A Review of 'Thorium: energy cheaper than coal' by Robert Hargraves

But rgb, will solar panels ever produce enough energy in their lifetime to both manufacture themselves, all inclusive, *and* supply years of energy to consumers? Will they ever become energy neutral? Maybe so if they become both printable and durable.
Also, I don’t put much hope in fusion. Instead of making plants smaller and smaller, those installations would be huge best I can tell.
See where I am coming from? Liquid salt reactors produce enough temperature to manufacture enough energy to clone themselves, start to finish, fuse carbon into hydrocarbons, produce fertilizer, various chemicals, desalination using the waste heat, etc, etc let alone electrical generation. Don’t think even fusion holds all of those characteristics at a small enough scale to be feasible and inexpensive and distributed.
Of course, I am taking a thousand year view.
Of course they will. The cost of energy is built into their price. If one can buy a cell at full retail now (as one can) and turn a profit on it (as one can) during its lifetime you have by definition paid for the cost of the raw materials and all manufacture costs (including the energy required) plus a profit for not one but several middlemen. They already produce more energy in their lifetime, all inclusive, and supply years of energy to consumers. That’s obviously implicit in the assertion that one can buy a panel and amortize its cost over roughly 2/3 of its lifetime. I’d like the margins to be better, amortize its cost over 1/3 of its lifetime, but it already easily matches the investment cost-benefit of the three successive high-efficiency heating/air conditioning systems I’ve had to buy over the last four years as the original equipment for the house wore out. In fact, if I hadn’t just (sigh) spent some $20,000 over four years on those replacement systems I’d serious consider putting 5 kW on my roof right now. However, I’m old enough (57) that I wouldn’t recover the investment (made now) until I was 70, and who knows if I’ll be alive and in this house at this point. It’s also still a bit dubious that I’d be able to recover the remaining investment in higher sale price of the house — my house is probably already over improved for the neighborhood, with high end energy efficient windows and heater/AC units and a full walk up finished attic. Nice to live in, but housing is depressed and not necessarily a perfect investment.
Inside the decade, though, as prices fall, I rather expect to bite the bullet at a long-term profit. It’s simple arithmetic.
Fusion, of course, is a speculative technology at best. The latest report on /. was that at least one group thinks they have the SHORT run pathway to 1000x energy gain in special magnetic pinches — if they are right that isn’t a thousand year solution is is an “infinity” solution. Humans will have evolved to not be human by the time fusion fuel and energy is depleted in our solar system. Or we’ll have gone extinct, of course. Either way fusion equals the dawning of a new age, literally, the fusion age, where energy is never again a limiting resource for humanity and where whatever the reality of the CO_2 situation is, it won’t matter, as by MID century there simply won’t be any more burning stuff to make electricity, anywhere on the planet, ever again.
Thorium isn’t bad or crazy, but it isn’t as good as fusion if fusion at a megawatt (plus fuel) in per gigawatt out works out. Also, the cost of the fuel itself will be far smaller, as it is easier to extract deuterium from sea water than thorium from ore. Finally, it is a lot safer, and produces a lot less radioactive/toxic waste, and the nuclear proliferation risk from fusion plants is zero.
Of course, the 1000x gain may not work out. Or it may continue to be “ten years from now” like it has been for 30 years or more. Speculative, no doubt, but so is thorium to some (but a lesser) extent. In the meantime, solar is FWIW pretty much a sure thing — a marginal technology already but poised to become enormously profitable with the nearly inevitable progression of work already in progress that is very, very likely to maintain the downward progression in cost per watt that we’ve seen for the last twenty or thirty years. If storage technology “hits” on any of its many high-return (high risk) projects that are underway in the meantime, even fusion will have long term competition from PV solar. Or (if you like longer shots) if any breakthrough in transmission occurs — room temperature current tolerant superconductors made out of engineered nanomaterials or whatever.
The point is that coal is dandy, natural gas dandier, but they’re still basically transitional technologies and fuel sources for large scale energy production whether or not they have major negative environmental consequences. Personally, climate skeptic or not, it wouldn’t be that surprising to me if at least coal does (it’s hard to see any negative impact from burning methane unless CO_2 is catastrophically bad, and I doubt that it is). But there may be other negative aspects of mining methane. Time will tell. Building solar cells isn’t zero impact either. Nor is building nuclear plants of any sort. One of many things that annoys me about the environmental impact assessments is that they don’t really do a fair comparison of the “costs” and “benefits” of the alternative technologies. The free market doesn’t either — it’s too easy to foist hidden costs off on future generations or the commons (see Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” if you haven’t read it yet).
In the end, energy production and consumption is a Commons issue, one that requires regulation and a fair assessment of real costs and benefits. Sadly, the sociopolitical Universe of the human species so far has proven absolutely incapable of the rational solution of this sort of problem, so we just muddle along in a state of both ignorance and an appalling distance away from any sort of economic/environmental optimum. The free market does pretty well, as long as it is prevented from abusing the commons, but what are lobbyists for if not to extract commons exceptions that grant the recipient great wealth at everybody else’s expense (with little passed on benefit to compensate). But I digress.
rgb

There are those who have grown weary, and think that Fusion is far away. But in reality it is NOT. ITERbuilding in France, is both the last Fusion physics experiment; and it is at the same time, the first protoype of a commercia lFusion reactor.
ITER will produce between 500 and 700 megwatts, thermal, of Fusion energy, ten times what it took to initiate the reaction, and will run for the better part of an hour each time it ignites a fusion plasma. That is far, far longer than the few portions of a second that instabilities take to form. ITER will show that the long list of plasma instabilities are now catalogued, understood, and now conquered, and ameliorated.
The large amount of energy produced for that length of time provides substantial amount of engineering data to makeclear we understand and know all the engineering problems constructing a commercial Fusion reactor. It’s succesor will be able to add power much more reliably to the grid than any windmill or solar array.
ITER will provide more power than any windmill or solar array. in existence by a factor or 50 for ITER and probably thousands of times for its succesor, and the succesor as planned will be the first to add Fusion generated power to the grid.
The only reason ITER is not harnessed to provide grid power is because we chose not to do so. Since after all, we want the flexibility to experiment, and we can save a few millions in not buying the generators and ancillary equipment. But we could do so, and it is more continuous than any windmill in existence!
We could start designing and building its succesor the first commercial Fusion plant within a mere five years. We could build five or six succesor Fusion plants for what has been wasted by the US alone by the present Administration, for quixotic windmills and solar arrays and failed crony capital Green companies.like Solyndra, First Green etc. .