In article ,
jonathan wrote:

"James Nicoll" wrote in message
...
In article ,
jonathan wrote:


Let me ask you, looking into the future what is our biggest problem
facing us? Isn't it our global energy needs? In fifty years or so
we need to replace oil with other sources.

Coal liquifaction should see us well into the 21st century,
assuming the whole world industrializes (centuries if they don't).

I also hear tell that there's this atomic power stuff from the
pulps that looks promising and a certain amound of uranium and thorium
in the Earth's crust, to the tune of about 10^30 joules worth or about
equal to the energy in 160,000,000,000,000,000,000 barrels of oil. Humans
use use about 10^13 watts but most of us are poor: multiply that rate
by 20 and there's enough fissionables to last us about 160 million years.
If we'd got started using atomic power in the late Jurassic, we'd just be
running out now.


And what about the rest of the world? When will, say, Indonesia, India
or Mexico get to build dozens and dozens of nuclear power plants?

Well, nobody except France, Japan, Russia and the US have
"dozens" of reactors (although S. Korea and Lithuania come close)
at the moment. Oil was cheap, so there was no incentive for the most
part to build them. An amazing thing about human behavior -- make that
primate behavior, since capuchin monkeys have been taught to use
money [1] -- is that when one commodity becomes expensive, people tend
to start using other, cheaper replacement commodities.

Indonesia is the odd one out (as one might expect from the fact
that it's swimming in oil): 2 reactors, both TRIGAs.

India has 15 reactors, with 8 under construction.

Mexico has 2 reactors (and lots of oil).

And what about climate change when the rest of the world becomes
industrialized and is then burning ten times the fossil fuels we are now?
I don't see a future in that.

I do: I'm 330 meters above sea level in a temperate zone in
a country that has thoughfully located most of its economy and people
well above the maximum sea level that we can expect from global warming.
I expect local housing prices to rise, though.

Carbon sequestering may become necessary for convenience of
the majority of the human race that lives near sea level, some because
they are being flooded out and others because it's cheaper than dealing
with the refugee problem (AKA work force enhancement program). It'd be
best if we could figure out a way to make sequestering profitable, so
people would have to be nooged into it: using nuclear power to make
synthetic oil from raw materials would do it and help replace fossil
fuels.

James Nicoll

1: Independently inventing prostitution. It really is the world's
oldest profession.
--
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll