Saudi Arabia, for one. And who cares what percentage? A suicide bomb can’t cost more than a few hundred bucks.
Nuclear power to generate electicity to power electric vehicles from cars to high-speed trains. Military and cargo aircraft may continue to use fossil fuels, but civilian passengers will have to switch to the high-speed trains, unless a feasable rocket-powered civilian transport is developed. Large ships will be nuclear powered, smaller vessels by electricity, steam, or wind.
Really? You tellin’ me I can’t grow more trees to replace the ones I’ve burned?
Here is a cite with more details. It appears that the 50 number is only those that they can directly (and quite definitively?) attribute to Chernobyl. The better estimate is that up to 4000 people will eventually die as a result.
I agree that this is still fairly small potatoes compared to the estimates for how many die from pollution from coal and other fossil fuels.
Is there any doubt about that?
I know this is a common scaremongering tactic by the peak oil loonies, but could you explain how such a scenario ever come about, much less be a reasonable fear?
Consider that the major energy source in the world today remains coal. The world has massive amounts of coal. There is so much coal that we haven’t even looked very hard to find out how much coal there is. There is so much coal that at the moment many places won’t touch coal if there is more than about 50 metres of soil over the top of it, it’s just not worth the effort to remove the overburden. Yet we know that there is coal thousands of metres under the ground. And there are still paces where coal lies ion the surface and can be picked up by hand.
Consider that the world has enough uranium to provide energy for the next 500 years at least. Also consider that deep coal mining and nuclear power are not developing technologies. They have been solid technologies for 200 and 50 years respectively.
So with all those facts in mind can you explain how we could ever come up against the wall so rapidly that we will have to abandon industry? To me the whole idea makes no sense.
Nuclear power is very nearly competitive economically with coal right now. In many places it is more competitive, and every year advances in technology make it cheaper. At the same time coal energy will become more expensive as we are forced to resort to ever deeper, dirtier and more remote coal deposits. At some point, when coal power is still less than 25% as expensive as it is today, nuclear energy will become the preferred economic option.
So can you explain why, at or very near that point, we won’t switch to nuclear power for purely economic reasons? Not because we are anywhere near running out of coal, we will still have hundreds of years of coal left. I simply cannot see how we could ever even hit a bump when it comes to energy transfer. The competitiveness of nuclear is simply to close to coal to make that possible.
I certainly can’t see any scenario that doesn’t involve spacemen that would lead to us having so little coal left that we couldn’t build infinite nuclear reactors. Perhaps you could explain how you think this could ever happen.
No, it won’t. Even with all those factors taken into account we have sufficient nuclear energy for at least 500 years into the future then yes. 500 years is not might fast. 500 years is so far into the future that it is for all practical purposes infinitely far off. Simply consider the technological changes that have occurred in the last 100 years and then tell me that you can predict energy options in 100 years time, much less sin 500 years.
Fusion is the Holy Grail of both the Physics and Energy sectors. It doesn’t require any more incentive for investigation and there is no reason to believe that a decline in resources could provide more incentive or make it a reality any faster. Energy yielding fusion simply isn’t a working technology. More pressure isn’t going to magically make it happen.
And if it the drought doesn’t break then I don’t believe it will rain.
This is a tautology. Of course if we don’t find a replacement for the energy needed to sustain a developed society then we won’t be able to sustain a developed society. Hardly profound.
The point to realise is that we have sufficient coal for at least 100 years, and we haven’t even looked for coal resources yet. We have sufficient fissionable material for another 500 years beyond that. So that gives us 600 years with current technology. Worrying about what energy sources we might be using in 2600 is as ridiculous as a woman in 1400 speculating about the world of today. That world will be just as incomprehensible to us now as our world would be to her.
In short the 600 years we have ATM is for all practical purposes an infinite amount of time. Maybe if technological growth showed any signs of stalling we could become concerned. But it hasn’t, I can see no need for concern on these grounds.
In the ludicrously strict sense, no, you can’t, because if you continue long enough at cycling your tree farm you will eventually run out of sunlight to make trees with. And, in the long term, all the stars in the universe are expected to burn out and die, so you can only keep up the tree thing for so long.
Realistically, we’re not looking for a thermodynamically perfect process, but rather one that can be maintained indefinitely for a “long time”, that being, ideally, until the planet or the sun are expected to be worn out.
Ok, well, you are welcome to believe if you wish that jihadist terrorism will somehow magically vanish overnight if US companies stop buying oil from Saudi Arabia, but that seems pretty naive to me.
OK, so if I understand you correctly, because you are personally pissed off at Saudi Arabia over possibly funding some terrorist acts against the United States, you want to risk further global warming in the short term, destroy the entire US airline industry and impose upon the US population a forced switch to public transport, over what is currently a grossly inadequate passenger rail network, for most domestic travel. I utterly fail to see the reward, economically or strategically, in making these draconian changes at this time. As an aside, I am also unclear on where the electricity or steam for the seagoing vessels you propose is supposed to come from absent some means of burning fuel to drive their electric generators or heat their boilers.
Sorry, sir, but I do not find your ideas particularly intriguing and I must decline to suscribe to your newsletter.
Blake- that is one of the most well reasoned posts I have read on this board (In my short time here). As Blake said, there is coal everywhere. And, we’ve known how to turn it into transport fuel since WW II. Furthermore, the world has quite a bit of natural gas as well. Much of it is stranded, but as LNG tech becomes cheaper, it won’t be stranded for long. We also know how to turn natural gas into a clean diesel. Might be a little pricey, but it’s already being done. That doesn’t even scratch the surface of gas hydrates, which aren’t feasible now, but would anybody want to bet me we could utilize them in oh say 200 years, a few centuries *before * coal is tapped? How’s about nuclear? We could look for Uranium harder if need be, and, as I understand, other fuel can be used for a reactor (I am not a nuclear expert). Furthermore, how about a breeder reactor? I’ll also bet we get those working in the next few centuries. We can already use electricity (from nuclear or what-have-you) for transportation. Trains have been doing it for quite sometime.
See, none of this stuff (except the gas hydrates) requires anything new. We can already do it.
Even Sven- what do you mean we won’t be able to sustain current lifestyle? Give me a realistic scenario of how that might happen. I think myself and others have shown plenty of options*** that already exist*** as a substitute for oil everywhere it’s currently used. And that’s if we stopped working today and took a break.
After oil is gone, there will still be plenty of natural gas. After gas, coal, after coal, uranium.
And fusion? Who knows? Considering 66 years after people said powered flight was impossible they watched a guy walk on the moon, I’m not going to bet against human ingenuity.
To be clear, fusion works just fine. It’s cold fusion that you’re speaking of. “Cold” meaning a fusion process which produces more energy than it consumes to maintain itself autonomously.
Why not? Does nuclear fission produce CO2?
No, “cold” fusion means fusion at low temperatures (unlike, say, the core of the sun). From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion:
In any case, I think flight was referring to controlled fusion of any kind. It’s been achieved in labs (under very not-cold conditions), but only for a few seconds or microseconds, and is not self-sustaining, nor does it release more energy than it takes to create the reaction.
Yes, but at a net energy loss. See this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=336917
Doesn’t any energy process involve a net energy loss as you re-order the energy? My car certainly has a net energy loss in its motor but it’s still useful. If a society is bone dry of crude oil and natural gas, and electric cars don’t get their motors running, what is wrong with using coal? Yes the conversion process is expensive but I fail to see how a net energy loss is a problem. I would guess gasoline refining has a net energy loss too; it’s just cheaper to do than Fischer-Tropsch right now. Maybe I misunderstand your definition of “net energy loss.”
Cite?
Well, I’m not a physicist. That’s why I made the statement as a question and not a declaration. Just what I’ve been led to believe, but again, college physics was a few years back. I’m going to do some more research, but if you know the statement to be false, please enlighten me.
Blake, truly an excellent post. I have never seen a number like 500 years of available nuclear fuel, so I believe you may be referring to the amount of time it would take to use up the known sources of are at our current usage levels. Even assuming that power requirements do not dramatically increase, if as you suspect, we will become more reliant on nuclear that means usage rates go up and how long until we run out of fuel goes down.
Currently nuclear on provides about 16% of the worlds power. This, as I read the article, is just for generator plants and does not include many key sources of power, such as home heating gas or oil and fuel for vehicles. If there were reductions in the availability of these resources then nuclear and coal would be required to fill the gap either through hydrogen production, electically powered vehicles or artificial oil from coal. This would dramatically increase nuclear fuel usage and reduce the amount of time available resources would last. This was what I was referring to when mentioning the short time that nuclear would be able to meet our needs.
However, I have discovered further information that seems to contradict me. Here it says that we likely have far more uranium out there than we know about. Unlike oil where we have been putting forth huge effort to discover further sources there has been little attempt to locate new veins of uranium, sugeesting that much may be left to find. That, which I was unaware of, makes nuclear look a lot better.
Actually, they work just fine now. England has been operating at least one for quite a while, though I believe they have now shut it down. Can’t remember. The problem with them is that they have a nasty habit of making nuclear bomb material that is a pain to safely get rid of.
As to the rest of the Blake’s post, I’m working on it. Though, the far greater abundance of nuclear fuel alone than I knew of may be enough to kill the theory.
No, it isn’t. Of course we have the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which means, among other things, that once you burn up any fuel, it’s gone for good. But my point was:
It is possible to convert coal to gasoline (the Nazis worked out the process);
But apparently you get much less energy out of coal if you convert it to gasoline than you get if you burn it as coal – because of the energy required by the conversion process itself. (That’s also a problem with gasohol, BTW – the energy invested into raising the crops is more than you get by burning the alcohol.)
That makes coal-derived gasoline (or crop-derived gasohol) a less-than-optimal choice, to be resorted to only if there’s no other way to get gasoline and no way to make cars that run on anything else. In other words, burning coal-derived gasoline in our cars is, to put it mildly, a clear sign of desperation.
T_SQUARE said, “Doesn’t any energy process involve a net energy loss as you re-order the energy?” In which s/he seems to be simply trying to wave aside the above as a problem. But it’s irrelevant. The fact remains that some ways of “re-ordering the energy” are less efficient than others.
Yes- Fischer-Tropsch is not the most efficient way to make transport fuel right now, which is why we don’t do it. But just because the conversion takes some energy, doesn’t mean the concept is crack-pot. Burning regular coal is all well and good, but darned inconvenient for transportation, unless you can convince your wife to man the shovel in the back of the mini van. There is nothing wrong with spending some energy to make it more useful. A laser, for example, is pretty inefficient, I would imagine. However, a camp fire isn’t too useful for eye surgery. You use energy, a lot of energy, to re-order it to make it more convenient. I’m not saying we should be making synthetic motor fuel now, far from it in fact. But the option is on the table and it is viable.
I’m not sure we necessarily disagree.
Then what the hell did you mean? That’s exactly what you said. Don’t expect me to decipher your OP and then tell me the interpretation is worng with no further clarification. :rolleyes:
I assume the readers have some amount of inteligence; obviously we will not wait until the oil is totally gone before starting to develope alternatives. As oil becomes more scarce and more expensive, alternatives will be developed due to a sense of urgency which is lacking at present.