As long as there is money to be made of those sources this will never change. Don't you think we could have come up with some better energy sources by now if we wanted to?

As opposed to my parents in the 80's i'm all for nuclear energy. I even have some suggestions on where to drop the waste and hope for life over there to actually grow a functional brain.

Just out of curiosity, what you get for these 4 dollars? In other words this is price of what exactly?

I dont know much about thorium. I thought the most commonly used materials in reactors were uranium and plutonium. How is thorium different? And if so why arent more countries using it. 

NZ has generally done fairly well without nuclear power - while we have had a few issues I feel generally we have a pretty good mix of energy sources - why do we need nuclear?

Oil and coal arent the only other alternative sources of electricity. There are renewables for example, which here in NZ makes a significant portion of the electricity generated. If this is such a serious roblem in Canada ( I assume that is where Alberta is), then why isnt the government doing something about it. 

It's not for electricity generation. There's plenty hydro and nuclear around here. Plus solar panels are getting more common. Most of the oil extracted is sold to the US. Canada supplied 28% of US crude oil imports in 2012. The government is making money of it. They're actually subsidizing the oil sands and exempting them from water usage regulation. It's not a problem since nobody lives there :/


1% of electricity comes from oil, it's pure for profit.

Oh I see. Interesting. 

 I believe he's actually referring to the US.  Which would be just slightly high for a galon of gas most places.  

Basically the US pays about double what russians pay for gas...

and germans pay about double wht US citizens pay.

So he's paying about 4X what you pay to fill up your car.

Not sure what kind of a solution renewables might be: renewables won't simply compensate the difference if hydrocarbonates are no more, wind and solar energy EROEI is substantially lower than oil and gas while hydro is almost ran out of any capacity of growth, besides we yet to see the profitability of solar and wind energy industry when costs will rise sky high if there'll be no cheap oil around -- aside hydro renewables are merely a leach that suck out blood out of hydrocarbonates, no cheap energy = no renewables (almost). What else we've got? Well yes, tidal power plants might be more common in the future, there's potential of growth, but at this point in time there's not enough investment into really worthwhile projects like Penzhina Bay TPP (afaik the project has been discussed since late Soviet times and never realized). All in all renewables are hocus of green politics and parties.

Can't say nuclear power is a savior her too, the rate at which new NPP blocks are comissioned is absolutely unsatisfactory. When Hubbert was drawing his Gausian curve of fossil fuels production rise and decline he thought that nuclear energy will pick up to compensate for steady decline. But it didn't, which makes it harder for us to maintan current level of oil production and increasing our chances that this tranist to new energy source might be more abrupt with all fancy effects of such transition -- poverty, famine, wars, population decline and so on and so forth.