This article was sent to me by Charles Hart, and I have to say, I really like this quote from Curt Stager in Fast Company. Between the extremes of Hansen’s pronouncements about coal death trains and people in Britain having to choose between food and fuel, this is where we need to be.
This is the middle ground I believe we can all agree on. Forget reconciliation attempts, let’s just get busy.
Stager writes:
In other words, I want you to help save the world. If green nukes are even half as promising as their proponents claim, then supporting their development may be our best hope for a sane, sustainable, and abundant energy future.
He’s talking about Thorium reactors, which we’ve covered here on WUWT before. Here are some of the stories:
Finding an energy common ground between “Warmers” and “Skeptics”
US Energy Independence by 2020
China announces thorium reactor energy program, Obama still dwelling on “Sputnik moments”
David Archibald on Climate and Energy Security
Curt Stager’s article in Fast Company is well written and appeals to the layman, cutting through a lot of the tech clutter related to thorium based nuclear power. It is also encouraging because we have a former nuclear protester having a “light bulb moment”, and it’s the good old incandescent kind, not a CFL twisty bulb. I recommend reading it, and passing it along. – Anthony
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Will Green Nukes Save the World?
BY FC Expert Blogger Curt Stager
Amidst the darkening clamor over global warming, declining fossil fuel reserves, conflicts over oil supplies, and rumors of heavy-handed governmental attempts to curb our carbon-hungry lifestyles, a welcome glow of hope is emerging on the energy technology horizon. To most viewers, it looks green, or at least “greenish.” And–perhaps surprisingly to those of us who remember Three Mile Island and Chernobyl–it’s radioactive.
As a climate scientist, I’m well-aware of the perils of global warming and I’ve long favored a timely switch to alternative energy sources. However, I’ve also drawn the line at nuclear power, having been an anti-nuke protester in college. I was therefore horrified when prominent environmentalists first began to suggest that nuclear power is preferable to fossil fuels, as though their apocalyptic climate rhetoric had trapped them into minimizing the risks of meltdowns, radioactive waste, bomb proliferation, and nuclear terrorism.
But my attitude changed recently when I raised this subject with an environmental scientist friend whose son is training to become nuclear engineer. “He’s working on a new kind of reactor,” my friend explained, “It can’t melt down, it makes only minimal waste, and it can’t be used for making bombs. It doesn’t even use uranium, which is rare and dangerous to handle; it uses thorium instead, which is common and safer to work with.”
…
Some proponents envision “a nuke in every home,” because self-contained thorium reactors can be built small enough to fit on a trailer truck bed. Such green nukes would dam no rivers and produce no acid rain or greenhouse gases, and their electrical output could create clean hydrogen fuels from water as well as seemingly limitless direct heating and lighting.
Full article here:
http://www.fastcompany.com/1727914/will-green-nukes-save-the-world
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Here’s what Thorium looks like:
Learn more about it here
You can even buy Thorium in the raw on as a refined rod, on Ebay.
Nuclear fuel is not so scary when you can put your hands on it so easily, is it?
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Someone put together a story of thorium “mash up” and posted it on YouTube:
The style gets rather choppy and erratic at times, but if you would like a backgrounder that’s only about 16 minutes long, this video is a good start.
Thousands of tons of uranium have gone into coloured glass and pottery with no health effects. There is much more uranium in a concrete basement producing harmful radon. Uranium is less toxic than lead, and less harmful as shrapnel in the body.
That Star Trek episode in the first comment is ridiculous, people live on rich thorite deposits in India. It’s pretty sad when SciFi promotes Greenpeace paranoia.
MarkW says:
February 16, 2011 at 4:58 am
I’ve always thought it a bit ironic, that many of those who believe in catastrophic warming, are also convinced that “cheap fuels are running out”.
In order to get to catastrophic warming one needs to burn about 25 billion tons of coal per year. Prior to 2002 the inflation adjusted price of steam coal on global markets had been dropping for 30 years. In 2002 the Chinese were exporting steam coal at $27/ton. It would be easy enough to extrapolate the dropping price trend along with rising consumption trend out to 25 billion tons a year.
China is no longer exporting steam coal, they are importing it at at a price of $125/tonne. The price of steam coal on global markets has been rising for 8 years and shows no signs of stopping.(India was also an exporter and they are now an importer).
It’s awfully hard to extrapolate the current world consumption of 6-7 billion tons of coal a year to 25 billion tons a year in the face of 20% year on year price increases.
It has taken some in the climate movement a few years to see that their concern in 2000, an ever expanding supply of cheap coal is no longer valid.
Of course the coal industry, hoping to lock utilities into 40 years worth of coal purchases isn’t doing anything to dispel the myth of ‘unlimited cheap coal’ either.
The coal industry and the climate extremists both need the myth of ‘cheap coal forever’ in order to sell their solutions.
The US is the Saudi Arabia of coal. Coal mine productivity east of the Mississippi has been trending downward for 10 years, from more then 4 tons per man hour to less then 3 tons per man hour. There is a reason that the Southeastern US Electric Utilities all have plans to build nuclear power plants, they can see the productivity trends in Eastern US coal mining.
Thorium reactors are worthy of study, no doubt, and will find a place in the energy mix if they are truly efficient and cost effective. Frankly, I have my doubts, but have no problem whatsoever with further research and development. After all, that’s the power of free markets. I just don’t want to see huge amounts of government subsidies going into thorium reactor development, just as I don’t approve of government subsidies to wind and solar, or ethanol for that matter.
Actually, were it not for government interference, the energy crisis would be solved, just not in the way those currently in charge would like. Here we had Xerxes a couple of days ago telling us that oil is a fuel of the past, yet anyone with a mind who wishes for civilization to exist on a large scale knows this to be drivel.
Were the Gulf to be opened to drilling again, and Alaska fully explored and engaged, and the new techniques learned in natural gas drilling fully operational in oil fields, the US could be fully energy independant in 5 years.
I know of an oil well redrilled in a supposedly dead field, but using modern techniques of fracking, that is now producing more oil than it ever did. And there are thousands of wells where this technology could be used to the same effect, allowing billions of barrels of oil to be recovered. Many of these old fields had only 40% of the available oil recovered from them. And relatively new fields, such as the Bakken, are seeing exponential increases on the amount of oil that can be recovered. New estimates put the Bakken reserves at 24 billion barrels vs. the government estimate of 4 billion. Add trillions of feet of new natural gas reserves and we’ve hit the jackpot, people. The US has more energy potential than any country in the World.
The new technology that caused the revolution in natural gas is now coming into play in the oil patch, and if not prevented by the government, will allow us the amount of time we need to develope new sources of power. Plenty of time. And the Chinese believe it, because they are buying up huge amounts of American hydrocarbon energy potential as we speak. This should be the main worry when it comes to energy production. Should we let the Chinese control our energy future? But that is a question for another post.
Why the love affair with thorium. Hyperion reators use uranium, they are safe and they are commercially available right now.
http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/
people in Britain having to choose between food and fuel, this is where we need to be.
What madness this is. Without sufficient fuel, how will the fields be prepared for planting? How will the crops be harvested? How will the food be processed? How will the food be transported?
The world isn’t going to run out of natural gas, coal or petroleum any time soon. Even higher levels of CO2 would result in more food being produced. Tractors need portable fuel, not electricity. Electric vehicles can’t be practical, which is why virtually none are being purchased.
This is the sort of madness which can only result in massive revolutions, which, by the way, have begun, in good part because food is simply far too expensive, in case no one noticed. When people can’t afford to feed themselves and their families, people revolt.
It seems people are finally re-waking-up to the reality of energy density… only a hundred or so years after Einstein’s good year.
Erik says:
February 16, 2011 at 5:05 am
So, Eric, whaddya think? Will the Geo-Greenists dismiss and subvert the Thorium Fairy?
(BTW, there is also a Fusion Fairy. Watch this little seminar held Dec. 21:
http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/article/focus_fusion_solstice_seminar_now_available_online/
About an order of magnitude cheaper than Thorium, and could kick in 10-20 years sooner. )
Anthony;
You realize that your call to focus on something clearly workable to produce clean power without smashing the economy is a “Put up or Shut up” challenge to Geo-Greenism?
Someone carped in comments above that we’ll end up buying our small efficient thorium reactors from the Chinese. Mebbe so, but that still would work fine, IMO. The point isn’t “Who’s gonna make billions by selling reactors.” It’s the downstream consequences of clean, cheap power. Many greenies are on record as deploring them, starting, natch, with Ehrlich: “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
My bad in assuming Stager uses the term denier … he doesn’t seem to throw it around …
My point that he was ignorant on the science of nuclear power until recently still stands …
“…Forget reconciliation attempts, let’s just get busy…”
I totally agree. Pointless arguing about the falsified CAGW conjecture, let’s just get on with developing cheap energy sources like thorium, methane clanthrate, mass produced small scale uranium reactors…e.t.c., e.t.c.
Without cheap energy sources the progress of mankind will be slow and the huge populations of the third world will have to resign themselves to a short life of poverty, hunger and hardship.
I don’t know what will solve our future energy needs, and neither does anyone else, that is the thing about the future, it isn’t hasn’t happened yet. The best way to support that future energy is to let the private sector and the market place decide. Whatever energy sources that emerges as a future energy source should do so through competition driven by market forces, and not through government intervention.
I’m curious about something having to do with shifting in a significant way to decarbonized energy. And it also involves fractional distillation (FD) at refineries. The scenario is decarbonized energy cannot be used everywhere. Airplanes require jet fuel and that is a product of fractional distillation. Trucks and locomotives require diesel fuel which is another product of FD.And ships require bunker fuel which is the last drop in the barrel after the other products have been used. What remains I presume is used to pave our highways.
The question has to do with economies of scale and the FD process. Currently there is a kind of balance between what is pumped out of the ground and a market for the distilled products produced. If thorium and other innovations come along this balance will be upset in some segments. There will necessarily be abundances and these will have to be stored (costly, too), or there will necessarily be reductions in production which will lead to rationing, and there will be waste products for which there is no longer a viable market. That would be products formed in the FD process unavoidably so that other products can be produced. Lighter distillates are created on the way to heavier distillates.
Any scaling back invokes the economies of scale law which requires that creating less product costs more to produce/unit than large scale production. Any requirement for storage is a recurring cost. Commodities we now have affordably and in abundance and which have led to a good quality of life are going to disappear, I think.
Then there is the problem of where do you store things? The French nuclear waste problem has been raised here – the solution is to let future generations deal with it in the same cavalier way the US government passes off debt to our unborn. What will future generations do with our old oil sludge?
So the question(s) is what do we do with the refinery by-products, and can we afford to scale back production? If there is no satisfactory answer then before we do any of this maybe we need to prove that CO2 is the problem some people think it is.
I am tired of people claiming to be scientists who believe in Global Warming, yet are completely ignorant as to the efficient creation of reasonably safe nuclear reactors with very little environmental consequence.
They call skeptics of Global Warming ‘Flat Earthers’ and ‘Deniers’ yet they cannot see the same image in themselves when they talk about energy sources.
Nor do they understand the fallacies in their own arguments that there are fuels that should be abandoned because they can’t last… If a fuel can’t last then as it runs out the price will raise and people will move away from it. Perhaps it is because when I was in school in the 80’s I was promised we would run out of Oil in 2010, or that there would be massive droughts in 2005 that would destroy all the crops and we would starve to death, or any number of other promises that turned out to be false that has made me skeptical of promises of the future with no direct correlation today.
All the while they use an appeal to authority ‘I am a climate scientist I know what will happen’ when the truth is most of the research ignores possible alternative scenarios for warming and thus is fairly easily subjected to skeptical minds. Add into it the EXTREME predictions where it is all gloom and doom ( have you ever read a scientist stating that Global Warming has potential benefits? Or as they now call it ‘Climate Change’ )
This does not mean I cannot be convinced that Global Warming is really occurring due to CO2, however there is so much noise in the data that I have examined as to shake my confidence in it being a problem. I am as of yet unconvinced of feedback loops behaving the way that ‘scientists’ believe them to behave. I am tired of policy makers excepting the reports of these scientists as doctrine.
I wish in the USA we were pushing for more nuclear power as these plants could create wonderful energy sources.
For those unfamiliar with the elements, here’s an educational little video (very short.)
http://www.privatehand.com/flash/elements.html
There is no “middle ground”–truth is truth, numbers are numbers, and honest scientists are skeptical and realists (meaning they don’t bend their results with politics or religion). Truth isn’t negotiable–it just is.
A tall order? Perhaps, but that’s why scientists are so essential.
Uranium-fuelled small reactors can be made very safe. Read about SLOWPOKE [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Canada].
IanM
There is an old adage: “if it sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true.” This has clearly proven to be true with electricity generation from windmills and solar panels. I suspect the same logic applies to thorium reactors.
Thorium based reactors must be a much more difficult thing to manufacture on a commercial basis than has been suggested here. Otherwise – and I know this sounds obvious – someone would already be commercially producing thorium reactors. Of course, it could all be a ‘Big Oil’ conspiracy.
Stress the word “commercial”.
Mike Mangan says:
February 16, 2011 at 4:17 am
“There’s a litmus test. A large chunk of the left will oppose ANY form of efficient cheap energy. Cheap energy means the whole world breeding and consuming and that’s what they hate most of all.”
But that is a fundamentally illogical position. The more enriched and educated a population the less they breed.
I think the answer is more religious in nature, a new form of self-flagellation and guilt. Sure, they think people are bad, but it isn’t enough to reduce the population. Human beings, being such monstrous creatures, must be made to suffer for their transgressions – the biggest sin of which is existence itself.
Original sin anyone?
I don’t know if they articulate these thoughts, but I think that is what drives the hard-core environmentalists on a subconscious level.
There is no middle ground to be had from an alternative form of energy production for electricity. Thorium may provide an alternative to uranium for nuclear power stations, but this is but one source of energy for electricity – and more expensive than coal and gas. Electricity is no a reasonably-priced or practical alternative for cars, so thorium is only of limited use.
A better middle ground to go for is on policy. Rather than state “we must do something”, we should ask “Can we make the world a better place for future generations by trying to limit CO2 emissions?”
Skeptics would reply “no”.
But anyone who follows the Stern Review’s Cost Benefit calculations would also reply “No” if they allowed for the policy-making process which will lead to ineffective policies. We will impoverish ourselves and future generations more through the policies to curb CO2 than the catastrophic scenarios of Stern or the UNIPCC.
I have tried to demonstrate this argument graphically at
http://manicbeancounter.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/climate-change-policy-in-perspective-%e2%80%93-part-1-of-4/
“Once they figure out that natural gas and most oil is not really fossil and much more prevalent, produced from subducted/cooked ocean floor and the Earth’s core, the “cheap fossil fuels are running out” mantra will have to die.”
That sounds like Thomas Gold’s Deep Oil hypothesis. Geologists — perhaps humbled a bit by the Wegner-Continental drift fiasco — have tended to treat it with some respect, but there really is virtually no evidence that any current gas or oil production does not have biological genesis. Neither is there any reason to believe that commercial production of non-biologically produced hydrocarbons will ever work out.
Gold was an interesting guy and often right — particularly about the inability of the Space Shuttle program to ever come close to it’s stated objectives — but my impression is that few people who know about hydrocarbon production think he was right about this one. My feeling is that they, unlike the climate scientists, don’t have a quasi-religious position to defend. They’d be perfectly happy to find and pump non-biological hydrocarbons if such existed in commercial quantities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold
thegoodlocust says:
February 16, 2011 at 11:29 am
“– the biggest sin of which is existence itself.
Original sin anyone? ”
Couldn’t agree more TGL, spot on. The medieval world of invisible evil spirits and demons in the air around humans has its modern parallel in the ‘evil’ omnipresence of CO2. Depressingly, this is why real science, done well, will not alone vanquish. In religious terms, it’s a crusade or a jihad for its cultists and rationality plays no part in those things. I watched Inhofe being interviewed in a corridor by Hertsgaard and some followers. I could see the utter hatred and blind anger in their eyes. They’re the ones who have no middle ground, I fear.
Mark V says:
February 16, 2011 at 7:43 am
“Several years ago I was part of a foundation tasked with looking at clean energy futures in the UK.”
There’s your problem. You are in the UK. The Brits invented the digital computer, the CPU, the jet engine…. on and on. But never capitalized on it. I was at a complete loss to understand why. I think you’ve now explained that for me.
I have a good information source concerning the Battelle National Laboratory Idaho activities. The Lab is doing very little research concerning Thorium reactor research because of lack of funding resulting from Congress’ failure to adopt budgets for the last few fiscal years. Continuing resolutions based upon the last budget preclude new research. So one of out two national labs engaged in nuclear energy research is hogtied by the Democratic controlled Congress’s failure to adopt an new budget since 2008.
This is another example showing that Obama’s promises to develop new nuclear power generators is false. If he wants more nuclear power he must act affirmatively to fund essential research and engineering. Actions still speak louder than words.
LarryOldtimer says:
February 16, 2011 at 9:34 am
“The world isn’t going to run out of natural gas, coal or petroleum any time soon. ”
The world isn’t going to run out of diamonds anytime soon either. But if the price of extracting coal ends up being same as the price of extracting diamonds I’m not going to be able to afford electricity produced by coal.
The loss(income) statement for UK Coal is pretty sad, at a mine mouth price of 45.70 pounds(75 dollars) per tonne UK Coal lost money in the first half of 2010.
http://miranda.hemscott.com/static/cms/2/4/2/6/binary/8337229825/16526658.pdf
The ‘cheap coal’ in Europe,Africa,Asia and the Eastern Seaboard of the US has already burned up.
There is a nice big pile of cheap coal left in Wyoming. I’m sure the good folks in Wyoming will be enjoying cheap energy from cheap coal for 1,000 years. The rest of us need to start thinking about other options.