People today seem worried about the world running out of energy. Here is an article about how much uranium there is available from sea water. There is a lot, enough to fuel the world for over one hundred thousand years. Here is a discussion.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/08/how-long-can-uranium-last-for-nuclear.html
Note that the cost of the uranium fuel from sea water is just over one penny per million BTU's. That compares to $8 per million BTU's for natural gas, and $16 per million BTU's for oil.
Then there is the possible use of thorium fuel in nuclear reactors, something that has been demonstrated around the world. There is more than one billion tons of thorium in the world. There are designs for breeder reactor electric generation plants using thorium as the fuel. The thorium fuel systems can be designed so as weapons grade material is not produced.
This all means that there is the potential for generating all of the electricity the world needs without having to get a workable fusion power system, or resorting to inefficient "sustainable" systems such as wind and solar power. Fusion would be nice if it can ever be developed, and the sustainables are cost-efficient in some instances, but are not practical to provide all of the power the people of the world need.
Nuclear reactors could be used to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen during off-peak hours, and the hydrogen could be used as a transportation fuel.
The solution to satisfying the world's energy demands seems easy to me. It would take some time to make the transition to mostly thorium based nuclear power, but the world has time. Why can't political leaders grasp a rather straight-forward strategy instead of messing around with carbon credits and other non-productive concepts.
One thing I have wondered about is the impact of having hundreds of millions of automobiles running around spewing a lot of water vapor. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, but that may not be the main issue. I suspect that if millions of cars were putting tons of water vapor into the air it would have an impact, particularly around cities. There might be a lot more rain. This needs some serious study. But, we could and should start building nuclear reactors now.
posted by James Williams | 2:52 PM
2 Comments:
Nuclear power could also be used to run a Coskata like technology and create Syngas at overnight rates. This could be captured and feed into bioreactors 24/7. In this way, nuclear power could get rid of nasty municipal and hospital waste and produce ethanol for transportation from it.
There are several reactor designs that utilize the Thorium fuel cycle. Pebble bed reactors like the South Africans and Chinese are bringing on line in the next two years, Thorium Power's seed and blanket design which also burns down reactor waste plutonium, to be tested in 2010, and the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, which the Japanese are working to commercialize. Apparently, we don't need to do basic research in this country, we can just buy all these mature technologies that we invented from other countries, like China and Japan. We'll fight wars instead.
Consistent with this, George W. Bush lit a match to biomedical research in this country by underfunding the NIH by over 14% over the last six years. I know researchers at the most prestigious institutions in the country who have opened labs in Singapore and Canada because they were having a hard time sustaining funding. Young principle investigators haven't had a chance and have been dropping out of science. We at one point were able to invent the atomic bomb from scratch in three years without the aid of computers and no certainty that it would work. We invented biotechnology. Now we can't sustain federal funding for the same kinds of economic engine drivers because we have leaders who are tide to corporate interest and failed sink holes that our budget has fallen into. I believe that no one wants the LFTR to succeed because there is more money in LEU driven LWRs. This money is wasted as the better options are ignored. I know as a fact that if a drug company has a low margin effective medicine and a less effective high margin medicine for deadly diseases, they will develop the latter. This is the rationality of the market, and it is rational, until you are on your back getting the second medicine and not making it, then you don't feel so due to the change in your perspective. I'm all for building a few LWRs in the mean time, but we really need to tell our leaders we will not tolerate foot dragging on this because the entrenched commercial interest feel threatened. We need our own pebble bed technology, we need our own LFTR technology, we need the Hatch Thorium legislation brought to the floor and passed.
Fusion may be closer than you know:
Fusion Report 13 June 008
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