Guest essay by David Archibald
It is a significant fact that half the protein the world eats has its origin in fossil fuels. We are all aware of the green revolution that, amongst other things, saw dwarf strains of wheat increase yields by a couple of hundred percent. There was another revolution in agriculture sixty years prior to the green revolution. That was the development of the Haber-Bosch process of combining hydrogen and nitrogen to produce nitrogenous fertiliser.
The plants that produce that fertiliser, the source of half of the protein we eat, run on natural gas or coal. One day these fossil fuels will run out. Does that mean that half of our population starves? It does if we don’t have a way of producing nitrogenous fertilisers cheaply using something other than natural gas or coal.
And it won’t be sunbeams or wisps of the wind that will keep people fed. Those things barely pay for themselves, if that. Take the case of the Ivanpah solar facility in California built at a cost of $2.2 billion. Rated at 392 MW, Ivanpah is a near 20-fold scale up from the previous largest solar thermal facility of 20 MW in Spain. Despite all the engineering that went into the design of Ivanpah, it operated at least 40% below design in 2014.
The chief economist of the International Energy Agency, a warmer by the name of Fatih Birol, once said ‘One day we will run out of oil, it is not today or tomorrow, but one day we will run out of oil and we have to leave oil before oil leaves us.” What is true of oil, the liquid fossil fuel, is also true of the solid, coal, and the gaseous form, natural gas. One may quibble about the detail but the overall effect will look something like this:
Figure 1: Fossil Fuel Production 1800 – 2300
Oil production will be the first to start the long decline to oblivion. We can fix the problem of declining transport fuel availability by a form of alchemy that converts coal into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. And we will be doing that. But it will be another short term fix until the coal runs out. You might think we have a lot of coal. We had a lot of oil too, once – until we burnt it. Converting coal into the transport fuels we need will double the rate of our coal consumption. And our coal endowment will be largely gone in our grandchildren’s lifetimes.
If we combine the data from Figure 1 with world population growth, we get this figure:
Figure 2: Per Capital World Fossil Fuel Production 1800 – 2300
Per capita fossil fuel production falls off a cliff in 2030. Projections of agricultural land available to be brought into production suggest that the system might cope with growing demand at least up until the late 2030s. Fossil fuel availability though indicates that prices will start accelerating well before then.
There is no alternative – nuclear energy is the only energy source that has any prospect of making good the looming fall in energy supply. Only nuclear power has any hope of being cheap enough to provide the energy to cook up the slew of chemicals and fuels we need to maintain our high standard of living. But it won’t be nuclear power as it is commonly understood. That is power plants burning U235 and using water as the coolant. Civilisation took a wrong turn way back in the 1950s when that technology became dominant in the nuclear power industry.
There are a number of reasons why it was a wrong turn. Firstly, U235 is only one thousandth of the nuclear fuel available to us. The best nuclear fuel, thorium, is eight hundred times more abundant. If you like to believe in a Creator who made the earth as a paradise for us to inhabit, U235 is the nuclear match made for us to light the fire that will sustain civilisation indefinitely. We are still burning that nuclear match though and we should have already moved on from that.
The second big problem with nuclear power plants running on U235 is decay heat. You can’t turn off nuclear power plants instantaneously. They continue to produce heat for a while after the reactions have been shut down. If the cooling water doesn’t circulate for some reason during this period, then there is a good chance you will get a hydrogen explosion. This is what happened at Fukushima which had three reactors blow up due to hydrogen explosions.
The question now being asked about thorium reactors is, if they are so wonderful, why haven’t they been developed yet? The only major company that once expressed an interest in developing molten salt thorium reactors was Teledyne Brown. There are a number of startups in the thorium space but none seem to have traction yet.
Perhaps the reason is that nobody has looked past the development of a commercial thorium reactor, a wonderful thing in itself, to the enormous commercial opportunity that follows from that. Let’s assume that each thorium power plant is 250 MWe, the same size as the conceptual design at Oak Ridge National Laboratory 50 years ago. Assuming no economic growth that required a higher rate of build, just replacing declining fossil fuel production to 2100 would require the building of 14,500 units at 250 MWe. The build rate would get to about 300 a year by mid-century. The rate could be 30% to 40% higher than that if carbon-based transport fuels are going to be created from hydrogen from electrolysis and carbon scavenged from forestry and agricultural waste. Also assuming that each unit lasts for sixty years before it has to be replaced, then the ramp up of replacement units in the second half of the century is just as fast as the initial ramp up as per Figure 3 following:
Figure 3: Number of 250 MWe nuclear reactors required by year to 2100
Thorium molten salt reactors, without the need for all the backup safety systems that U235 nuclear plants have, should be no more expensive to build than coal-fired plants. This is an overnight capital cost of $3,246/kW as opposed to U235 nuclear at $5,530/kW. At that rate, a 250 MWe plant would cost about $800 million. Building 300 per annum would provide a revenue of $240 billion per annum.
To put that in perspective, in the first quarter of 2015 the commercial division of Boeing sold 184 aircraft for $15.4 billion. That is an average revenue of $84 million per aircraft. The list price of a 737-800 is $93.3 million. Annualised, Boeing has a revenue of $60 billion per annum from its commercial aircraft division. Our prospective thorium reactor builder would become four times larger in the base case.
That will be the reward for saving humanity from a bleak future by developing the thorium molten salt reactor – owning an enormous industrial enterprise.
David Archibald, a visiting fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., is the author of Twilight of Abundance (Regnery, 2014)
His name is very similar to Faith Broil.
In the 21st century energy will come from…
3rd place – Conventional Nuclear
2nd place – Gas
1st place – King Coal
Thorium molten salt fission is one nuclear possibility. Prototypes have been built and run for a few years. But there are others. Travelling wave reactors–TerraPower, backed by Bill Gates, being just one fission example. Much more speculative, high Beta Fusion (Lockheed Skunkworks claims). Most speculative, LENR based on the weak rather than strong force as positd by Widom Larsen. The phenomenon is almost certainly real, and ot cold fusion. But whether it can be harnessed commercially is completely unknown.
In the absence of a climate crisis, we could divert billions from climate science to sorting out properly the best nuclear options, then proceed on them when ripe. One of thr many distortions introduced by CAGW and radical Greens.
“Thorium molten salt fission is one nuclear possibility. Prototypes have been built and run for a few years.”
Got a reference for that assertion? I didn’t think so.
Yes I do and therefore you are obviously ignorant of the following fact. Oak Ridge National Laboratories ran a Molten Salt Reactor for 5 years. “The salt was loaded in 1964 and nuclear operation ended in December 1969 and all the objectives of the experiment were achieved during this period”.[1] There are others, but I will leave that as homework for you.
Let me put it to you bluntly, Gamecock, Thorium reactors have been built, are being built and will be built.[2]
Which leads me to the following prediction. Thorium reactors will be the main stay of energy for thousands of years into the future[3] and for Uranium[4], whether you like it or not.
Hay, don’t take my word for it, look it up yourself.
Regards
Climate Heretic
PS You must be a Troll or a Watermelon
[1] Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment
[2]Thorium
[3] How long will our supplies of uranium and thorium last?
[4] Breeder Reactors: A renewable energy resource
Climate Heretic May 17, 2015 at 4:06 am
Except that the MSRE did not demonstrate full thorium breeding cycle, and only ran at full power, if that’s what 7 MW* is, for less than two years.
The MSRE was a 7.4 MWth test reactor simulating the neutronic “kernel” of a type of inherently safer epithermal thorium breeder reactor called the liquid fluoride thorium reactor. It primarily used two fuels: first uranium-235 and later uranium-233. The latter 233UF4 was the result of breeding from thorium in other reactors. Since this was an engineering test, the large, expensive breeding blanket of thorium salt was omitted in favor of neutron measurements.
[…]it operated as hot as 650 °C and operated for the equivalent of about 1.5 years of full power operation.
The result promised to be a simple, reliable reactor. The purpose of the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment was to demonstrate that some key features ofthe proposed molten-salt power reactors could be embodied in a practical reactor that could be operated safely and reliably and be maintained without excessive difficulty. For simplicity, it was to be a fairly small, one-fluid (i.e. non-breeding) reactor operating at 10 MWth or less, with heat rejection to the air via a secondary (fuel-free) salt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment
* Reference to 7 MW:
The Taichung power plant in Taiwan is the largest coal-fired power station, at 5,780 MW.
The Surgut-2 Power Station in Russia is the world’s largest natural gas power station at 5,600 MW and the 19th largest plant in the world.
In Japan, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant is the world’s largest nuclear power plant at 8,212 MW. It is also the fifth largest power plant in the world.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2013/08/26/worlds-39-largest-electric-power-plants/
Climate Heretic –
Yes, Thorium wil power the world for thousands of years – no matter HOW much more industrialization occurs. Once the reactors are online, others will follow.
The last time thorium came up on WUWT, someone commented that Thorium reserves weren’t infinite. I took the thorium % in the crust and figured out how much the Thorium on Earth would last. It came out to about 14 billion years. Since that is pretty much the time from the Big Bang until now, I thought that that was close enough to infinity for all practical purposes. At 3 generations per century, 30 per millennium, that comes out to about 420 million generations of humans.
And if we last beyond 14 billion years, we can always use what is on the Moon for a few more billion years.
Are these numbers real? I just took the numbers that others provide for how much Thorium exists. Maybe we can’t access all of it in the crust. Maybe only 10% of it. That should be pretty conservative. I’d think I’d still go with 1.4 billion years as pretty freaking long.
http://media.photobucket.com/user/TheCuteWoofer/media/Smilies/Weird/bsmeter.gif.html?filters%5Bterm%5D=bullshit%20meter%20gif&filters%5Bprimary%5D=images&filters%5Bsecondary%5D=videos&sort=1&o=0
The Chinese, at a very senior level, are investing heavily in taking the shelved Oak Ridge design as the starting point for a thorium reactor. There are some interesting challenges, though.
Lord Chris,
I am an ex-nuclear engineer. CANDU
Aside from the corrosion issues inherent with salt and metal tubes, what is the downside the Chinese are witnessing?
I’d be more inclined to follow INEL’s Integral Fast Reactor (IFR)design which was demo’ed with the EBR-II. This would be able to make use of the spent LWR fuel (albeit reprocessed) for initial core load. The thorium reactors would either need a serious program to produce 233U from current LWR’s or start with 20% enriched uranium.
Both the MSR and IFR designs would have the problem of dealing with volatile fissions products that are currently left in the fuel with current LWR designs. The IFR at least would keep the metallic fissions products in the fuel.
One good thing that Obama did was to stop Yucca Mountain so the US still has 72,000 tonnes of spent fuel rods sitting around in dry cask storage. From memory, those fuel rods contain 660 tonnes of fuel-grade plutonium. Thorium reactors need 1 kg of fissile startup fuel per MWe of capacity. So those fuel rods are good for the first 2,600 reactors of 250 MWe each. The doubling time on thorium reactors may mean that enough U233 is generated for the complete build out.
David,
My recollection was that the dry casks to be stored in Yucca Mountain were supposed to be retrievable.
The IFR can breed with the 239Pu/238U cycle as well as the 233U/232Th cycle, whereas the MSR needs to use 233U/232Th due to the relatively high non-fission thermal neutron absorption cross section. The IFR can make use of the decay heat from metallic fission products, being a fast reactor the breeding is affected as much by the neutron poisons present in fission products. In addition, the EBR-II ran for longer and at higher power than the MSR at ORNL. One disadvantage of the IFR is dealing with the material damage from the high fast neutron flux (which would be far worse in a D-T fusion reactor).
The Chinese buy 747s because they really can’t make that great airliners yet, how are they going to make a thorium reactor?
I dunno about the reactors or the 747s, but they do seem to know how to build towering skyscrapers, which must be seen at least informally as a sign of wealth.
Chinese city Tianjin near Beijing has under construction 3 towers which will stand 597 m, 530 m, and 488 m respectively, with another proposed at 588 m. Suzhou, Wuhan, and Shenzhen all have 600 m or taller skyscrapers under construction, all rivaling or exceeding the world’s current 2nd tallest building in Shanghai, 632 m.
16 of the 25 tallest buildings under construction worldwide are in China
Contrast with 1 WTC at 546 (with spire), or the Willis Tower at 527, also with spires.
Noted in case anybody was wondering what the Chinese are doing with all that $$$. Meanwhile, they can buy good airplanes from the United States, Russia and several other nations who will happily sell their wares to anybody with $$$.
Tom Trevor
You are implying that the US has not built a thorium powered power generation industry because it is hard to do. Making a product as large and complex as a 777 or 747 cheaply does not make Thorium impossible. The US chose to make fast breeders. That was a policy decision in part to keep the cost of the fuel and plants and waste management high.
The Chinese or Indians don’t need to build everything. There are two forces working against Thorium power: fanatical resistance from the anti-nuke industry and entrenched investments in expensive alternatives. India and China and Russia and South Africa are not bound by either of those limitations. Why should they be? They are quite capable of making complex things when they want to. Examples are the Russian heavy lifters for space flight, the Rooivalk helicopter, the Silkworm missile and the Mars satellite by India. It would not surprise me if all four were running Indian software.
Steve P –
It’s not just skyscrapers, dude. The Chinese also lead the world in high-speed rail miles, and they haven’t stopped building them. How many miles of high-speed rail does the USA have? ZERO.
Do not discount how much work and design go into skyscrapers, either.
While we sit and blow a little bit of hot air, at a non-official level like this blog, the Chinese officials have committed all sorts of resources at thorium reactors. India, too.
Basically, we in the USA are blowing it out our rectal orifices while others are puttig scientists and engineers on this.
WHY? Because they see that the principle proved itself 50 years ago, and that it is a matter of engineering it now, and that is what they intended to do more than five years ago.
NO matter WHAT naysayers here blow out their bums, this is happening, people. WE in the USA are not and WILL not be part of the process – except as customers. Someday in about 10-15-20 years our cities will be buying LFTRs from China or India.
I learned a lot a couple of years ago reading on how much effort it was eearly in the Industrial Revolution to transport ores and coal. Early on people were building canals in indiustrial Europe and the very young USA. Lots of people went bankrput in the process, and then the canals became obsolete very quickly with the advent of trains. And many people went bankrupt with THOSE, too. And then trains only really lasted maybe 130 years or so before interstates and trucking took over most of industrial transportation – and airlines took over passenger transportation.
In all of that, the main beneficiaries were the people of the countries with canals and rail systems, and they still are.
Some of the people working on thorium are going to go belly up, but the people of the countries which have LFTRs will again be the beneficiaries.
* * *
Someone paraphrased Kirk Sorenson above, the Indians are now committing themselves to LFTRs instead of trying to run conventional reactors with thorium – and that they are sorry that they had not decided this earlier in their program.
I always thought that trying to stuff thorium solids into some bastard form of present technology was a really stupid idea. It seems the Indians see the light.
Dang, thought I could post just the BS Meter itself. Sorry! Remove.
But, the whole exercise deserves the BS Meter.
Any “forecast” going out over 30 years, even 10 to 20 is PURE BS! And worthless.
Max
Right click on the BS meter and copy the URL
http://i375.photobucket.com/albums/oo194/TheCuteWoofer/Smilies/Weird/bsmeter.gif
OK, here goes :
http://i375.photobucket.com/albums/oo194/TheCuteWoofer/Smilies/Weird/bsmeter.gif
Is that the best B.S. meter one click can buy?
Where is my lame-o-meter?
We really don’t need thorium at all. We only use about 5% of the energy capacity of conventional fuel rods. If we engaged in a reprocessing programs, we would not need to use even one tiny bit more of enriched uranium. We already have enough fuel to satisfy our needs for a couple of centuries sitting in spent fuel storage. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/smarter-use-of-nuclear-waste/
Thorium reactors also can burn nuclear waste: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/187917-startup-gets-funding-for-its-molten-salt-nuclear-reactor-that-eats-radioactive-waste
Probably true, but it is a solution looking for a problem, in our case. It’s fine for a place that has large thorium reserves but little Uranium (like India) but we have enough uranium to last for centuries.
As usual, crosspatch is correct. We have plenty of resources. Only misguided enviro-politics stops us from using them.
True Db, but my understanding is that the storage of conventional nuclear processing is a huge issue, and my understanding is this solves that, both eliminating over 90 percent of the waste, and leaving a product with a greatly reduced 300 year 1/2 life. As mentioned, freed resources from the green nightmare, and natural economics would likely sort this out fine, with all resources working in a natural harmony.
Once energy was reliable and abundant, then the energy to produce coal to liquid would also be abundant. We will run out of energy, when we run out of planet.
The entire universe, and earth included, is literally awash in energy.
That, IMO, is the long and the short of it.
The rest is all details.
Choose which stream to dip a toe into.
Actually, the percentage of extracted energy of light water reactors is about 0.7%, not “about 5%”.
Thorium extracts 99.3%, with less than 1% waste products – of which a good percentage is radioactive materials that are useful in medical applications. Sorry that it is late right now and that I don’t feel like looking up exactly which ones.
Also, the reason all of that waste is waste is because we do NOT have the means to make use of the over 99% wasted uranium 235.
According to Mendeleeve, it is hydrocarbons, not fossil fuel.
Check his table for an example of his thinking.
Since ~1857, everyone who has predicted a hydrocarbon shortage has
been wrong. (Check Julian Simon for a list)
Big oil, oil states, regulators, and greenies have all conspired to try to make us believe that
hydrocarbons are rarer and more expensive than they actually are, albeit mostly in an
unspoken way.
Carter getting rid of our breeder reactors, while the world in general did not, made us much less competitive. Nuclear in whatever form the market decides, is the answer for electricity.
Portable fuel will be hydrocarbons.
There are a number of particularly Russian scientists who believe that our so called ‘fossil’ fuels are actually abiotic and produced by processes around the earths outer molten core. The stuff near the surface is a result of them breaking out through fissures created in the earths crust.
The moon Titan demonstrates how these processes can be created.
My gut feel says that this makes a lot more sense than ‘fossil’ fuel which needs a lot of belief in some shifty theories.
Titus, the abiotic theory for liquid hydrocarbon fuels (there are methane hydrate examples for abiotic gas) has been disproved so many times that it turns you into a reverse denier. Please study up. No global warming. No abiotic petroleum. On all the observational evidence for both.
Is the methane on Uranus biotic? The other trace hydrocarbons? There are no abiotic hydrocarbons in the solar system? Well, glad that is settled.
Abiotic hydrocarbons abound in the universe. The question is the source of all or most hydrocarbon deposits on earth.
I like that ‘reverse denier’. Makes me feel special. Thanks.
I think this will keep raising its head for as long as the hydrocarbons keep coming. I don’t see any reason to deny either right now. This was an interesting read:
http://www.csun.edu/~vcgeo005/Energy.html
Cheers……..
In fact, PAHs may well have catalyzed the formation of RNA, so biotic hydrocarbons might owe their existence to abiotic hydrocarbons.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/PAHWorld.png
sturgishooper says:
Abiotic hydrocarbons abound in the universe. The question is the source of all or most hydrocarbon deposits on earth.
Repeated for effect. The answer is clear to most thinking readers.
And no peak oil. Because it too has been disproved many times.
Clear for coal, sure. Less clear for oil. Not at all clear for natural gas. Or am I not thinking?
/Mr Lynn
Mr. Lynn,
There are methane seas on Titan:
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s–eycebr_u–/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/18s3qc80vyx1hjpg.jpg
[Methane is natural gas.]
DB,
It’s not just methane. Complex hydrocarbon compounds are also abundant, to include chain molecules, like the PAHs, which contain perhaps 20% of all the carbon in the universe. They formed as soon as the first generation of stars made the first carbon billions of years ago.
sturgishooper,
I agree, but there are some interesting questions. Methane seas are found on Titan. Are methane seas found anywhere else in the Solar System?
If not, why on Titan?
[BTW, I was just answering L.E. Joiner’s comment: “Clear for coal, sure. Less clear for oil. Not at all clear for natural gas.”]
Uranus
DB,
I know, but mentioned PAHs because not everyone is aware how common hydrocarbons are in outer space, to include interstellar space.
I know of methane lakes on no other body in the solar system, but I’m not a geo-astronomer but a humble, down to earth, terrestrial geologist. Among moons, Titan is unusual for its size and atmosphere. It’s also obviously cold enough for liquid methane to form.
I know that. What Sturgis said was:
“On Earth.” On Earth, as I said, “Clear for coal, sure. Less clear for oil. Not at all clear for natural gas.” My guess is that natural gas and maybe much petroleum are abiotic in origin. Your “thinking” response was cryptic.
/Mr Lynn
L.E. Joiner,
My apologies if I misread your comment. I thought you were saying @6:17 that it’s not clear that methane is abiotic.
As I suggested, Titan is large and has a thick atmosphere but is still very cold. It has a solid surface (rock hard water ice). Like many other bodies, it has a lot of hydrocarbons. The rocky inner planets either have tenuous atmospheres, are too hot or lacking in surface and atmospheric hydrocarbons, the hydrogen in their atmospheres having long ago faded away into space.
The solid cores of the gas and ice giants are not well known, if at all.
The other, smaller icy moons generally lack substantial atmospheres.
How do you ‘disprove’ the idea that oil and natural gas are abiotic? The Russians, who seem to care about such things, worked out the step by step energy path needed to turn rocks and water into oil under heat and pressure. It is nowhere as deep as the outer core. It is the outer mantle – 100 km down for light oil. 30 for natural gas.
Then they built the equipment to demonstrate it. That alone proves it is possible and provides the theoretical work needed to explain it.
Our methane seas are frozen in clathrates on the bottom of the water seas.
In fact, PAHs may well have catalyzed the formation of RNA, so biotic hydrocarbons might owe their existence to abiotic hydrocarbons.
____________________________________
Hmm, perhaps all those thick coal seams, containing fossil fern leaves and fossil insects, were also created abiotically. It all makes sense now. When magma gasses cool, they form themselves into fern leaves. Simples.
I am not sure it is disproven (abiotic origin) as not proved.
Some theories of solar system formation are rather detailed as to temperature of certain zones, driving out volatiles, etc.
But how much of the original volatiles in the proto-disc would have had to remain in the mix for earth to have a very large amount of organics below the crust?
I think the answer is clearly…not much. One would have to thing, seemingly, that nearly every trace of organic volatiles were driven out of the interior of the earth before the crust solidified.
Am I wrong, or did much of the proof involve looking at chemical fingerprints of certain molecules in petroleum, and ascribing their origin as being only producible by life processes?
Silver ralph
May 18, 2015 at 4:09 am
It is a long way from RNA to ferns. I assume you made the leap in jest.
Elsewhere on this blog I’ve written what I consider the source of Carboniferous and Permian coal deposits to have been, ie the “newly” (Devonian) evolved seed-bearing vegetation which was inadequately decomposed before burial due to lack of the requisite fungi, which hadn’t evolved yet.
Re Titan’s Unnamed Methane Lake, I propose we name it Lake Le Pétomane.
When a person states that one day we will run out of oil or gas, they are showing their utter ignorance of the economics of the free market. The world is almost literally awash in hydrocarbons. The issue is NOT one of supply but of the cost of amounts of hydrocarbons in a form suitable for the particular application.
I don’t want to burn anything to generate the electricity that I need to run my home air conditioner when I can use clean and safe nuclear power. But as with many issues in modern society, government has intruded to regulate towards nuclear power plant design that can also produce the predicates of nuclear weapons and have mandated designs that are inherently unsafe. That is to say, are not walk-away safe. This is the mindset that leads to storing spent fuel pellets on top of the reactor so that the failure of the cooling system in an unforeseen way leads to massive release of core fuel in the atmosphere and ground water.
I look forward to viable LFTR designs based on Lithium fuel. I also look forward to LENR power as it is being developed. But we have needs for power now and we have to deal with the issue of delivering reliable power now. So, these things take time and awareness.
The free market is fully capable of making these decisions if the full costs of every aspect are transparent and real. But please don’t fall for this absolute nonsense that we are going to run out of oil and gas. It is simply impossible in the biosphere as large as the one we have.
+1
buckwheaton says:
The free market is fully capable of making these decisions if the full costs of every aspect are transparent and real. But please don’t fall for this absolute nonsense that we are going to run out of oil and gas. It is simply impossible in the biosphere as large as the one we have.
Correctomundo, Señor Buckster! We will never ‘run out’. The price may rise. Even a lot. But we will never, ever, ‘run out’ of fossil fuels.
As the cost rises, alternatives will be adopted. In econ, it’s called the principle of ‘substitution’. But the climate alarmist scaremeisters are almost universally economic illiterates, so they do not understand the idea of substituting a less expensive power source for something more expensive.
Correctomundo, Señor Buckster! We will never ‘run out’. The price may rise. Even a lot. But we will never, ever, ‘run out’ of fossil fuels.
_______________________________
Except, of course, that Britain has run out. And in just 40 years – a blink of the eye in civilisation terms. And what goes for the UK microcosm, also goes for the world macrocosm. You just have to work out a probable bell-curve.
R
Was there not a huge new petroleum reservoir found recently,
right smack bad in the hustle and bustle of southern England?
http://fortune.com/2015/04/09/has-britain-just-discovered-a-new-oil-bonanza-under-southern-england/
Or maybe even smack-dab. (That is a Texas oil term, quite technical in nature.)
And nothing against David, but the idea at the end of the post that business hasn’t realized the profit potential is naive at best. This is like claiming that because the government wouldn’t fund stem cell research, a cure for cancer was pushed out 20yrs. Pharmas don’t need government funding to research something that may cure cancer. The profit potential for that cure is MORE than worth the research $$. Same with clean energy.
The unstated motivation that drives politicians is control. You’ll never see a politician announce that something is good, and free. And you’ll never see a politician give UP control over anything in the name of the greater good, even if it’s blatantly obvious.
Fig 1 just looks like one of the peak oil/gas disaster graphs that have been doing the rounds for years ow.
Is there a citation for the graph please?
Nay lad, the real industrial age is just getting its second breath, having had a sip green tea, girding its loins now onwards, ensuring improvement in the well being of mankind as a whole
What I want to know is when we’ll see peak baloney? Since before I was born we’ve been ‘running out of oil’ and yet for decades that peak just keeps getting higher. And I’m really getting sick of seeing graphs that show us at the top right now, and it’s all down hill from here. Guess what. In 10 years the peak oilers will still be making graphs that show we’re still just reaching the peak. And 25 years from now. And 50. Ect Ect Ect. We’ll run out of reason to drill it before we run out of oil to drill for.
I have an oil energy book from 1919. Technical kind. Has “running out” of oil in 50 years… or 1969….
There is typically always 40 to 50 years of reserves since spending money to search for more is daft then. I’ve seen that duration of reserves in technical estimates from 1919 to now. It is essentially a constant.
What I want to know is when we’ll see peak baloney? Since before I was born we’ve been ‘running out of oil’ and yet for decades that peak just keeps getting higher.
________________________________
And the 1st century Romans said the Empire will never end.
And the 2nd century Romans said the Empire will never end.
And the 3rd century Romans said the Empire will never end.
And the 4th century Romans said the Empire will never end.
And the 5th century Romans said the Empire will never end.
And the 6th century Romans said….. Well actually they said nothing, because the Empire had already ended – along with the deaths of countless millions of people who depended upon the ‘system’ surviving.
Do you ever think in the longer term?? Or is next week an entire epoch, in your view?
R
So, the most up to date research has concluded that the trajectory of fossil fuel usage will match the trajectory of the Roman Empire?
Maybe it will match the trajectory of China instead, or that of the Muslim population on the Earth.
Hmm?
or that of the Muslim population on the Earth?
_________________________
Even that may crash soon, once people cotton on to what IsIam really is. Nothing is forever – not even fossil fuels.
R
David, don’t get caught in linear extrapolation of today as to what we are up against in the future – remember Malthus was worried he wouldn’t even be able to roll over in his grave because of the weight of horsepoop he would be buried under. Talk about peak anything is a collectivist notion. Technology hasn’t failed us in thousands of years, so why would it fail us now. The only thing that could cause this well honed problem solving magic to fail is the regulatory environment – that is the “limits to growth”. That and a fragile, “liberal”, self-immolating education system that could turn out dumbo engineers who scored high in PCness and didn’t take the math option. A healthy regulatory (or unregulated) environment for innovation with the age old motivation by reward doesn’t need tinkering with. Also see my earlier post on resource provenance- there is a lot more fossil fuel resources than you think:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/05/16/thorium-the-last-great-opportunity-of-the-industrial-age/#comment-1936699
I am an oil explorer and I did my honours thesis on a coal mine, so I can think of a lot of fossil fuel resources. The wake up call for me was that I missed the CBM boom here ten year ago because I thought that gas was second prize. Suddenly the north Asians were paying near the oil price in energy content terms for LNG. In June 2004, and yes we know the month, the world flipped from 70 years of inherent oversupply to a permanently tightening market. Re technology saving us, I didn’t write this piece for the education or misinformation of the masses. It was written for an audience of one.
David Archibald
I write to ask for a clarification. You say
OK. Please say why you posted it on WUWT if it “was written for an audience of one”?
Richard
Think we’ll ever have “peak regulations”.?
No. Once they have a regulation for everything they will start regulating the regulations.
“Thorium molten salt reactors, without the need for all the backup safety systems that U235 nuclear plants have, should be no more expensive to build than coal-fired plants. “
Perhaps a Thorium molten salt reactor will need less expensive backup system, but it will still need plenty of them. The primary coolant will still need to be handled as if it was radioactive.
If I may, I would like to urge proponents of LFTR and other Thorium based reactor designs to “zoom out” and look at the bigger issues involved. The focus isn’t the reactor, it is the Thorium fuel cycle. LFTR’s promise is a conceptually safe reactor design married to an as yet unproven, untested, continuous reprocessing of a highly radioactive working fluid from the reactor core. Think of the marriage of a metal smelter and an oil refinery in a hermetically sealed environment on the same site as the reactor.
The muscle of LFTR requires we create LFTR kidneys to remove reactor poisons from the blood of the LFTR core. A conventional reactor can run for a thousand days before changing fuel rods. An LTFR mush have it’s core recycled every ten days.
This reference from the Appropedia (see “Ease of Reprocessing”) has more detail.
It then goes on to say:
All the salt has to be reprocessed, but only every ten days.
It goes on for several more paragraphs…. but I think you understand how I equate this as a cross between smelting and fractional distillation in an oil refinery in a sealed environment.
It isn’t the physics that is holding back LFTR. It is the chemistry and metallurgy.
Even when we solve the technological problem of the reprocessing, who wants a smelter or oil refinery in our back yard. So there is still a NIMBY problem with a safe reactor.
A good reason for writing articles like this is that it flushes out current knowledge. Appropedia also say that the volumes to be reprocessed are very small. All very encouraging.
The reactor itself looks very safe. The LFTR fuel reprocessing might even be much safer than conventional U-Pu reactors with LTFR having much shorter half-lives of the waste products.
The Appropedia makes this fallacious argument:
Note 1: 800 kg per gigawatt-year, 2.5 kg per gigawatt-day [ = one 10,000,000 kg coal unit train] is a impressively small amount of radioactive waste. Fantastic! — If True. I strongly suspect, however, it only counts the fission product ash from the core and does not count all the materials that come into contact with the reprocessing equipment and working fluid. An oversold claim.
Note 2: this does not follow. — maybe only 0.01% is waste, but you are processing 10% of the core per day through fractional distillation of an intensely radioactive fluid, the equipment and safeguards will be sizeable.
Continuous, remotely controlled, reprocessing of the core, at a rate of 10% of the core per day, of a high-gamma ray, high temperature molten-salt amalgam of Thorium, Uranium, Actinides, and a dozen other fission products is no easy feat.
Note well that the 2-fluid core (U-233 core, Thorium blanket) is mechanically more complex, but allows for a simpler reprocessing. A 1-fluid core is the mechanically simpler design (and the one most talk about), but requires the more complex reprocessing scheme. So it is important not to confuse the differences.
Stephen Rasey – See some of Kirk Sorenson’s videos on what those waste products are. He lists several of them as highly DESIRABLE products, for medical applications. Sorry that I don’t have the info in front of me.
My favorite element is molybdenum.
Mostly because I just like to say it…molybdenum.
Yet the people who mine and work with the stuff call it simply “molly” ( maw’-lee )
They must be got no heart 🙂
Izzat Molly B Denim ??
I tend to agree with you and disagree with the original article. I’ve studied and published on fuel cycles for years. Thorium is simply NOT a game changer versus uranium. The waste from thorium/U233 is little different than the waste from uranium/Pu239 – some ways actually worse and some ways better. U233 is just as nice bomb material as Pu239. Anyone who tells you that thorium lacks nuclear proliferation concerns is on drugs or lying; there are many clear explicit peer-reviewed articles on that & i’ve done the calculations myself & the IAEA “significant quantities” on U233, U235, and Pu239 are all similar. Molten salt reactors (whether thorium/U233 or uranium/Pu239 or a hybrid) are potentially very interesting and have potential safety advantages, but the chemistry and metallurgy issues are nontrivial. And, the proliferation issues for molten salt are not as simple as some claim because current practise involves counting and tracking a limited number of fuel assemblies. I am not claiming that proliferation resistance and monitoring in a molten salt reactor is more difficult than reactors with fuel assemblies, only that its not necessarily straightforward or without issues to be resolved. As a nuclear engineer, i would be thrilled if thorium had magic answers to the challenges of uranium-based nuclear power. Sorry, but thorium is not a game changer. Molten salts might, but they aren’t just around the corner.
India made and successfully tested a U233 bomb from Th breeding many years ago.
P.S. I met Dr. Hubbert of the original “peak oil” analysis in the mid 1970s at a USGS by-invitation-only lithium conference in Denver. I asked the old fellow (as I thought of him then!) what he foresaw happening for the future with this hanging over us. He said, “Oh Heavens” no need to worry, we’ll solve that problem and be fine (I’m only quoting the Oh Heavens verbatim). No Chicken Little this guy.
There is no current alternative to big diesel motors and fossil fuel based fertilisers in farming. The green movement has blinded the general population and our leaders to the realities of human sustenance.
Our reserves of phosphoric rock are dwindling fast and modern farming systems will collapse without the P in the NPK nutrient formula.
We are a very stupid generation!
The green movement has blinded the general population in so many ways…but I’m not sure they’ve “blinded” any leaders. That would assume that the leaders wanted to see clearly in the first place, and I’ve no faith at all in that particular premise. The political leaders are absolutely thrilled with being able to point at a group and say “…because they said so!”, and further tighten/exercise more controls.
Farmer Gez, there is lots of phosphate. There are enormous amounts in a rock known as carbonatite which is abundant in a number of countries including Canada. Some are being produced from at the present time. However there will develop a huge by-product supply from production of Rare Earth Elements (REE) for which demand in any quantity has only developed in the past decade or two, although the phosphate is discarded. These 15 metals (including Yttrium) are the source for powerful magnets for motors, generators large and small (wind turbines, too which are probably a waste of good REE but they are recoverable when WM fall down or are taken down) and for phosphors used in a number of electronic uses (mail sorting, color in TV and computer monitors, etc. etc. etc.) and as catalysts and many more applications). There are also large resources in an abundant rock called anorthosite, now attracting some interest. Where you see the mineral name ‘apatite’ (nice, it’s almost like appetite), this is calcium phosphate – the same stuff in large phosphate deposits you know about.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1995/ofr-95-0831/CHAP6.pdf
and anorthosites: Here is an anorthosite with apatite covering 20,000sq kilometres:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/news-sources/?mid=ccnm.20131008.201310080903043001
Also, there are huge resources of conventional phosphate up through British Columbia and central Yukon just sitting there.
And finally, if we go big on Thorium, phosphate is the main by-product. We have all the phosphate we need but you are right that “We are a very stupid generation.” for other reasons.
Check out this graphic.
N, P, and K…check, all on there.
N is actually the one with least abundance. I know that abundance is no the same as concentrated ore deposits, but the earth is big. Very big.
It will just get a little harder to find and more expensive…maybe:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elements#/media/File:Elemental_abundances.svg
Since the emergence of The Club of Rome nearly 50 years ago “peak oil” or catchphrase equivalent has been forecast for the near future. After reading Paul Zane Pilzer’s book ‘Unlimited Wealth’ in the mid 90’s, I have rejected this notion.
The meme that we are running out of oil is a lot older than The Club of Rome and has been wrong over and over again.
I do hope that the work to develop a plasma model of the sun bears fruit. I suspect that one day we will have a low temp fusion reactor based on plasma. Thorium may indeed be key but I suspect the mechanism to obtain energy from the atom has yet to be developed. I think a liquid salt reactor is a good first step.
Thorium is relatively safe and is less useful for producing bomb material. But unfortunately, it’s not worthwhile for the private sector to develop the technology.
Not to worry.China has a big program to develop thorium reactors and will probably soon be building one thorium reactor per month or some such bizarre time.
Some day the US will be able to buy Chinese thorium reactors. Maybe China will even allow US corporations to build them under licence and with a lot of luck even to use U.S. thorium.
In the meantime while we wait for China to become a truly advanced country they don’t really invent anything, they steal it, and they are still using 747s they buy from Boeing, because building a true airliner is still really beyond them.
Paper and gun powder to name two that were not stollen. Yes, stollen car making capacity buy re-using old and discarded presses etc from the West. As for airlilners, why re-invent the wheel?
Google “China high-speed rail miles”. Then google “USA high-speed rail miles”. NOw hold your breath waiting for when USA mile ONE is actually built. And by high-speed don’t be talking about 75 miles per hour…
Lattice assisted nuclear reactions have a greater power density.
How are you going to electrify the transportation sector?
Liquid fuels are still the best for most transportation and most likely will not change for a long time unless government forces it or a battery 10 times better then what we have now is developed.
Nuclear energy can be used is cheap enough, which it can be, to make liquid fuels using many different feed stocks. They key here is the energy being used must be cheap as the efficiency of these processes is not that high.
Technology for electrifying railroads has been in existence for over 100 years. Urban electric delivery trucks were also common 100 years ago. Electric long distance over the road travel is still not here yet, though fuel cells may be “somewhat” workable.
LiS batteries appear to have enough energy density to make short range electric air travel possible, though I wouldn’t bet on it becoming economically viable. Long distance air travel will always need some sort of hydrocarbon fuel.
Electric cars are here and growing. Tesla (a bit pricey) but it will go up to 500km on a full charge. Also the price includes free charging at an exanding network of Tesla quick charge stations. In North America, hotels are already putting chargers in their garages for guests. As soon as one chain put them in, the others had to follow suit or lose business. The amperage is low but it will charge you over night. Now restaurants are installing low amperage stations. You may only get 20km out of your stop for a sandwich and a bowl of soup, but what the heck. Shopping centres are getting them, too.
http://www.plugshare.com/
http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger (these babies charge you in ~20minutes.
I reckon the Fisker is a much much better car and system.
Nick:
“How are you going to electrify the transportation sector?”
Electric trains.
That is a good question, Nick. Once thorium LFTRs are online, electricity will be so much cheaper than gasoline that the internal combustion engine will be under serious threat of extinction. YES, there are BIG problems yet with cars and batteries, but the latest development from TESLA Motors bodes well in regards to batteries (if they aren’t blowing it out their bums). Also graphene terminals have shown great potential for super-fast charging of batteries. That’s not a done deal yet, but look for it in the not-so-distant future. Charging stations will be built when economics and market forces requires them – and will become commonplace. MUCH charging will be done at home, I am thinking. I also think that swap-out batteries might be doable, if cars can be designed for quick switch-overs with some modular system.
So, maybe cars all go electric within 50 years or so. And if cars do, so do trucks. Don’t forget that trains dominated transportation for a long time, and look at where we are now. With driverless cars arriving on the scene even as we speak, we may even see powered roadways 100 years from now – maybe much sooner, but I doubt it.
It will all be driven by pricing and market forces. Tech is holding up the whole thing right now, but it won’t be for long. This is not solar power and this is not 1970.
Do not expect today’s technological limitations to exist forever. Human ingenuity isn’t restricted to just “Yankee ingenuity.” There are LOTS of countries now with very smart and motivated inventors and scientists.
Airliners are going to be a big problem, because you can’t go from electric to jet thrust. Short flights might revert to prop-driven. Long flights may always be with jet fuel (kerosene). But one or both may be replaced by high-speed rail to a large extent.
I CAN see thorium used in space vehicles. With ion drives a thorium FTR is just what the doctor ordered – a fairly light nuclear reactor to provide an abundance of energy for ionization. The amount of thorium fuel on board would NOT be much, and would give a lot of ROI in terms of energy output.
Both Thorium and Uranium are good nuclear fuels.
Thorium may be best used in a Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor because it can be made small but other reactors maybe just as good as well.
Uranium and nuclear waste can be burned in Fast Neutron Reactor which will have almost zero waste and that waste is only hazardous for 500 years.
http://www.nationalcenter.org/NuclearFastReactorsSA1205.pdf
Nuclear fuel is effectively inexhaustible and should be treated as a renewable energy source.
http://www.mcgill.ca/files/gec3/NuclearFissionFuelisInexhaustibleIEEE.pdf
Nuclear energy has already proved itself to the safest and greenest for all energy sources and requires the smallest environmental foot print.
As far as my memory serves, Thorium is fertile, and thus not fissile. To become fissile, and useable in a reactor, it needs one neutron.
This reminds me of the nuclear boms tests in the 1960’s, Bikini atol I think, and the device was called “Mike”. Used isotopes of Lithium, specifically Lithium 6 and 7 (30% – 70% ratio). Expected yield was to be ~5 megatonnes but turned out to be ~15 or more due to a not well understood reaction where Lithium 7 was stripped of a neutron. It vapourised the site it was on and left a massive hole ~200ft deep.
Patrick –
Right, fertile, but easily changed to U-233. The fluidized thorium when passed through a jacket around the core absorbs one neutron and becomes Protactinium-233, which lasts for about 29 days before converting to U-233, which becomes the basic fuel. When all they have to do is pump it around the core, you can’t get much easier than that. Compare that to the massive amounts of processing to make U-235 from U-238.
CNC –
LFTRs can also burn existing waste materials, thus making them a multi-fuel reactor. And the waste is almost nil. The first time through the reactors, because of the saturation of the uranium pellets, only 0.7% of the available energy was able to be extracted. But fed into LFTRs, about 898% of the available energy can be extracted, meaning that more or less 150 times as much energy can be extracted – and, yes, leaving VERY little waste, and that short lived.
And, yes, nuclear energy IS virtually inexhaustable. Just the thorium, if we can access only 10% of what is in the Earth’s crust, will last about a billion and a half years, by a rough calculation I made the last time this subject came up here. Even if I am off 5-fold, there is still enough to last 300 million years or so. And that doesn’t count the uranium and plutonium waste that can be burned.
The big problem with oil is that, when we have extracted it all, the bearings of the Earth will seize up and the Earth will stop rotating. Then we will be doomed!
Hummm…funny! But the earth spins on magnetic bearings that need no lube, or until Atlas get’s a bit of a back ache.
You should see how much oil they put on Atlas’ shoulders…
First, I find it dubious we will run out of conventional fossil fuel in the age of my grandchildren, coal should provide for at least 200 years. Second, there are other unconventional NG sources – methane clathrate, “burning ice” has the potential to supply us with energy for 3000 years.
But the real answer is that we don’t have to worry about all this, as conventional fuels slowly become scarcer the price will naturally go up until, eujtrpreneurs naturally come up with alternate solutions, from efficiency gains to solar or thoreum. It might turn out algae is out best bet, but we don’t have to worry about any of this now. Markets will naturally and invisibly create the new sources of energy for us when the time is appropriate.
Here in Australia, we have reserves, at current consumption levels, of at least 500 years. But there are those that simply want it left in the ground (All of that compressed solar energy gone to waste, a true biofuel) while we all fall in to the energy poverty trap.
Didn’t you folks take a huge step in the OTHER direction recently by booting a bunch of the idiots out of your government?
Maybe a small step, but a step all the same.
Well, yes, but there is still strong opposition to the mining and fossil fuel industries in Australia as it appears many people still believe burning fossil fuels is changing climate in a bad way even though there is no eveidence for that at all outside alarmist institutions like the BoM, CSIRO, ABC and SBS. There are roumors abound Abbott may go to voters early in a federal election possibly this year. I think that is a mistake because there has been a slight swing towards Labor and The Greens.
Patrick –
Hahaha – The “energy poverty trap” – I like that! Can I use it?
The VERY FIRST IPCC document I read when I first wanted to check out global warming science for myself was a “Preamble” that I haven’t been able to find ever since. In that, they stated as their goal to reduce CO2 emissions in the world to ZERO. I’ve been an enemy of theirs ever since reading that. Such a thing is not possible, not with 7 billion people on the planet (~6.2 billion at that time). At least half a billion lost jobs, the world would starve to death. Just the energy to FEED the world is more than would ever be available from solar and wind. And if we had to burn trees, the world would look – and BE – like Haiti. And trying to fuel the world on solar/wind, burning trees? Not enough energy density, so it is a lose-lose situation. And LIVES would be lost, in vast numbers.
As long as people repeat the (proven wrong) ideas of Ehrlich and Malthus, we will have to put up with these idiots who think that they are saving the world from humans.