Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

[wordspeak2]

Oy vay. Maybe Palast's movie or Engdahl's book will help the situation. Nordic, tell us again *why* you believe that the world is imminently running out of oil and *what* you think the solution for this and inter-related crises are.

"Peak Oil exists." What does one even doe with that phraseology? Stickdog99 wrote such a lovely synopsis; we should have left it at that.

[Nordic]

Why bother? Logic and scientific facts don't work in the face of "true belief".

It's obviously a waste of time to convince anyone as to why the sun is shining if they don't believe it to be true.

I'd rather address the pathology behind the denial at this point.

[slimmouse]

it reminds me more of someone with bad diabetes. the gangrene is setting in to the feet, and one of the doctors is suggesting amputation to save the rest of the body, and the patient doesn't like that, so he's saying "you're lying to me about my diabetes! you just enjoy cutting off people's feet!"

Nah. You need to be a more productive unit than a guy with no feet. You need to work to be able to buy their fuel. You need to pay your taxes to blow up your fellow mankind. You need to get sick when youve worked enough to buy their medicine

You subsequently need to develop a "me or them" attitude. It's not your fault of course. This is just how human beings are. Ask Milton Friedman.

[Nordic]

it reminds me more of someone with bad diabetes. the gangrene is setting in to the feet, and one of the doctors is suggesting amputation to save the rest of the body, and the patient doesn't like that, so he's saying "you're lying to me about my diabetes! you just enjoy cutting off people's feet!"

Nah. You need to be a more productive unit than a guy with no feet. You need to work to be able to buy their fuel. You need to pay your taxes to blow up your fellow mankind. You need to get sick when youve worked enough to buy their medicine

You subsequently need to develop a "me or them" attitude. It's not your fault of course. This is just how human beings are. Ask Milton Friedman.

I would argue you need them footless so they can't walk to alternatives.

[Nordic]

And by the way, looks like Thorium reactors might not be such a panacea:

http://www.ccnr.org/Thorium_Reactors.html

Thorium Reactors:

Back to the Dream Factory

by Gordon Edwards, July 13, 2011


The Nuclear Dream Factory

Every time a nuclear power reactor idea doesn't work out, and ordinary people get down-hearted and start to doubt the magnificence and benificence of nuclear energy, nuclear proponents rush back to their well-stocked dream factory to fetch another idea -- one that is sufficiently unfamiliar and sufficiently untested that ordinary people have no idea whether it is good or bad, safe or dangerous, feasible or foolish, or whether the almost miraculous claims made about it are true or false.

Just a few years ago, nuclear proponents were pushing Generation 3 reactors -- enormous plants that would generate huge amounts of electricity, yet be cheaper and faster to build than earlier models, as well as being safer and longer-lived.
Then Areva ran into a blizzard of problems trying to build one of these behemoths in Finland -- the cost soaring by billions, the construction time stretched by years, and fundamental safety-related design problems surfacing late in the game. Check and mate.

Undaunted, nuclear proponents quickly executed a 180-degree turn and are now promoting small reactors which can be mass-produced by the thousands and sprinkled on the landscape like cinnamon on toast. Pebble-bed reactors, molten-salt reactors, thorium reactors, have been paraded before the public with as many bells and whistles as the nuclear industry can muster, to distract people's gaze away from the construction fiascos, the litany of broken promises from the past, the still-unsolved problems of nuclear waste and nuclear weapons proliferation, and the horror that is Fukushima.

The following paragraphs are written to dispel some of the mystique surrounding the idea of "thorium reactors" -- a very old idea that is now being dressed up in modern clothes and made to seem like a major scientific breakthrough, which it is not.

Thorium is not a nuclear fuel

The fundamental fact about thorium is that it is NOT a nuclear fuel, because thorium is not a fissile material, meaning that it cannot sustain a nuclear fission chain reaction.

In fact the ONLY naturally occurring fissile material is uranium-235, and so -- of necessity -- that is the material that fuels all of the first-generation reactors in the entire world. Thorium cannot replace uranium-235 in this regard. Not at all.

Thorium is a "fertile" material

But thorium-232, which is a naturally occurring radioactive material, is about three times as abundant as uranium-238, which is also a naturally occurring radioactive material. Neither of these materials can be used directly as a nuclear fuel, because they are not "fissile" materials.

However, both uranium-238 and thorium-232 are "fertile" materials, which means that IF they are placed in the core of a nuclear reactor (one that is of necessity fuelled by a fissile material), some fraction of those fertile atoms will be transmuted into man-made fissile atoms.

Some uranium-238 atoms get transmuted into plutonium-239 atoms, and some thorium-232 atoms get transmuted into uranium-233 atoms.
Both plutonium-239 and uranium-233 are fissile materials which are not naturally-occurring. They are both usable as either fuel for nuclear reactors or as nuclear explosive materials for bombs.
(The USA exploded an atomic bomb made from uranium-233 in 1955.)

Reprocessing of irradiated nuclear fuel

In general, to obtain quantities of plutonium-239 or uranium-233, it is necessary to "reprocess" the irradiated material that started out as uranium-238 or thorium-232. This means dissolving that irradiated material in acid and then chemically separating out the fissile plutonium-239 or uranium-233, leaving behind the liquid radioactive wastes which include fission products (broken pieces of split atoms, including such things as iodine-131, cesium-137, strontium-90, etc.) and other radioactive waste materials called "activation products" and "transuranic elements".

Reprocessing is the dirtiest process in the entire nuclear fuel chain, because of the gaseous radioactive releases, liquid radioactive discharges, and large quantities of highly dangerous and easily dispersible radioactive liquids. Reprocessing also poses great proliferation risks because it produces man-made fissile materials which can be incorporated into nuclear weapons of various kinds by anyone who acquires the separated fissile material.

Advanced Fuel Cycles and Breeders

Any nuclear reactor-fuelling regime that requires reprocessing, or that uses plutonium-239 or uranium-233 as a primary reactor fuel, is called an "advanced fuel cycle". These advanced fuel cycles are intimately related with the idea of a "breeder" reactor -- one which creates as much or more fissile material as a byproduct than the amount of fissile material used to fuel the reactor. So it is only in this context that thorium reactors make any sense at all -- like all breeder concepts, they are designed to extend the fuel supply of nuclear reactors and thus prolong the nuclear age by centuries.

The breeder concept is very attractive to those who envisage a virtually limitless future for nuclear reactors, because the naturally occurring uranium-235 supply is not going to outlast the oil supply. Without advanced fuel cycles, nuclear power is doomed to be just a "flash in the pan". Thorium reactors are most enthusiastically promoted by those who see "plutonium breeders" as the only other realistic alternative to bring about a long-lived nuclear future. They think that thorium/uranium-233 is a better fate than uranium/plutonium-239. They do not see a nuclear phaseout as even remotely feasible or attractive.

"Molten Salt" reactors

Molten salt reactors are not a new idea, and they do not in any way require the use of thorium -- although historically the two concepts have often been linked. The basic idea of using molten salt instead of water (light or heavy water) as a coolant has a number of distinct advantages, chief of which is the ability to achieve much higher temperatures (650 deg. C instead of 300 deg. C) than with water cooled reactors, and at a much lower vapour pressure. The higher temperature means greater efficiency in converting the heat into electricity, and the lower pressure means less likelihood of an over-pressure rupture of pipes, and less drastic consequences of such ruptures if and when they do occur.

Molten salt reactors were researched at Oak Ridge Tennessee throughout the 1960s, culminating in the Molten Salt Reactor Experi- ment (MSRE), producing 7.4 megawatts of heat but no electricity. It was an early prototype of a thorium breeder reactor, using uranium and plutonium as fuels but not using the thorium blanket which would have been used to "breed" uranium-233 to be recovered through reprocessing -- the ultimate intention of the design.

This Oak Ridge work culminated in the period from 1970-76 in a design for a Molten Salt Breeder Reactor (MSBR) using thorium as a "fertile material" to breed "fissile" uranium-233, which would be extracted using a reprocessing facility.

Molten Salt Thorium reactors without reprocessing?

Although it is theoretically possible to imagine a molten-salt reactor design where the thorium-produced uranium-233 is immediately used as a reactor fuel without any actual reprocessing, such reactor designs are very inefficient in the "breeding" capacity and pose financial disincentives of a serious nature to any would-be developer. No one has actually built such a reactor or has plans to build such a reactor because it just isn't worth it compared with those designs which have a reprocessing facility.

Here's what Wikipedia says on this matter (it happens to be good info):

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

To exploit the molten salt reactor's breeding potential to the fullest, the reactor must be co-located with a reprocessing facility. Nuclear reprocessing does not occur in the U.S. because no commercial provider is willing to undertake it. The regulatory risk and associated costs are very great because the regulatory regime has varied dramatically in different administrations.[20] UK, France, Japan, Russia and India currently operate some form of fuel reprocessing.

Some U.S. Administration departments have feared that fuel reprocessing in any form could pave the way to the plutonium economy with its associated proliferation dangers.[21]

A similar argument led to the shutdown of the Integral Fast Reactor project in 1994.[22] The proliferation risk for a thorium fuel cycle stems from the potential separation of uranium-233, which might be used in nuclear weapons, though only with considerable difficulty.

Currently the Japanese are working on a 100-200 MWe molten salt thorium breeder reactor, using technologies similar to those used at Oak Ridge, but the Japanese project seems to lack funding.

Thorium reactors do not eliminate problems

The bottom line is this. Thorium reactors still produce high-level radioactive waste, they still pose problems and opportunities for the proliferation of nuclear weapons, they still pose catastrophic accident scenarios as potential targets for terrorist or military attack, for example.

Proponents of thorium reactors argue that all of these risks are somewhat reduced in comparison with the conventional plutonium breeder concept. Whether this is true or not, the fundamental problems associated with nuclear power have by no means been eliminated.

Gordon Edwards, Ph.D., President,
Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility.

[wintler2]

.. tell us again *why* you believe that the world is imminently running out of oil

You are a liar, nobody is saying the world is imminently running out of oil.

and *what* you think the solution for this and inter-related crises are.

Different thread, read the 1st post again.

[stickdog99]

At the risk of repeating myself ...

Why should the masses be so damned concerned that an economic system that exploits their labor while pitting every worker in the world against every other in order to enrich the elite is "about to crumble"?

The reason Big Oil is reassuring everyone that "all is well for now" is because to suggest otherwise might cause conversion to other alternative energy sources on a timeline that limits their potential for exploiting inevitable future shortages of oil to maximize profits. However, this should not blind us to the fact that the history of oil production has been the history of keeping oil prices artificially high. Nothing has changed on the front as of yet nor is likely to in future as long as Big Oil runs the military of world's only superpower.

The price of gas has nothing to do with the price of oil production. It's a supplier controlled market. The only real price control is the political unrest that would accompany gas prices set so high that they would destroy Joe Taxpayer's debt based consumer lifestyle. The prices consumers pay for the end products of oil have almost nothing to do with the cost of production and everything to do with whatever cost regional consumers are willing to bear before foregoing oil, demanding conversion to other alternatives or rebelling against their rigged political systems. This is why Iraqis pay less than 20% of what Americans pay for gas and Americans pay less than 40% of what Europeans pay for gas.

The reason I hate Peak Oil chicken littles is that they are acting in the service of Big Oil by spreading a bunch of dubious information about what are essentially known unknowns and unknown knowns as gospel truth under the guise of grassroots environmental activism. While the intent of these chicken littles may be pure, the effect is to prepare the way for Americans to accept ever rising prices for gas and other petroleum products and ever more aggressive imperialistic forays into regions that are rich in cheap oil because "oil is running out" when the actual truth of the matter is that Big Oil continues to control the whole distribution market as well as the imperialistic military beast that allows it to control the cheapest production spigots. That this beast is itself completely dependent on oil as well as the world's largest consumer of oil cements the deadly symbiosis of military aggression and Big Oil profits.

It's not that I dismiss Peak Oil so much as that I don't understand the focus on it. The real problem is not that oil is running out -- it's that Big Oil is running things. The solution is breaking Big Oil's strangehold on energy distribution with decentralized renewable energy sources. Sounding the Chicken Little Peak Oil alarm -- even if true -- plays into Big Oil's hands by making the tacit assumption that Big Oil's interests are in some manner aligned with ours.

The problem is not that oil is running out. The sun is still shining, the wind is still blowing almost, water is still flowing, and the earth is still cooling. That's a lot of basically free, inexhaustible energy. All we need to do is harness a small portion of it. The problem is that Big Oil (in symbiosis with the big US defense contractors) currently controls the vast majority of the distribution of energy in the world. Anything that helps break this stranglehold is positive.

When oil prices go up to $10 a gallon, I want the left to use the opportunity to exploit Big Oil's hubris by agitating the masses and proposing the real solutions to the real problems: a break up of the energy distribution monopoly, a drastically scaled back military, smarter manufacturing practices and highly distributed, renewable energy sources owned and operated by individuals and/or their local communities. What I don't want to see is a bunch of leftists sitting quietly at home shaking their heads that they saw this whole thing coming while thanking Gaia that Joe Sixpack finally can't afford his giant pickup and bemoaning the end of civilization as we know it because others refused to see what was always so plain to them.

Sorry, but our biggest problem is not that oil is about to run out. It just isn't. Nearly infinite sources of energy are all around us. They aren't about to run out any time soon. Nor will oil running out cause our corporate empires to collapse and force us all to embrace a simpler lifestyle, like it or not. If we want change, we have to cause it. And the place to begin is not just anywhere. It is exactly where they do not want us to begin, and that is with bottom up, locally owned and operated renewable energy sources.

My bottom line is this: if you wish to make people aware that current (and growing) levels of oil consumption will soon put us even more at the mercy of Big Oil and associated oligarchs, Peak away! If you instead wish to alarm us that "our" economic sky is currently in the process of falling -- justifying both Big Oil's insane profit margins and military adventurism -- please carefully reconsider your rhetorical excesses.

[Nordic]

Stickdog, we're really not in disagreement. For example, I think one of the worst things that could possibly happen to the world is that enormous limitless lakes of oil were discovered. Oil for everybody! All that you can burn!

That would fuck up the world even faster than it's currently being fucked up. Certain doom!

But people live like that's the reality! And that's how they want the world to be. That's what they expect!

How many households use less electricity than they did, say, 20 years ago. Between all the goddamn DVR's and the cable boxes and the computers and the big screen TV's and the extra freezers in the garages ......

Electricity use is a good thing to look at because people are under the delusion that electricity is somehow free. We're now living in the age of e-everything! E-energy. E-food. E-love.

Most people have no idea that somewhere, there is some dirty nasty COAL being burned to keep their computer screen glowing. And that somewhere else, mountaintops are being destroyed in order to dig that shit out of the ground.

But no, let's just all get electric cars and we'll be fine! Just plug in the cars and they go! Look! It's like magic! It's practically free!

No it's not. In fact, between the inefficiencies of burning coal and turning the heat into electricity, the line loss of transferring that electricity to your house, the losses from charging up the batteries, then the mechanical inefficiencies of driving this giant cell phone battery down the street and on the freeways, an E-Car isn't that much less energy efficient than a gas burning one. Really the only reason they are is because they're so much lighter, physically.

People have no idea how dependent they are on oil, coal, all that ugly stinky crap that has to be mined out of the ground.

[stickdog99]

Yes, we are in agreement, Nordic

If we want all of our electronic toys, we really need to find a way to generate most of the power for them locally and/or individually using geo and solar energy.

We need to divorce ourselves from our globalist masters when it comes to energy consumption. We need to commit to this effort neighborhood by neighborhood. And we need to start yesterday.

[wintler2]

We're all in agreement about need to reduce our dependance on oil, not least because its immoral. Buying oil pays for the many oil wars currently underway. It is not impossible to reduce oil dependence, many are already working on same, either because they've been priced out of the market, or the immorality of oil gets to them, or because they can see the writing on the wall. Transition Towns is a (middleclass) international movement doing exactly that, and it is explicitly motivated by oil depletion - so peak oil is (apart from being a fact) a meme that is moving people away from Big Oil dependence.

[stickdog99]

We're all in agreement about need to reduce our dependance on oil, not least because its immoral. Buying oil pays for the many oil wars currently underway. It is not impossible to reduce oil dependence, many are already working on same, either because they've been priced out of the market, or the immorality of oil gets to them, or because they can see the writing on the wall. Transition Towns is a (middleclass) international movement doing exactly that, and it is explicitly motivated by oil depletion - so peak oil is (apart from being a fact) a meme that is moving people away from Big Oil dependence.

Works for me. However, I still don't see how people can say the all the cheap oil is gone when Iraq's oil fields are still largely untapped, Iran's oil reserves are also still largely untapped, Saudi fields are still going strong and the most expensive oil being pulled from the ground to date still costs less than $30 a barrel to extract.

Still, if the Peak Oil meme is getting some people off their asses to organize at the community level for decentralized, renewable energy alternatives, I say let them Peak away.

[Hammer of Los]

So after all that, we can say we all actually agree?!

Oh happy day!

[wintler2]

So after all that, we can say we all actually agree?

You mean you've finally noticed that i'm not pro- Big Oil. Whoopdefuckingdo.

.. Iraq's oil fields are still largely untapped, Iran's oil reserves are also still largely untapped, Saudi fields are still going strong and the most expensive oil being pulled from the ground to date still costs less than $30 a barrel to extract.

All false.

Iraqs oil was first tapped in 1927.

Irans in 1908.

Saudi oil?

[stickdog99]

Iraq and Iran both have far more oil in proven reserves than oil that has already been pumped from the ground in their entire oil production histories.

The fact that Saudi production has declined slightly may or may not have anything to do with its reserve capacity.

My point is that there is a lot of cheap oil left and Big Oil plans on marking it up at least 2000%+.

Do you agree or disagree?

[JackRiddler]

Iraq and Iran both have far more oil in proven reserves than oil that has already been pumped from the ground in their entire oil production histories.

Do they? You see incentives to invent oil depletion. But do you also see incentives to claim higher reserves than actually exist? Example: in the 1980s OPEC agreed to tie production quotas to reserves; everyone suddenly discovered their reserves were much higher than previously claimed. Claims of high reserves invite investors, for one thing, and they also reassure states and capital that no big crisis is imminent, so there is no pressing need to shift investment priorities to renewables, efficiencies and transport transformation.

The fact that Saudi production has declined slightly may or may not have anything to do with its reserve capacity.

Why are they drilling offshore?

My point is that there is a lot of cheap oil left and Big Oil plans on marking it up at least 2000%+.

Do you agree or disagree?

I agree that something like this is what they will attempt to do in the future. They'd have to be careful about a jump by a factor of 20 (a number you've chosen arbitrarily, I must presume) because that would destabilize all of the governments they've bought influence over, and force these to turn on them. Such a crunch would be so destabilizing that it would invite revolutions (even in the United States: imagine gas were 20 times higher tomorrow!), nationalizations, and crash programs to get off the oil teat. Even the monsters who are destroying the basis for human life on earth in a matter of decades may hesitate to take actions that could destroy them in a matter of weeks.

Anyway, I'm glad after 97 pages (or whatever it is) we've reached a point where we all seem to agree societies need to get off the oil teat, post-haste, as a matter of survival, regardless of how much "oil is left" (and the latter is actually plenty, once we factor in the ocean floor, the tar sands, and related certain causes of disasters on a scale unimaginable even by today's air, water and land pollution and ongoing mass extinction of species in all habitats). So we're not disagreeing on the consequences of our different beliefs, are we?

.