Nuclear energy isnt going to be an issue as natural resources decline

[The real slim spud]

Depending on the country, there seems to be a strong resentment in popular opinion about nuclear energy. This is certainly the case in Australia, whereby the Howard's support of nuclear energy was arguably one of the various factors that had them politically defeated.

I think that this popular resentment is completely baded in ignorance.

Basically, society starts slowing down because gasoline, and gas and whatever else is going through the roof, people aren't going to side with the greens and go, 'fuck yeah, now we have an opportunity to start over'...

As soon as the cost of living starts going up, people are going to cave EN MASS on this issues.

Thoughts?

[Yurpen]

Put like 10000 nuclear reactors in Antarctica or the North Pole where the big ozone hole is so the rads would just blow through to space and stuff. 10000 reactors in the same place would solve alot of problemos.

[Hydroponichronic]

Originally Posted by The real slim spud

As soon as the cost of living starts going up, people are going to cave EN MASS on this issues.

This.

[Vargus]

Nuclear energy isn't going to be an issue because there isn't enough uranium left to make it worthwhile to build a lot more. If one looks at the slow growth of nuclear energy at present and the known reserves, we have about 20-30 years left before it's all gone.

It's so hard to get people to understand just how precarious the situation is. Status quo and doubling down are not options.

Originally Posted by Hydroponichronic

This.

The only caving that will be going on will be with skulls. When it gets so bad that the problems in faraway lands start arriving on your doorstep you are going to see people get scared. Real scared.

[The real slim spud]

Does anyone know how many more years oil resources are going to last, taking into account the growth rate of consumption?

[The Pat-Man]

Originally Posted by The real slim spud

Does anyone know how many more years oil resources are going to last, taking into account the growth rate of consumption?

I read somewhere that at the rate China's car consumers are lapping them up, something like 30 years, conservatively. And that's completely out, not the ten years of slowing down.

[The real slim spud]

The world really is going to be a very different place to what we grew up in by the time we're on our death beds

[The Pat-Man]

Originally Posted by The real slim spud

The world really is going to be a very different place to what we grew up in by the time we're on our death beds

It can only be heaven or hell. Our time was purgatory. Either we will find some "x" factor, or we will find ourselves being eaten by radioactive cannibals.

[InspiredByMe]

Once we figure out nuclear fusion fission will be obsolete.

[Wolf]

Originally Posted by Vargus

Nuclear energy isn't going to be an issue because there isn't enough uranium left to make it worthwhile to build a lot more. If one looks at the slow growth of nuclear energy at present and the known reserves, we have about 20-30 years left before it's all gone.

It's so hard to get people to understand just how precarious the situation is. Status quo and doubling down are not options.



The only caving that will be going on will be with skulls. When it gets so bad that the problems in faraway lands start arriving on your doorstep you are going to see people get scared. Real scared.

Uranium isn't the only nuclear fuel. Thorium, for example, is another possibility. But it is going to need different reactors.

Anyway there was an article somewhere about how China is planning to build reactors underground. I wonder if those would be safer?

[Fra]

Originally Posted by Vargus

Nuclear energy isn't going to be an issue because there isn't enough uranium left to make it worthwhile to build a lot more. If one looks at the slow growth of nuclear energy at present and the known reserves, we have about 20-30 years left before it's all gone.

It's so hard to get people to understand just how precarious the situation is. Status quo and doubling down are not options.



The only caving that will be going on will be with skulls. When it gets so bad that the problems in faraway lands start arriving on your doorstep you are going to see people get scared. Real scared.

Why are you pulling facts out of your ass? oh yeah, 'cause there is no reason not to use nuclear power. Uranium will last for about 125 years at current usage. And this just by considering the cheapest to extract uranium (130$/kg); but due to the fact that uranium fuel is just 10% of the cost of nuclear energy, it wouldn't be a problem even if it cost like 3 times it's current price. There is uranium for 800 years if we consider the one costing 200$/kg. and besides, nuclear energy is probably the most ecologic source available to man

[Yurpen]

Fuck sakes, Uranium is more common than Tin and Silver combined ^ where you pulling your facts out ur ass.

[Optionryder420]

Originally Posted by Fra

Why are you pulling facts out of your ass? oh yeah, 'cause there is no reason not to use nuclear power. Uranium will last for about 125 years at current usage. And this just by considering the cheapest to extract uranium (130$/kg); but due to the fact that uranium fuel is just 10% of the cost of nuclear energy, it wouldn't be a problem even if it cost like 3 times it's current price. There is uranium for 800 years if we consider the one costing 200$/kg. and besides, nuclear energy is probably the most ecologic source available to man

He does that.

[Vargus]

Originally Posted by InspiredByMe

Once we figure out nuclear fusion fission will be obsolete.

Unless you have some sort of deus ex machina breakthrough sitting in your basement contained fusion as an energy source is not physically possible.

Originally Posted by Yurpen

Fuck sakes, Uranium is more common than Tin and Silver combined ^ where you pulling your facts out ur ass.

The fissile isotopes are not.

Originally Posted by Wolf

Uranium isn't the only nuclear fuel. Thorium, for example, is another possibility. But it is going to need different reactors.

Dittmar pointed to what he believed that the problems of thorium breeding include,

The high cost of fuel fabrication due partly to the high radioactivity of U233 chemically sepa rated from the irradiated thorium fuel.
Separated U233 is always contaminated with traces of U232 (69 year half-life but whose daugh ter products such as thallium-208 are strong gamma emitters with very short half-lives). Although this confers proliferation resistance to the fuel cycle, it results in increased costs.
The similar problems in recycling thorium itself due to highly radioactive Th-228 (an alpha emitter with two-year half life) present.
Some concern over weapons proliferation risk of U233 (if it could be separated on its own), although many designs such as the Radkowsky Thorium Reactor address this concern. The tech nical problems in reprocessing solid fuels are not yet satisfactorily solved. However with some designs, in particular the molten salt reactor (MSR), these problems are likely to largely disap pear.
Much development work is still required, before the thorium fuel cycle can be commercialized, and the effort required seems unlikely while (or where) abundant uranium is available. In this respect, recent international moves to bring India into the ambit of international trade might result in the country ceasing to persist with the thorium cycle, as it now has ready access to traded uranium and conventional reactor designs.

In Dittmar's paper he also addresses that the thorium process needs U-235 to help breed U-233, which is also a slow process.

Originally Posted by Fra

Why are you pulling facts out of your ass? oh yeah, 'cause there is no reason not to use nuclear power. Uranium will last for about 125 years at current usage. And this just by considering the cheapest to extract uranium (130$/kg); but due to the fact that uranium fuel is just 10% of the cost of nuclear energy, it wouldn't be a problem even if it cost like 3 times it's current price. There is uranium for 800 years if we consider the one costing 200$/kg. and besides, nuclear energy is probably the most ecologic source available to man

I like how you accuse me of unsourced citations and then proceed directly to produce your own shit-stinking facts.

In order to ensure the continuous operation of existing power plants, uranium production capacities must be increased considerably over the next few years well before the stocks areexhausted. Rising prices and vanishing stocks have led to a new wave of mine developments. Actually, various projects are in the planning and construction stage which could satisfy the projected demand if completed in time. Annex 7 lists the mines which are planned to be in operation by the indicated years according to the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA 2006). In total, about 20 kt/yr of additional production capacity are expected by 2010. This would increase the present capacity from about 50 kt/yr to 70 kt/yr, enough to meet the current demand once the stocks are exhausted. However, it is very likely that new mining projects experience cost overruns and time delays which raises doubts whether the production capacities can be extended in time. These problems can be observed e.g. at the development of the Cigar Lake project which is supposed to produce about 8 kt/yr U3O8 (equivalent to 6.8 ktU) starting in 2007. In october a severe water inflow occured wholly flooding the almost finished mine. At present it is very unclear whether the project can be developed further (more details are given in Annex 8). The black line represents the uranium demand of nuclear reactors which in 2005 amounted to 67 kt. The forecast shows the uranium demand until 2030 based on the forecast of the International Energy Agency in 2006 in its reference case (WEO 2006). Taking account of the uncertainty of the resource data it can be concluded that by between 2015-2030 an uranium supply gap will arise when stocks are exhausted and production cannot be increased as will be necessary to meet the rising demand. Later on production will decline again after a few years of adequate supply due to shrinking resources. Therefore it is very unlikely that beyond 2040 even the present nuclear capacity can still be supplied adequately. If not all of the reasonably assured and inferred resources can be converted into produced volumes, or if stocks turn out to be smaller than the estimated 210 kt U, then this gap will occur even earlier.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2379

What is yet lost upon you is that at some point the resource becomes uneconomical to use as fuel. We need something cheaper than petroleum resources to take over baseload supply. Nuclear is not cheaper now, and will quickly become more expensive in the coming years.

Originally Posted by Optionryder420

He does that.

[Fra]

http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/uranium.aspx
if you want I can find the more recent article I read about it, but it's in Italian. Still, this one, which was the 1st google result, states more or less the same

[Kosh Naranek]

Originally Posted by The real slim spud

Does anyone know how many more years oil resources are going to last, taking into account the growth rate of consumption?

The growing thought is that we actually hit peak oil in 2005-06, and we're now in an "undulating plateau" of oil extraction and refinement where our production ramps up with lesser results for the effort. What this means is that when we finally do hit a point where cheap oil is simply no longer possible, it'll be like falling off a cliff rather than a slow steady decline. Also keep in mind that whenever you see "...at present rates of consumption" those numbers aren't accounting for the fact that globally, we're almost always consuming more in some way. That 500 year supply of coal "at present rate of consumption" will be lucky to last 50 in reality.

Cheap oil, not simply oil, is what drives our civilization. Things are going to get ugly this century. Even the big oil companies (ie: Shell) are backing projection models that show -in an ideal situation- that we're in for a bumpy ride as we scramble to meet our energy and fuel needs going into the 2020's.

Nuclear power won't come to light until we're in the middle of a resource-depletion shitstorm and by then it will be too late. Shit, even now it's already too late. We're completely fucked.

[Vargus]

We're completely fucked.

Completely, and utterly.

Not much left but learn how to live without consumerism and prepare for the fireworks. And they sure will be pretty.

[Tachosomoza]

God, I hate this shit. We've been 30 years away from running out of oil and coal since 1971. Still, it wouldn't be a bad idea to start rationing electricity and gasoline while we continue research in new fuel technologies.

[Vargus]

Originally Posted by Tachosomoza

God, I hate this shit. We've been 30 years away from running out of oil and coal since 1971. Still, it wouldn't be a bad idea to start rationing electricity and gasoline while we continue research in new fuel technologies.

We've also been through a period of global cooling, if you were to trust everything you heard. We know that a global energy catastrophe is looming within at least a century, if not less than half of that. This is tantamount to denying anthropogenic global warming in the face of all evidence and logic backing it up.

But go ahead and call for rationing while the government wastes money on fusion research and corn ethanol subsidies.

[Snoopy]

Solar & wind. All we really need. Both oil and nuclear is old technology and will be obsolete.

[Tachosomoza]

Originally Posted by Vargus

We've also been through a period of global cooling, if you were to trust everything you heard. We know that a global energy catastrophe is looming within at least a century, if not less than half of that. This is tantamount to denying anthropogenic global warming in the face of all evidence and logic backing it up.

But go ahead and call for rationing while the government wastes money on fusion research and corn ethanol subsidies.

Independent sources have repeatedly provided statistics showing that there will NEVER be an "energy crisis" during our lifetimes. The guy behind the Peak Oil theory predicted in 1956 that we'd reach maximum production in the years between 1965 and 1970.

Now, his ideological children are saying the same thing. The only thing that has changed is the dates. Instead of 1965, they're saying 2065. I'm not saying that we're never going to run out of oil, but it's going to be quite a while in the future. There's conventional oil in places we can't even dream of. Hell, who knows what we'll find when the capitalists finally get their hands on Antarctica. Not only that, but we're coming up with ways to wring out more and more oil. As of now, we're only able to extract 40% of oil in established drill sites! By the time we "run out of oil", we should have developed and perfected better methods of energy production and oil will be a thing of the past. People forget how fast technology progresses. Look at how far we've advanced in a century, which is a laughably small bump on the ass of human history. Could anyone predict that we'd be walking around with little devices in our pockets that could connect us with people on the other side of the world instantaneously in 1911? I don't think so. There's graver issues affecting the human species than "oh noes, we're running out of oil guiz!!!"

Uranium is getting cheaper to extract, and the field of nuclear energy is advancing at a breakneck clip. It's still a relatively new field, you know.

But, like I said, we can buy time by rationing fuel and electricity.

[Really Awesome Nickname]

Youre all forgetting about antimatter. Its 100% efficient when stuff gets to transforming fuel mass into energy, while nuclear energy is like 7%, and its pretty much an infinite resource. It can be artificially made and can also be captured in outer space, which is kinda way bigger than we will ever come to consume.

Also, dark matter, although that shit is yet not any clearly understood.

[Yurpen]

Fusion is already on it's way /thread.

[Obbe]

Man, I saw this idea in the newspaper today where they would put a ton of solar panels along the moons entire equator, somehow convert it to microwave energy and transmit it to Earth where it can somehow be converted to DC.

[Masuvius]

Originally Posted by Really Awesome Nickname

Youre all forgetting about antimatter. Its 100% efficient when stuff gets to transforming fuel mass into energy, while nuclear energy is like 7%, and its pretty much an infinite resource. It can be artificially made and can also be captured in outer space, which is kinda way bigger than we will ever come to consume.

Also, dark matter, although that shit is yet not any clearly understood.

I am not convinced you clearly understand the complexity and/or underlying concepts of either of your suggestions.

[Yurpen]

What is antimatter than you fucking einstein

[Masuvius]

Don't get mad because I told you it's not likely. It's the truth. I'm not going to go into debating or writing a thesis on it simply because you fail to understand the concepts and derive your knowledge from sci-fi movies, not to mention that I barely grasp the concepts myself. I will however, point you to the first link you get from google had you bothered to search at all in the first place, rather than getting offended that your idea was total shit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter

[Kosh Naranek]

Originally Posted by Tachosomoza

The guy behind the Peak Oil theory predicted in 1956 that we'd reach maximum production in the years between 1965 and 1970.

Except that prediction was for the United States, which did hit it's peak oil production in that period. Whoops.

[Vargus]

Originally Posted by Tachosomoza

The guy behind the Peak Oil theory predicted in 1956 that we'd reach maximum production in the years between 1965 and 1970. =

.... American oil production DID peak in the 70's...

Uranium is getting cheaper to extract

Really? These guys don't seem to think so http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf22.html .

[Tachosomoza]

Originally Posted by Vargus

.... American oil production DID peak in the 70's...

Oh, well, that's a serious problem since we are using only American oil.

Your link does nothing to disprove my claims. The fact that the capitalists think that the uranium supply is drying up due to boosted demand, causing a mad dash and price jump, does not make an effective argument against the point that uranium is becoming cheaper to extract.



Seriously, though. You're all jumping the gun.

[Kosh Naranek]

Originally Posted by Tachosomoza

Oh, well, that's a serious problem since we are using only American oil.

If you seriously don't understand the implications of that then you're beyond having any sort of rational discussion with.

[Tachosomoza]

Originally Posted by Kosh Naranek

If you seriously don't understand the implications of that then you're beyond having any sort of rational discussion with.

I was joking. Go ahead, ignore the big picture and do what they want you to do. Play with your little end time, peak oil scenarios while the oil execs sit in their penthouses and manipulate the world's resources. They want you to think that conventional oil reserves are on the verge of being bled out to justify keeping oil prices high. Same with the OPEC countries, who understate reserves on purpose.

We are progressing in terms of clean, renewable energy development. People in the public sector know what they're doing, they just need more resources. There is not going to be an energy crisis in this century, unless OPEC wants to act the loon like they did in the Seventies. Which is laughably unlikely, since we've been kissing the Saudis', Nigerians', and others' dicks since Reagan was in office. When we run out of oil, we will have long ceased the use of it.

[Snoopy]

Originally Posted by Tachosomoza

I was SUCKING COCK.

tru story

[Vargus]

Originally Posted by Tachosomoza

I was joking. Go ahead, ignore the big picture and do what they want you to do. Play with your little end time, peak oil scenarios while the oil execs sit in their penthouses and manipulate the world's resources. They want you to think that conventional oil reserves are on the verge of being bled out to justify keeping oil prices high. Same with the OPEC countries, who understate reserves on purpose.

We are progressing in terms of clean, renewable energy development. People in the public sector know what they're doing, they just need more resources. There is not going to be an energy crisis in this century, unless OPEC wants to act the loon like they did in the Seventies. Which is laughably unlikely, since we've been kissing the Saudis', Nigerians', and others' dicks since Reagan was in office. When we run out of oil, we will have long ceased the use of it.

You have got to be kidding. The excess of the last century was fueled by cheap oil. We added a couple billion more people in that time, started a few HUGE wars, and wasted so much. You really think that every oil company is lying about what is left to justify raising prices? That it goes and drills for oil in the most remote and dangerous places just for show? The Saudis lie by OVERSTATING their reserves since they are afraid we will get off our asses and do something about it.

Look, I despise the capitalist class just as much as the next tovarishch, but let's be real. There may be a lot of collusion here and there, but it doesn't always add up to a single massive conspiracy against the proletariat.

And anyway, no one is saying we are on the verge of running out of oil. We ARE, however, saying that we have already passed the point of cheap oil. We passed the half-way mark, which says a lot about how much there really is, but the world demand is still growing, and the supply is shrinking in kind. This is what happens to any desirable finite resource, and we are there with many things, the most important of which is petroleum; our lifeblood.

Go ahead and deny it is happening before your very eyes. I'll just dismiss you just like the ostriches who don't believe the earth is warming and that Republicans fight for the common man.

Just don't come knocking on my bunker when the shit gets real.

[Tachosomoza]

I won't, Comrade. I won't.

And you wonder why nobody takes the left seriously. We get sidetracked by the stupidest shit. Some of us are just as prone to capitalist manipulation as the others. It's pathetic.

[The real slim spud]

Originally Posted by Tachosomoza

I was joking. Go ahead, ignore the big picture and do what they want you to do. Play with your little end time, peak oil scenarios while the oil execs sit in their penthouses and manipulate the world's resources. They want you to think that conventional oil reserves are on the verge of being bled out to justify keeping oil prices high. Same with the OPEC countries, who understate reserves on purpose.

Have you got a any evidence to back up that outrageous claim?

[constantinople]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_vehicle

[nutsack]

Originally Posted by Vargus

Unless you have some sort of deus ex machina breakthrough sitting in your basement contained fusion as an energy source is not physically possible.

Oh? Why not?

[MediumD]

Originally Posted by Vargus

The fissile isotopes are not.

0.71% of naturally occurring uranium is 235. 0.71% * a fucking grip of U = still a fucking grip of U 235.

Originally Posted by Vargus

But go ahead and call for rationing while the government wastes money on fusion research

Wat

Originally Posted by Yurpen

Fusion is already on it's way /thread.

This.

[MediumD]

Here's my opinion on the matter. Gen III+ fission reactors like the Westinghouse AP1000 and GE's ASBWR are inherently orders of magnitude safer than the Gen II reactors around which the public has based their opinions of nuclear power. Even Russia's modern VVER reactors are very safe relative to the old RBMK designs.

Fission can and will provide a good, relatively cheap stopgap energy source until ITER and it's proposed successor DEMO can show us how to build commercialized tokamak fusion power plants.