silicon said:
fordy said:
HappySqurriel said:
fordy said:
HappySqurriel said:
We can power the world on 5,000 tons of thorium per year and there are 34 million tons of thorium in the world which means we will run out of thorium in about 6,000 years ... I believe it is kind of foolish to worry too much about a problem that might occur thousands of years from now; we (realistically) have no idea what kind of technology people that far in the future will have to produce energy from alternative sources.
With where research was at in the 1970s before funding was pulled from thorium research (probably) because it could not be weaponized, we could have (probably) had viable large scale thorium reactors in the early 1990s. If we're lucky we will be in a similar position with solar and wind power in 2050, and (realistically) I can't see us getting there in our lifetime.
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So if we're going with a new technology, why stick with just the one that would NOT require the changeover in a few thousand years? It woud, after all, stop yet another disruption of the energy market should such technology not be as ahead as you think (see "stagnation of technology" explanation in one of my earlier posts).
Renewable is getting closer to grid parity as we speak, and has the potential to get even cheaper. It's "exhaustion" time is when the sun consumes the earth in a few billion years (and that's providing we haven't found a new star to harness from).
Heck, even the use of just photovoltaics needs a miniscule area of the earth to match out current energy output (in black):
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I would rather use well understood, cost effective technology that can be produced today than waste money pushing energy technologies that are decades or centuries away from being cost effective. Eventually these alternative energy sources may be viable, but pushing them when they're not ready will only push energy costs on average consumers up and make them substantially poorer; after all, how "wealthy" would you feel if your total energy expenditure a month increased form $200 per month to $1,000 to $2,000 per month.
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You just contradicted yourself there, since, as you said, Thorium breeder reactors would take more research, whereas photovoltaic is reaching grid parity within a matter of years for many major cities, not decades.
The map that I showed you is the surface area of photovoltaics needed that would produce the same amount of energy that humans consume through other means, if photovoltaics have an 8% efficiency. In the lab, photovoltaics are in the 40% efficiency range.
It's not "decades or centuries away from being cost effective", it's reaching that point quicker than you can tell.
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Photovoltaics won't reach grid parity for a while, unless you look at countries with high electricity costs like Germany. Also, photovoltaics have 40% in practice too but they're expensive. It's a prive vs. efficiency. Anything higher then 8% costs too much to manufacteur or uses rare elements.
Wind is already below grid partiy, the problem is that it only provide inttermittent power, or no efficient way of storing that energy.
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Perhaps that's saying something, hm? That countries with cheaper electricity costs have not been absorbing the true costs of fossil fuel based energy generation? That those costs have been subsidised to buggery?
You're expecting me to have sympathy for those paying well below the global average, complaining that they no longer can? I mean, we only have to look at how many Americans kick up a stink when gas prices go up, yet it's still significantly cheaper than other places.
As for energy storage, there are two major technologies that I've seen that are being investigated:
- Ultracapacitors
- Molten salt batteries
