[hedwig]

Hey everyone,

I am new to this site but would like to share my views and hear yours.

This link from BBC News (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24475934) shows that China has overtaken the US as the biggest importer of oil, consuming 6.3 million barrels a day.

Oil is a non-reusable energy form – it will run out eventually. At the rate we are using it, this is likely to be sooner rather than later. Looking at this website: http://www.eccos.us/what-is-oil-used-for it is clear that we are far too dependable on oil. It's very easy to do everyday things that use oil without actually thinking about where the energy is coming from, so, I have two questions:

Firstly, what reusable energy resources do people think are the best and most sustainable when considering alternatives to oil?

Secondly, how can we get people to take action and use these reusable sources rather than simply just talking about making changes?

[Plantagenet]

Hi Hedwig. Very interesting post

IMHO the main driver of people "getting off oil" will be continued increases in the price of oil. The huge increases in exports by China will only act to accelerate global price increases

[Rune]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('hedwig', 'F')irstly, what reusable energy resources do people think are the best and most sustainable when considering alternatives to oil?

Secondly, how can we get people to take action and use these reusable sources rather than simply just talking about making changes?

[Surf]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'S')econdly, how can we get people to take action and use these reusable sources rather than simply just talking about making changes?

[Rune]

For those who do not want to buy Superfuel: The Green energy Of The Future, you can download the American Scientist article, Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors (pdf) to get an overview of the history and the compelling reasons they should be pursued.

Robert Hargraves, Ph.D., is a retired executive and promotes the “Aim High!” vision of a world energy future powered by thorium and liquid-fluoride reactors. He is the co-author of the American Scientist article , Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors and teaches energy policy at Dartmouth’s Institute for Lifelong Education.

He sits on the Board of Advisors to Flibe Energy

[ROCKMAN]

Howdy Hedwig. To add to Plantagenet's fine answer: develop an cheaper energy source and you'll get a major shift. Don't and there will be no change IMHO. The dynamic has always been determined by economics. I see nothing changing the situation significantly.

[ROCKMAN]

Howdy Hedwig. To add to Plantagenet's fine answer: develop an cheaper energy source and you'll get a major shift. Don't and there will be no change IMHO. The dynamic has always been determined by economics. I see nothing changing the situation significantly.

[Rune]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ROCKMAN', 'H')owdy Hedwig. To add to Plantagenet's fine answer: develop an cheaper energy source and you'll get a major shift. Don't and there will be no change IMHO. The dynamic has always been determined by economics. I see nothing changing the situation significantly.

[Pops]

In the rich world we are changing - using less, because oil isn't quite as free as it once was. The biggest energy development in the recent past, bigger than fusion (only 25 years away - still), bigger than tight oil or Syncrude is a price high enough to force conservation but not so high as to completely kill the economy. My worry some time back was that we'd hit a wall in production or worse, we'd round the peak from rising straight into falling production flows without time to start changing. As it's turned out, the regular increases these last 150 year have slowed the last 8 years and prices have not only risen but stayed high enough to give a pretty good signal for folks to reconsider their useage from lots of angles.

I'd say the best alternative to 133 energy slaves is fewer energy slaves, not a different color slave. The best action to take then is to conserve so as to be less dependent on the slave trade. By the same token the best action to take to influence others is exemplify a positive lifestyle using fewer slaves.

Back in my day big displacement engines and big fat tires were the thing, but then the embargoes came and my kids thought rice-burners and low profile tires were it... now my grandkids are coming of age and just aren't that into cars.. period.

[KaiserJeep]

To properly answer the question, look at what petroleum is used for:
(Source is US Information Administration for year 2012)

Gasoline 47%
Heating Oil/Diesel Fuel 20%
Jet Fuel (Kerosene) 8%
Propane/Propylene 6%
NGL & LRG1 6%
Still Gas 4%
Petrochemical Feedstocks 2%
Petroleum Coke 2%
Residual/Heavy Fuel Oil 2%
Asphalt and Road Oil 2%
Lubricants 1%
Miscellaneous Products 0.4%
Other Liquids 0.4%
Aviation Gasoline 0.1%
Special Naphthas 0.04%
Waxes 0.04%
Kerosene 0.02%

The highlighting is mine and represents the portion of petroleum used for vehicle fuels, everything from the 0.1% used for aviation gasoline to the 2% heavy fuel oil that includes the bunker fuel used by ocean-going ships, to the diesel grades used by trains and trucks, to the 47% used for gasoline. The fuel uses of petroleum total 77.1%, more than 3/4ths of the total.

So in the prior discussion you can pretty well discount any input that talked about electricity generation for the grid. YES, some of the 6% propane and 6% natural gas liquids are used for electrical generation, but they were not counted in the 77.1% total. Petroleum is primarily a light/medium/heavy vehicle fuel.

You could postulate a massive switch from gasoline and diesel for privately owned vehicles, to electric vehicles. However it has not happened yet, in 2012, out of 14,500,000 total vehicles sold in the US, only 71,174 were electrics. (Total includes battery electric vehicles, fuel cell vehicles, and plug-in hybrids.) Which means that after literally DECADES of government subsidies, electric vehicles hold a market share of UNDER 0.5%. Expressed differently about one out of every 200 cars sold.

Thorium fission, Helium-3 fusion (my own favorite), Uranium fission, Solar, Wind, Geothermal, etc. etc. do not directly substitute for petroleum as vehicle fuels. Biofuels based on ethanol are a total boondoggle, only possible due to intensive mechanized agriculture and government subsidies. That leaves used cooking oil, except we need that for heavy trucks that are transporting food.

One is led to the conclusion that after the oil ends so do cars, light trucks, motorcycles, and anything else privately owned. As gasoline and diesel become more dear, their uses will be limited to growing and transporting food - via ships, trains, and heavy trucks.

Get a bicycle or a horse for personal transportation. If you are a wealthy "one-percenter", you might own something like a Tesla Model S, which in the post-oil world will cost something like 100X the present cost - along with virtually everything else we buy.

If you are a "ninety-nine-percenter" like most of us, you will walk, bicycle, etc. from your residence and take public transportation, which will also cost about 100X the present cost if fueled by petroleum, or only about 20X the present cost if powered by the electric grid.

Hidden under the terms "Petrochemical Feedstocks" and "Propylene" above are the raw materials for virtually every plastic in use today. Plastic containers will be precious and not disposable. Medical uses of plastics will require that we return to reusable instruments and autoclaves, but at least we won't have medical waste problems anymore.

Given nearly unlimited energy, all the other applications other than vehicle fuels could be tackled one by one and substitutes found, I am certain. However, we will not have nearly unlimited energy, what we will have is petroleum fuels at 100X present cost and electricity at 20X present cost.

Also hidden in the wondrous list of petrochemicals above are the basis for virtually every chemical fertilizer, insecticide, and herbicide we use on the soil we till with oil-powered machinery. Food is going to cost a LOT.

In short, it's a very different world. You will be poor, poorly fed, and in poor health. Still, as an American, you will be better off than most people in the world, although you will be cold and in the dark with barely enough to eat. Because midway in the petroleum production decline, most of the rest of the world starved.

[Synapsid]

Rune:

Two points about your list of attributes of LFTRs:

You state that those waste products that have no commercial value have half lives less than 30 years. That's nice, but some of them are intense gamma emitters and that makes dealing with the waste difficult.

Another point: "Thorium and its derivative fuel, uranium 233, are impractical and undesirable for weaponization efforts relative to well-known uranium enrichment and plutonium breeding pathways."
That sentence sounds like it was written by an administrator. Nevertheless, regardless what you look at it relative to, U233 works just fine in a fission bomb and that means there is a proliferation risk with LFTR just as there is with uranium and plutonium reactors. The key is separating the parent of U233, Pa233, from the decay scheme that will produce U232 and its gamma-emitting daughters. The Pa233 then decays to pure U233 and you are on your way. Several common separation schemes can do the job, and even a research reactor can perform the neutron-activating step that starts the decay of the thorium fuel. This subject is described in the 6 December 2012 issue of Nature in an article, referred to in a former post, written by four British nuclear engineers who are concerned precisely with the lack of attention paid to proliferation risk from thorium reactors.

From what I've read it seems to me that thorium reactors are definitely a better choice than any of the present types used or planned, but they should not be presented as a solution, or partial solution, to the problem of nuclear proliferation based on the technology in commercial nuclear reactors. Proliferation risk is still there.

[Rune]

It's so difficult to make a bomb from the thorium fuel cycle, you might as well build a regular old uranium enrichment facility.

So what are you suggesting? Greater use of fossil fuels? We should keep on burning coal? Mass sterilization? Global warming isn't really a problem? Dr. James Hansen is full of crap?

How ya gonna get people to quit f***ing and making babies?

Come on! The world needs clean energy. And LFTRs and MSRs have been shown to work great with minimal problems.

The Chinese are already on it. So is India. So is Sweden...

There is a vocal grassroots organization in the US. There is one in Europe...

You can even make liquid fuels with these things. There is a ton of stuff online to read.

Five years and a billion bucks for a prototype that the US could export so as to keep itself in the nuclear relevancy leagues.

It's just common-sense to have clean, cheap, safe energy.

[Synapsid]

Rune:

What I'm suggesting, if you're addressing me, is the last paragraph in my post.

[KaiserJeep]

What I'm suggesting is that any large power plant doesn't replace petroleum, which has a primary application as fuel in internal combustion engines for vehicles.

[Rune]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Synapsid', 'R')une:

What I'm suggesting, if you're addressing me, is the last paragraph in my post.

[Synapsid]

Rune,

You're right, proliferation risk isn't going away. In far too many pieces advocating thorium reactors that I have read, though, on the web and in print, thorium reactors are presented as being free of this risk, unlike other types of fission reactors. That is hype that is in error to boot, and the error is what I'm pointing out.

Commercial fission reactors of all types, including those based on thorium, carry risk of allowing nuclear proliferation. That's all, that's the message and it should not be ignored or contradicted in promotions of thorium reactors.

I will say again that thorium reactors seem to be the way to go, in preference to reactors based on other fuels.

[Rune]

Nuclear Ammonia

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) has the potential to make electric power cheaper than from coal. Typical costs for electric power bought by US utilities average around 5-6 cents per kilowatt hour generated by coal, hydro, and natural gas sources. Government regulations are requiring utilities to buy solar- and wind-generated power at 20-30 cents/kWh. LFTR’s potential cost advantage of 3 cents/kWh is the economic incentive to stop burning CO2-emitting coal, without economically injurious carbon taxes and politically obscured feed-in tariffs. In this way LFTR can improve both the environment and the economy.

There is an additional way to benefit from LFTR’s inexpensive power — synthesizing liquid fuels to replace petroleum. The world gets 37% of its energy from petroleum, vs 21% from coal. A typical nuclear reactor power plant generates about 1 GW (1000 MW) of electric power. A large refinery produces 40 GW of power in the form of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. Liquid petroleum fuels contribute to global warming yet are essential to the global economy. Their high energy density and portability make them attractive energy sources for vehicles such as cars, trucks, trains, ships, and airplanes; these all carry their energy sources with them. We can use more LFTR-sourced power for more high speed electric trains and for more small short-range automobiles; we can use LFTR power plants to propel large ocean-going vessels. But we can’t electrify commercial airliners and trucks because they cannot carry heavy, bulky batteries with them.

But what happens if we stop burning coal? Project Green Freedom proposes capturing CO2 from air, but its density is only 0.035% of air. Nitrogen is plentiful in the atmosphere (78%) and returning it to the air is nonpolluting. Consider ammonia for fuel. Ammonia is the second most common industrial chemical...

[Rune]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Synapsid', 'R')une,

You're right, proliferation risk isn't going away. In far too many pieces advocating thorium reactors that I have read, though, on the web and in print, thorium reactors are presented as being free of this risk, unlike other types of fission reactors. That is hype that is in error to boot, and the error is what I'm pointing out.