When The Oil Runs Out

Great Debates
21

And of course thats the key. All this gloom and doom stuff hinges on the US’s stupidity in continueing to follow an outmoded and hysterical view of nuclear power, continueing to fall behind in developing new power plants and researching new and better power plants. If the US did a France and went to 70% (if memory serves) nuclear power, something we could certainly do especially with the newer cheaper and safer (not to mention more efficient) plant designs coming out of China and South Africa, we would cut our oil/coal usage figures big time…and more importantly we’d cut our carbon emmitions down. To me there is no huge looming crisis of oil (or coal)…there is a looming environmental crisis from using hydrocarbons the way we do.

Well, if we cut our every day use of oil/coal down there will be plenty left over for jet fuel. Barring that we could burn hydrogen easily enough, or I suppose go electric using hydrogen/methane or whatever fuel cells. All of this is easy enough with wide spread nuclear power…it opens a lot of doors.

Even if this were true (which it isn’t), so what? We aren’t likely to run out of oil/coal tomorrow after all…or 20 years from now. If we started wide spread building of nuclear plants today we’d have plenty of oil to finish them. As for mining uranium, we really don’t need all that much…especially if the US decides to drop Carters madness and join the rest of the world in recycling our spent fuel. I know, I know…it can produce those nasty weapons and all…but it also stretches out your use of the fuel big time. Something like 90-95% can be reused if you enrich. That also means there is less waste to have to store btw.

Are you talking about the fertilizers? They can be produced in other ways besides raw hydrocarbons you know. If there wasn’t a single drop of oil left on earth after we went to an all nuclear powered system we’d be able to make every thing we need to keep the farms going. The key is having the power. The rest is just engineering and chemistry. Besides, we aren’t likely to run out of oil, especially if we cut the use of oil for personal transport, generating power, etc. There will be PLENTY of hydrocarbons left for producing plastic and fertilizers and such if we go to hydrogen/nuclear.

Why? What must be done really, initially at least, is to change the perceptions of the average American that nuclear power is some kind of dangerous evil thing thats bad for the environment. We need to throw off decades of rabid hysteria over its use spewed out by the environmentalists. Its a difficult job but straightforward. We need to enlist the new breed of environmentalists to push for massive use of nuclear power in the US, and push hard for development of new technologies to take advantage of all that power…like hydrogen perhaps.

Energy is the key. With energy we can pretty much do anything…and we can certainly support the present population at least as well as we are doing at present. I dont’ see how depleting oil means that we can’t sustain the present (falling) population though. Again, unless you are positing that the oil will run out suddenly world wide this is just hysteria…and the oil isn’t going to simply run out suddenly.

-XT

22

As good as the album “No Nukes” was, I’m all for nuclear power.

23

To build a nuclear plant, I’d say on the order of building an oil burning plant.
To mine the fuel, on the order of pumping, refining and distributing the oil.
As to nitrogen fertilizers, they’re primarily produced using natural gas.

My post though was dealing with the relative environmental impacts of the two on a per kg basis. It also relied on a simple use of uranium and not a light water reactor or breeder reactor design. Those up the energy density ratios by another order of magnitude.

24

So when do we reach peak uranium production?

[evil grin]

25

About a month before deuterium mining starts on the moon. :wink:

26

Moving this from IMHO to Great Debates.

27

There is energy aplenty - it’s just a matter of cost and technology. There are no ‘limits to growth’. We live in a solar system containing a huge fusion furnace which is just bathing us in energy. We just have to learn how to collecct it. We live on a planet with a molten core - we just need to figure out how to tap into it. We live in a solar system filled with energy sources - we just need to figure out how to go get them.

Geothermal power is a significant source of energy for Iceland, because it’s easy to get to. There are other geothermal sources available elsewhere that we can get to if we absolutely have to. We can harness the power of ocean currents, or the thermal gradient between the warm, sun-drenched upper surface layers of the ocean and the deep cold.

There may be huge reserves of methylene hydrate on the ocean floor, just waiting to be harvested.

If we have to, we can orbit huge solar collectors and beam the power back to earth in the form of Microwaves.

We have enough coal to last something like 400 years. We have Uranium to last a long time as well. If we can figure out the fusion thing, the moon is full of He3 waiting to be exploited.

The list goes on. There’s energy aplenty - it’s just a matter of figuring out how to get it, and of paying for it.

28

You mean fertilizer? We can get nitrogen for fertilizer in other ways. We don’t HAVE to use petroleum for that - we just do because it’s cost-effective.

Nuclear plants are not energy intensive to build - no more so than any other industrial structure. Hell, there’s a nuclear plant in orbit around Saturn right now. Our local university has an energy producing nuclear reactor. There’s a whole fleet of submarines and aircraft carriers out there being powered by small reactors. A reactor can be amazingly small and simple for the amount of power it produces over its lifetime.

And because the energy density of Uranium is so high, mining operations take up a comparatively lower amount of the energy produced by the Uranium. Where you have to worry about the cost of building plants and mining is when you’re talking about mining energy sources with very low energy densities - for example, solar power cells and ‘fuel crops’. Harvesting crops to make ethanol fuels may cost more in energy to run the combines, fertilize, truck to processing facilities, etc. than what you get back from the end product. That’s why the ‘fuel crops’ that exist are usually highly subsidized.

Nuclear does not fit into this category of energy sources.

29

Plant matter and feces can be composted and the methane harvested as fuel instead of allowed to escape into the atmosphere and damage the ozone layer.

30

Well… At current consumption rates, I think there are about 250 years worth of known Uranium reserves. So if we produced all of our electricity with Uranium, we’d have known reserves of maybe 25 years.

But this doesn’t mean we’ll run out. Unlike oil which appears to exist only in pockets around the globe, uranium is common and plentiful all through the earth’s crust. So we can get plenty more if we’re willing to pay for it. For example, doubling the price of uranium would give us about 10X the number of reserves(*). Increasing the price of uranium by a factor of ten would allow us to extract Uranium from seawater and other deposits. And that’s a LOT of uranium. The known reserves we have now are about 16 million tons. Seawater contains 4000 million tons of uranium. So if we were to increase our uranium consumption by a factor of ten, seawater alone contains enough uranium to meet our power needs for about 6000 years.

(*) Doubling the cost of Uranium would not double the cost of nuclear power, because the cost of uranium fuel is only a small fraction of the cost of nuclear power. Most of the cost is in enrichment, refinement, waste disposal, etc. I think the fuel costs in a nuclear reactor account for about a fifth of the overall cost of the energy. So doubling the cost of uranium would only increase the cost of nuclear power by about 20%.

31

I know it can be harvested. The question is whether it can be harvested, turned into a usable energy form, and shipped to the end user for less energy than what the fuel itself contains. If it can’t it’s a gigantic waste of time.

32

Umm, methane doesn’t have any effect on the ozone layer. 20 years on and people are still getting global warming and CFCs confused. CFCs damage the ozone layer, they also contribute to global warming. Methane is a greenhouse gas that has no effect on the ozone layer.

33

The problem of nuclear waste disposal was solved long ago – encase the stuff in ceramic/glass blocks and bury in in a geologically stable location.

The problem of getting politicians to lead rather than pander to peasant superstition has proven more intractable.

34

European Fusion Program

Fusion Power Association

But just in case that isn’t fast enough

The Trillion-Barrel Tar Pit

Since as others have pointed out there are other energy sources, it seems that worrying about running out of oil is simply a waste of time.

35

Just asking a question but, aren’t we in a world of hurt when petrolium runs out in many other ways than just energy. What about the ability to make plastic? How do you make a computer or a cell phone, not to mention a number of medical devices, such as syringes, without plastic? Also, isn’t petroleum required for the manufacturing of many medications? Seems to me that, nuclear power or not, we are going to have a lot of adjusting to do.

36

Club33 that question has already been asked and answered. I’ll repost.

Petrochemicals are just a convenient and cheap source of hydrocarbon. They can be readily produced from coal, of which there is no shortage, or plant biomass. If it comes down to that we can produce it directly from the air using CO2 as the source. The electricity of the nuke plants plays a role in this by powering the transformation process from the carbohydrate of plants or long-chain carbon of coal into the required form for petrochemical feedstock. There’s no serious problem here. Prices will rise a little but so long as we have energy we will always have hydrocarbons.

You need to realise that there is nothing intrinsically different about the carbon and hydrogen atoms in petroleum compared to those in coal, or trees or air and water. So no, petroleum isn’t required to make anything at all. We use it at present because it’s cheap and convenient. When it ceases to be cheap and convenient we’ll use something else. No world of hurt, no doomsday, just a slight price adjustment.

37

Another option is to bury nuclear waste in geological unstable areas in deep ocean trenches where the plates are causing the ground to be pulled under towards the molton core.

An added benefit would be that we will increase the amount of geothermal energy in the process.

38

Or, and I realise this is not the most cost effective method, launch it into the sun. It’s not going to notice another couple of kilos of radioactive matter being engulfed in it’s nuclear reactions.

Of course, residents of Florida may have concerns about radioactive waste being launched from Cape Canaveral, although I believe many satellites have nuclear reactors for power.

39

It’s extremely energy intensive to launch anything to orbit ($10,000 per kg right now), but launching something and getting it to reach the sun if even more prohibitive. Easier to store it somewhere nice and stable where we can either use it latter if we have a brilliant idea or destroy it completely if we figure out how.

Not reactors, RTGs (radioisotope thermoelectric generators). Basically the radioactive decay heats the material and thermocouples generate electricity. They also have the advantage of keeping the craft warm in space.

40

You don’t want to launch your radioactive waste into the sun, because A) it would be far more dangerous than just storing it, and B) You might want to use the stuff one day. It’s still got plenty of energy in it.

Really, the nuclear waste problem is political, not technical. Yucca mountain has been stable for eons. There is no moisture getting in or out. The facility built there has been designed to withstand all manner of breaches. Nuclear waste can be turned into a glass or ceramic which is inherently stable and will not leach out into the environment. It can also be put in concrete and steel containers which will last for millenia. The fear of nuclear waste is mainly the result of fear-mongering from anti-nuclear activists.

To this day, people have a wildly exaggerated threat of the dangers of nuclear power. Three Mile Island was, from an environmental and human health standpoint, a complete non-event. No one was harmed by it. And yet, people still talk about it as if it were a huge ecological disaster. At the peak of the crisis, the radiation you would have gotten standing at the gates of the plant was about what you get from your TV. Inside the plant the radiation was still extremely minimal - on the order of all kinds of natural and man-made radiation sources we work around every day.

This week on ‘24’, the plot hinges around the ability of terrorists to melt down nuclear reactors in the U.S. by remote control. The writers depict the danger as being huge radioactive clouds that could wipe out millions of people. In reality, all that would happen is that the cores would shut down, and the containment dome would be contaminated perhaps. No one would die. We in the west don’t build reactors like the piece of junk the Soviets installed at Chernobyl. Our reactors simply can’t do what that one did. In fact, the latest reactor technologies can’t even melt down. The CANDU reactor uses heavy water as a moderator and a coolant. If it loses its coolant, it also loses its moderator and the reaction simply stops. Pebble-bed reactors are even safer. But the public doesn’t understand this - they think nuclear reactors are essentially controlled nuclear bombs that could ‘go off’ if there were an accident. They think nuclear waste is like a fallout cloud - if some were to spill in their city they think it would cause mass radiation sickness. You can thank the fanatics for their fear-mongering (and a complicit media looking for a ‘scary’ story).

Transporting nuclear waste is also not a problem. The waste is packed into sealed containers that are designed to stay intact in collisions at any speed the vehicle might be going. These containers are tested by dropping from a large height onto concrete, and they are even dropped from high height onto a steel pin, to simulate penetration damage. They are placed in fires for hours to simulate a serious accident like a train derailment. They are designed to contain the waste even under all of this damage.

And what would happen if one were to split open? Not much. The people involved in the accident themselves might get lethal dosages. Perhaps. Then there’d be an expensive hazmat cleanup, and everything would return to normal. The risks truly are minimal.

Compare this to the alternatives like coal or oil. Count up all the people who die from emphysema, black lung, mining accidents, fires, etc. Add up the environmental damage from pollutants being pumped into the air, oil spills, drilling, and refining. The disparity between nuclear and fossil fuel is dramatic, and it simply baffles me that anyone who cares about the environment could be opposed to nuclear power at all. It’s clearly the superior alternative.

Unless, of course, the opposition is made up of luddites and people who will simply protest any form of concentrated energy. And sadly, that describes far too many people in the environmental movement. They may not even see themselves as luddites - they simply oppose everything and don’t think about or understand the ramifications of what they truly want. They see a world of clean windmills and solar panels and parks and birds and trees, and any big ugly concrete thing spewing clouds of of stacks doesn’t fit with their vision. But their vision belongs in fairy tales, and not the real world.