten salt cooled reactors as well as the more traditional fixed fuel element designs. The world is likely to shift from uranium to thorium as uranium gets more expensive in a few decades. The Chinese and Koreans are doing research on that now.
There are 59 large commercial nuclear power reactors being built at the moment, mostly in eastern Europe and Asia:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/reactors.html
Compared to none, that’s ZERO, new starts in the US in the past 30 years.
Plus, nuclear power stations are the only technology that includes decomissioning as part of the electricity rate structure.

GM says:
August 10, 2010 at 12:57 am
“You could only say that if you have zero understanding of what people like Hodlren are saying.”
It is clear to me that Graeme and others here have a better understanding of Holdren than apologists like you ever will. The misanthropic, Malthusian world view of people like John Holdren, Paul Ehrlich, Maurice Strong and Dave Foreman, to name a few, is both sickening and disgusting.
Many commenters on this site often joke about us skeptics/deniers being sent to re-education camps. I believe in free speech and appreciate that Anthony and the other moderators allow all viewpoints to be heard. However in my darker moments, when I read comments like yours that attempt to rationalise Holdren’s misanthropic statements I think a 2 to 3 month stay in a re-education camp for the Holdren’s of this world, and their apologists, might not be such a bad idea.
My fantasy re-education camp would be in a small village in a third world country. There participants would have the opportunity to enjoy subsisting on rice and noodles, drinking boiled water, and washing in rivers in to which untreated sewerage is released. The long nights without electricity would allow them plenty of quite time to reflect on the reality and quality of village life which is far different from the idealised fantasy penned by Hillary Clinton. I don’t think that most of them would last a week. But if they did they might start to understand why so many people from third world countries want to move to the west for a better life. They might even reflect on why the quality of life in the developed world is better and start to realise that it is due to a number of factors a few of which include freedom, democracy, a higher standard of education, clean water, nutritious food and abundant cheap energy. Late at night and hearing the neighbor couple “making babies” they might even take the next step and gather insights as to why urban populations in the developed world have the lowest birthrates where as third world villages have some of the highest birth rates.
It is a sad comment on our society that some people attempt to rationalize the misanthropic comments of John Holdren and the views of Paul Ehrlich. Worse yet they will reward the work of greedy, narrow minded, self interested people like Al Gore but remain blissfully ignorant of the work of people like Norman Borlaug who honestly care about their fellow man.

Solution to what?
There is no CO2 crisis. Warmer Is Better, anyway.
Everybody wants to get on the Alarmist Bus. Wait, wait! I have a Solution to the CO2 Crisis: chew gum, eat your children, buy a pony, dance in the sun, form a druid study group, ban toe fungus, shut down the public school system, enslave the market, etc.
But there Is No Crisis. CO2 is good for the planet.
Thanks a heap for all your thorium dreams, and I hope you get a big grant, but puleeease give the CO2 crisis mongering a rest. Thank you.
PS to GM — you are welcome to move to Cuba where they don’t have free markets. You’ll like it there, and we won’t have to put up with you any more.

redneck says:
August 10, 2010 at 11:40 am
My fantasy re-education camp would be in a small village in a third world country. There participants would have the opportunity to enjoy subsisting on rice and noodles, drinking boiled water, and washing in rivers in to which untreated sewerage is released. The long nights without electricity would allow them plenty of quite time to reflect on the reality and quality of village life which is far different from the idealised fantasy penned by Hillary Clinton. I don’t think that most of them would last a week. But if they did they might start to understand why so many people from third world countries want to move to the west for a better life. They might even reflect on why the quality of life in the developed world is better and start to realise that it is due to a number of factors a few of which include freedom, democracy, a higher standard of education, clean water, nutritious food and abundant cheap energy. Late at night and hearing the neighbor couple “making babies” they might even take the next step and gather insights as to why urban populations in the developed world have the lowest birthrates where as third world villages have some of the highest birth rates.

Simple questions: do you think all the problems of the third world would be easier or more difficult to solve if there wasn’t so many people there and the birthrates were at replacement level? The reality of life in a Third world country is precisely what we are trying to prevent from happening. What’s so hard to understand? BTW, it will not be long before similar conditions return to the West too, if we continue BAU.

It is a sad comment on our society that some people attempt to rationalize the misanthropic comments of John Holdren and the views of Paul Ehrlich. Worse yet they will reward the work of greedy, narrow minded, self interested people like Al Gore but remain blissfully ignorant of the work of people like Norman Borlaug who honestly care about their fellow man.

Those aren’t misanthropic comments. People look at what we know about how the world works (i.e. they study disciplines such as human ecology that are completely missing from the thinking of economists and free market ideologues), they look at the data about where we are now, they make conclusions about where we have to be and how we can (or can’t) get there. Nothing misanthropic about reality. Reality is indifferent towards human feelings. You can not ignore that, unless you believe in the bearded man in the sky, but he isn’t real anyway.
Again, what you described above was a classic picture of society suffering from a Malthusian crisis. That’s precisely what we don’t want and nobody is advocating that. But if you want to keep the AT high in the I=PAT equation, you have to lower the P accordingly. No way around that.

Phil’s Dad says:
August 10, 2010 at 9:38 am
I strongly recommend you take a look at this site.
http://focusfusion.org/index.php
Cheap to build, cheap to run, no practical limits on fuel source, small enough for a localised solution, radiation (and CO2) free.
Thanks for the link!

GM says:
August 10, 2010 at 10:59 am
“[…]Yes, birth rates stabilize with development. What you conveniently leave out is that if we are to stabilize birth rates at 9 billion people and Western Europe (not even US) levels of resource consumption, we will need another 5 planets to provide for them.”
You forget the law of supply and demand. Demand would rise, making raw materials and energy more expensive. With every prize rise, incentives for the development of more efficient production technologies increase vastly. Example: Todays LCD TV’s – their production consumes much less raw material than CRT TV’s of similar screen size.
” And this will be just for a century or two at most, until the depletion of various mineral ores put an end to technological civilization.
And this doesn’t even consider economic growth. Our current economic system is such that it requires constant expansions,”
No, not at all. Germany – where i happen to live – has a stagnating population level, a stagnating energy consumption, stagnating wealth. Still, we get along. I’m not going into the artificial subsidized blossoming of solar energy; that’s only a huge boondoggle; we get along even though we have to pay for that.
” which invariably means more physical stuff being consumed.”
Again, not at all. Software, miniaturization, multi-purpose devices, a shift in consumption patterns towards services, increases in efficiency can create monetary growth without increasing the consumption of raw materials. Even if the monetary value of the raw materials consumed increases, this does not necessarily mean that the tonnage consumed increases.
If raw materials stay cheap enough to encourage consumption, that just means that we have enough of them. But if more billions acquire our wealth, the prizes will rise and encourage, as i said, every measure that reduces the amount of raw material consumed, every measure that helps to switch away from an expensive raw material – say, from Li-Ion to NaS batteries where possible – , and every measure that increases efficiency.
It is this self-enforcing of innovation inherent in capitalism (or the prize system) that Malthusians like you don’t want to see.

Interesting idea, but violates the K.I.S.S. principle as it requires the development of – let me see – (1) Thorium-U233 alloys; (2) LiFl working fluid, with all the production and handling issues therewith; (3) use of helium (!) as a secondary working fluid in the steam production with various handling issues; (4) .. I lost interest after realizing that the “development” of such a reactor would require to development or invention of at least two and possibly three presently completely undeveloped technologies. Stick with PBR’s and gradually eliminate the pressurized water reactors. The tech development and research in the PBR’s is nearly complete and PBR’s could be produced – indeed, mass produced minus the fuel pellets – in the very near term .. sorry, within the next five years, with sufficient investment. No government money wanted.

Thanks a million Anthony for this article.

It’s important to remember that there can never be an energy compromise with warmers because ultimately they seek energy/resource deprivation…………………… to the point of genocide.

Interesting responses here, but there is also an awful lot of opinionating from inadequate knowledge, and negative generalizing about “the other side” that hinders informed debate. I still just want to build up information. So often, it’s not that one side is right and the other wrong, but that there are important truths and values on all sides.

There is an old saying: “Fish or cut bait”
Another: look before you leap.
… add any you can think of …
NONE of these can be compromised.
What would a compromise of up or down be?
What is a compromise of dead or alive?
There is no common ground between right or wrong.
It is fact or it is fiction.
Anything else is psychobabble.

ah, I’ve got it.
GM has arrived here, fresh from drinking in lots of information put out by those who appear totally committed to saving the planet (unlike us the unwashed). GM hasn’t yet begun to grasp the basic we all know here, that we’ve all got to do a bit of homework ourselves in fact-checking back to basics – and that this often shows that dirty is cleaner and clean-looking is dirtier. GM doesn’t yet understand that we the unwashed may actually be a lot cleaner (and greener) than those who at first sight look clean (and green).

This is another green herring.
We are ready in the US to begin constructing “Perfected” LWRs of the GenIII+ variety of nuclear plants in earnest in the next 12 months. Now the Greens say lets C-O-N-S-I-D-E-R a new kind of nuclear plant. It will only take 10-20 years to design, approve and gear up to build such novelties. Sadly, in 10 or 20 years, the Green leftists will have considered the new Nukes and decided …NO Nukes!
Screw them! I want to make them pay for their obstructionism. When we raise Utilities rates and check against the voting roles. Registered Democrats should get 100% of the increases. That seems only fair!

There is a website with an open-minded list of novel energy concepts and claims. A conservative reviewer would consider some of the more exotic ideas to be outright hoaxes, but it is fun to follow the ‘alternative’ technology. And, if one of the radical ideas actually works…
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Congress:Top_100_Technologies_–_RD

“Can common ground be found between “warmers” and “skeptics”? Can we identify energy sources that satisfy the concerns of both groups?”
Lucy Skywalker says:
August 10, 2010 at 2:37 pm
“Thanks a million Anthony for this article. It’s important to remember that there can never be an energy compromise with warmers because ultimately they seek energy/resource deprivation…………………… to the point of genocide. Interesting responses here, but there is also an awful lot of opinionating from inadequate knowledge, and negative generalizing about “the other side” that hinders informed debate. I still just want to build up information. So often, it’s not that one side is right and the other wrong, but that there are important truths and values on all sides.”
___________________________
The basic questions, AND the thoughtful response above, prompt me to make another observation: If History is indeed prologue to the future, it’s going to be a very, very bumpy ride; it’s not the science, it’s not the math, it’s the people that are the problem; and every little thing that makes every one of them who they are today, all 6.5 billion of them.

GM says: (August 10, 2010 at 1:05 am): [about naturally occurring crude oil] “And there are unlimited quantities of it, right?”
Probably not, but we’ll never run out of it.
If GM can wrap his head around that one, he’ll be half way to enlightenment. 🙂

GM says:
August 10, 2010 at 1:25 am
David, UK said on Finding an energy common ground between “Warmers” and “Skeptics”
If something is truly believed to be dangerous to human existence, you don’t impose a tax on it; you ration it, or in extreme cases you ban it
Precisely.
And knowledge. What about knowledge? Do you also propose to ban thinking?
What about the human brain? Do you propose to ‘ban’ that too?
Your solution is worse than the problem …

There aren’t many engineers in the string today. It is so easy to employ a priori reasoning (the kind of reasoning that a smart argumentative teenager uses on you because with no experience, he has no other kind to employ) in prescriptive policy advice. The neo-malthusians (Malthus was the quintessential a priori reasoner) have foist the engineer’s nightmare of wind mills and solar power on us and even though we knew they weren’t going to work as replacements for what we have, we allowed this expensive idiocy to go forward. We’ve also lost 50yrs of experience in nuclear energy development because of our forbearance – and they then produce studies that show it isn’t economic – I would say 50s technology for anything isn’t economic. In any case, it is certainly a heck of a lot more practical and economic than 5% efficiency windmills that work only when the wind blows.
The neo-malthusians’ a priori theorem that we are running out of resources has.a venerable history starting with Malty himself (a preacher by trade). The nineteenth century British economist Jevons had us running out of coal by the beginning of th 20th C (sorry on Bberry no links) with all the familiar disasters that that portended. The club of rome made a list of resources we would run out of. I recall one of them was zinc a commodity hat is used mostly for rust proofing sheet metal for culverts and barn rooves and the like. It illustrated that their was no understanding of the economics of resources. We don’t plan to “phase out” “scarce” resources. We let economics do this for us (by the way reserves of zinc are higher now than they were in the 50s!). By way of further illustration an engineer friend remarked that you could make a radio using only abundant materials if you had to – he quipped that heck you could make the case out of concrete. Ya see, the demand isn’t for zinc its for roofing and drainage. Please drop the phasing out of scarce commodities and move the discourse along.

I would be delighted to know if GM stands for General Motors.

@redneck says:
August 10, 2010 at 11:40 am
Redneck, I couldn’t agree with you more or have said it better. GM is a learned fool, who throws ad homs like hand grenades, and never has a citation to offer other than his gratuitous (second, pejorative definition) opinions.
I’ll give him one (first definition) off the cuff; the actual quote may be a little different: “A poor woman in the highlands of Scotland may bear 15 children in her life; a well to do woman in London these days can scarce bear two”. [Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776)].
And today, that’s where we stand – in Western Europe, Russia, Japan, China, and just about everywhere that isn’t Muslim (except, interestingly, the USA). The earth’s population growth looks like a graph Anthony recently posted about sea level rise – asymptotic. However, the demographic trends spell real danger for a world of progress, accomplishment and perhaps, happiness, another term invented or popularized by Mr. Smith.

The discussion of Malthusian scenarios is interesting.
It is always interesting that nobody discusses the real reason the third world has explosive reproduction rates when for centuries upon centuries populations were stable or growing very slowly. The reason is science in the form of medical advancements, and missionaries.
Populations were slowly growing/stable all over the world until the microscope was developed and cause and effect of diseases was discovered.
When doctors learned to wash their hands infant mortality and puerperal fever dropped dramatically. If you walk in old cemeteries in England, many graves have the man’s name and two or three wives, not because of harems 🙂 but because widowers needed a new wife to bring up children. One in three women died in childbirth.
Population growth depends on the number of living females. A man of 40 years was considered an “elder”.
Western society developed in parallel to medicine, resources that defied the Malthusian fears i.e. industrialization and energy use.
And then missionaries exported medicinal knowledge and medicine to the third world, in an unsustainable manner. Not only industrialization and energy use was hidden from the third world, but also their energy and other resources were exploited to keep and develop the western life style .
We cannot turn the clock back. There are too many people in the third world because of bad decisions of the first. It behooves us to search for unlimited energy and give it to the hoi polloi as soon as possible , because the sooner the populations stabilize the sooner they will start declining. In parallel make a massive effort to educate women. Educated women limit their reproduction when means are available to them, from contraception to abortions. In Greece for example, we are not reproducing ourselves and I think it is the same in all of Europe.
It may be that people who think like GM are really afraid of genetically disappearing, because, having started on the diminution road we will be much much less than the still growing third world.
The problem of the old generation when there is unlimited cheap energy is solved because with unlimited energy food and shelter will be available and a different value standard than the money standard will have to be found.

James Sexton says:
August 9, 2010 at 11:32 pm
“There are other viable alternate energy sources, such as LFTR, but I really don’t believe we are going to be able allowed to pursue any. Hydrogen was my favorite. For some reason, it has all but fallen from the discussion of alternate fuel. Why? ”
Show me the Hydrogen Mine, and I’m sure there will be a big rush for hydrogen cars.
Show me the Battery-stuff Mine, and I’m sure there will be a big rush for electric cars.

JimF
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/09/finding-an-energy-common-ground-between-%e2%80%9cwarmers%e2%80%9d-and-%e2%80%9cskeptics%e2%80%9d/#comment-453946
“But your question really is about nuclear waste. President Carter in 1977 outlawed reprocessing spent reactor rods, for “noble” reasons (I’ll leave it to you to find out why). But get this: U235, the easily fissionable isotope of uranium, comprises 0.5% of natural uranium (U238 makes up 99.x% of the rest, with U234 – a product of uranium radioactive decay – a minuscule, short-lived component of natural uranium).
When used in a reactor, U235 has to be concentrated to something above 5% (and about 20%+ for an atomic bomb). The rest of the reactor rod is U238 and binding materials.”
Thanks for all the above info and without hopefully being too pedantic I assume by ‘reactor rod’ you mean ‘fuel assembly’?
Also you do a good job of informing readers of this thread that the most of the uranium that forma part of the fuel pellets within the fuel pins within the fuel assembly is indeed watsed if the ‘spent uranium’ is not reprocessed and so recovered but you fail to mention that this will only be the case i.e. that the ‘spent uranium’ become suseful if we re-fabricate the ‘spent uranium’ (largely non-fissile U238) into fuel assemblies that are irradiated in a ‘breeder’ reactor e.g the fast breeder reactor (FBR).
FBR’s and other ‘breeders’ only ‘breed’ more fissile material than they consume (in the case of U238 it breeds Pu239) if they are designed and operated in such a way as to have a ‘positive breeding coefficient’. In the case of almost all the experimental and small scale power producing FBR reactors built so far (including teh IFR) their positive breeding coefficient has been NEGATIVE i.e they have consumed (more often than not considerably) more fissile material than they have ‘breed’. Indeed Sir Walter Marshall a former Chairman of the UK’s Central Electricity Gnerating Board (CEGB) often referred to the FBR as the ‘Slow Breeder Reactor’ for that reason i.e. he thought ‘fast breeder’ was a complete misnomer as the ‘fast’ actually refers to the energy of the neutrons used in the fission process and not that rate at which fissile material is ‘breed’ in these reactors.
Do we currently need FBR or ‘breeder’ reactors based on the Thorium fuel cycle yet? I don’t think so. At least not until we allow the developing world to exploit nuclear power of a means of generating relatively cheap electricity as we do at present. If we did this then clearly the price of uranium ore would go up and we would need to find further economic reserves of uranium to cope with the demand. This would be some decades if not at least a century off though I suspect. Should we start spending money on researching and further developing these ‘breeder’ technologies and in particular showing that we can have reactor designs with positive breeding coefficients? Most definitely. Should we reprocessing the ‘spent uranium’ now inorder to retrieve the U238 to fuel these commercial demonstration reactors? No! As we have more than enough reprocessed spent uranium fuel sitting in storage facilities (used to be in a car park in Harwell for many years) to ‘fuel’ these reactors in the UK at least.
In the UK what we need is to get on and build our next generation of Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) base don tried and tested light-water reactor technologies like the EPR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Pressurized_Reactor) or the AP1000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000). In the UK we must avoid our tendency to build each different reactor we operate to yet another different design as we did in the past for our Magnox and AGR NPPs. Instead we must as the French have largely done choice only one design and build and operate at least 10 NPPs to that same design. If we don’t and we don’t do that NOW! then for sure ‘our lights will be going out’ within the next 10 years. IMO we should not reprocess the spent fuel from these new reactors until such time as it makes economic sense to i..e not until we have committed ourselves to a fully developed design of ‘breeder reactors’. In the intervening time the spent fuel assemblies should be stored in cooling ponds either ‘on site’ or whereever we would most likely build the next generation reprocessing and fuel fabrication planets for this future generation of ‘breeder reactors’.

kwik says:
August 11, 2010 at 4:48 am
LFTRs looks very promising. I wonder why China isnt going for it then?
Instead of the coal plants? Is it 4 they build every week now?
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China needs a quick-fix solution in matching electrical generation to the industrial investments. Hence, even conventional nuclear is too slow to built for their own good, while coal fired boilers/turbines come cheap and by the dozen amd most probably with a buy-2-and-get-one-free sort of purchase.
Hence, investing in an unknown such as Thorium Nuclear is risky for the Chinese. However, some countries, including India are researching Thorium reactors.
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There is one thing which has been bugging for some time now. US and Russian (was going to say Soviet..oops) ships run on nuclear. These must have some kind of compact, extremely safe and reliable nuclear reactors that fit in one ‘small’ corner of the ship or sub. Wouldn’t these be also compact, extremely safe and reliable for any type of seafaring vessel such as a bulk carrier? Or would the cost be prohibitive? Or is it just fear of public fear? Who said that there is nothing to fear but fear itself?

It doesn’t matter whether we use thorium or uranium in reactors; the thorium reactor actually breeds uranium, which is the fuel that fissions (uranium reactors breed plutonium, but more in a moment). The waste products are essentially identical in each case: unburned fertile material, residual fissile material, and fission products. Mind you, only the fission products are truly waste, and they are the reason that fuel assemblies are removed from reactors: they “poison” the neutron production by absorbing neutrons. There’s plenty of nuclear fuel left to “burn”; there’s too much “ash” impeding the reaction. This is why reprocessing is so important. By separating the (usually short-lived) fission products from the remaining fuel, that fuel can be used further. Normal uranium reactors breed enough plutonium that a considerable portion of their total power generation is provided by plutonium fisson.
Nor should we forget the CANDU reactor, which uses unenriched uranium as fuel (Hatlo Hat Tip to the clever Canadians, who invented the concept because they couldn’t afford Manhattan Project-style enrichment facilities). It goes to show that we need not be overly bothered by the need for enrichment. Once any reactor can be put into operation, breeding fissionable fuel is a logical next step. (Better than enrichment, because the bred fuel can be chemically separated from the fertile material.)
What about the real nuclear waste? Store it underground if you want…or dump it into the ocean. If you work out the concentration of the chemical constituents of seawater, you will discover that a given cubic kilometer of seawater already contains thousands of tons of dissolved radioactive elements. Concentrated ionizing radiation is potentially harmful, but we live in an environment of weakly diffuse ionizing radiation, which may be essential to our health. Our granite countertops are radioactive. Your wife or husband is radioactive (carbon-14 anyone?). Also, radioactivity is not a form of leprosy that can be passed on to other materials.
Finally, don’t get too worked up over fusion reactors. Most fusion reactions that are practicable result in the creation of 14 MeV neutrons, which have a nasty habit of transmuting materials into radioactive isotopes (not a contradiction to the above; neutron irradiation is not radioactivity). This creates what has been called the “first wall” problem: every so often the entire inner lining of a fusion reactor will have to be removed and disposed of because it will have been rendered radioactive by the neutron exposure and possibly also because the neutron flux will have degraded its material properties (disruption of the crystalline lattice of the metal). Yes, the reaction is clean, but there is collateral radioactive waste to be dealt with. This fact has been known by those in the business since the 1970s (when I was shocked to learn the truth from my grad school professors).
With enough nuclear power, we can synthesize any chemical fuels we need in an endless cycle: hydrogen, hydrocarbons, aluminum, boron…you name it.

Looks like I am late (as usual) for this discussion. I have been a fan of the LFTR for a long time.
Let’s put some back-of-the-envelope calculations here:
A LFTR requires about 1 ton of thorium per GW and year. It would produce about 1 ton of fission products (nuclear waste) per year. A pure thorium cycle LFTR does not produce any transuranics (very long lived radioactive elements) like an U235/U238 reactor.
About 83% of the fission products have half-lives of 1 year or less (many have half-lives of only minutes). After 10 half-lives 99.9% of those <1 year hl isotopes decay to a radioactivity level where they can be considered harmless (remaining activity equal to or less than common uranium containing ore). So for those 83% that means after 10 years.
The remaining ~17% of fission products have half-lives of ~30 years. Meaning 170 kg per year from a 1 GW LFTR have to be stored for 300 – 500 years (10-16 half-lives, decaying to 0.1% to 0.001% of original activity). Because of the decay rate, there's a limit of how much total radiactive fission products there will be at any time. The limit is reached when the total decay rate (in kg/year) of those stored fission products is the same as the production rate of 170 kg/year. Which means no more than a few tons for every 1 GW reactor at any time.
If we use the usual "green" energy measurement of "enough to supply x households", while assuming 1 kW consumption per household, then a 1 GW LFTR will supply 1 million households while consuming 1 ton of thorium per year. Or 1 g of thorium per household per year.
According to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium (yes, I know)
Common soil (or rocks) contains 12ppm Thorium. At a density of 1.6kg/m^3 it means about 83 kg of common rocks (a few shovels full) have enough energy in the form of thorium to supply a family for a year. The mount of dirt moved to just build the household’s house contains enough thorium to supply the electrical energy needs for that household for 2 or more generations.
The US government buried in the 1960s 3200 tons of thorium in the form of thorium nitrate in the Nevada Desert. That material sits there in 50 gal drums, covered with a shallow layer of dirt.
These 3200 tons of already mined thorium fuel alone, using LFTRs, could supply all the US electrical energy needs (2005 level) for over 7 years.
Re: the Malthusian argument that we run out of materials like phosphates and so on is easily refuted. The elements that make up these materials after all don’t go away. They stay right here on earth. When we “consume” them we really just combine them with other elements and change their distribution on earth. Given enough cheap energy though, we can recycle ANY material.
All it costs us is a relatively abundant element like thorium. And not much of that either.

Redneck says:
So consequently I can write like this otherwise the GM’s of this world couldn’t understand me. One advantage though, there is nothing more unnerving and frightening for a liberal/progressive than running into a educated redneck. It turns their whole world upside down.
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Sort of like Randy Newman’s song, Rednecks. Brilliant musical sarcasm.

Lady Life Grows, if you’re never satisfied because of fallout, then simply r–
[Self-snip; I came to my senses just in time. In my defense, I point out that the poster couldn’t possibly have been serious either.]