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Wow. Sounds like a slightly less dire discussion of the sort of things that James Kunstler is always discussing on his site. http://www.kunstler.com/index.php

Wow. Sounds like a slightly less dire discussion of the sort of things that James Kunstler is always discussing on his site. http://www.kunstler.com/index.php http://www.kunstler.com/index.php I think Kunstler's site is a bit over the top, but it's an interesting "ha ha, only serious" view of peak oil. Things like this peak plastic article remind me that we better get to work on crazy stuff like fusion or orbiting solar powered microwave transmitters (to run Google's asteroid mining data center, of course) if we want to avoid a long slow decline into another dark age.

Tuna-Fish 15y ago
Fission power is good enough to avoid any decline. We just need to start building more of it...
- crpatino 15y ago
  Except we would hit peak uranium pretty soon, and be left with a bunch of new reactors that never got close to pay back the investment it took to deploy them. Not to mention the poisonous, radioactive debris to deal with for a long long time afterwards. I would be much happier if we committed those resources to maintain the nuclear infrastructure we already have in place, to keep it going safely for as long as possible.
  - Roboprog 15y ago
    I think fission is probably a lesser evil than burning mountains of coal, but yeah, it's a stop-gap at best until we get fusion working, or make much better use of that big fusion reactor nearby that's already been running for 4 or 5 billion years :-)
  - Tuna-Fish 15y ago
    > Except we would hit peak uranium pretty soon We will never hit peak uranium. The "exploitable uranium resources" numbers floating about are for deposits that would be commercially exploitable roughly at present prices. The thing is, the cost of the raw uranium is a very small proportion (less than 0.05%) of the cost of running a fission plant. In other words, you could multiply the market price of uranium by 1000 times, and it would only increase the cost of running the plant by 50%. But, well before that, it becomes cost-effective to separate uranium from seawater. Where we have enough for tens of milennia. If that runs out, it then becomes cost-effective to mine and refine nuclear fuel in space and return it to earth. At present-day launch costs. Peak Uranium will never happen. And if it somehow did, thorium is roughly a thousand times more plentiful than U-235.

Tuna-Fish 15y ago

Fission power is good enough to avoid any decline. We just need to start building more of it...

crpatino 15y ago
Except we would hit peak uranium pretty soon, and be left with a bunch of new reactors that never got close to pay back the investment it took to deploy them. Not to mention the poisonous, radioactive debris to deal with for a long long time afterwards. I would be much happier if we committed those resources to maintain the nuclear infrastructure we already have in place, to keep it going safely for as long as possible.
- Roboprog 15y ago
  I think fission is probably a lesser evil than burning mountains of coal, but yeah, it's a stop-gap at best until we get fusion working, or make much better use of that big fusion reactor nearby that's already been running for 4 or 5 billion years :-)
- Tuna-Fish 15y ago
  > Except we would hit peak uranium pretty soon We will never hit peak uranium. The "exploitable uranium resources" numbers floating about are for deposits that would be commercially exploitable roughly at present prices. The thing is, the cost of the raw uranium is a very small proportion (less than 0.05%) of the cost of running a fission plant. In other words, you could multiply the market price of uranium by 1000 times, and it would only increase the cost of running the plant by 50%. But, well before that, it becomes cost-effective to separate uranium from seawater. Where we have enough for tens of milennia. If that runs out, it then becomes cost-effective to mine and refine nuclear fuel in space and return it to earth. At present-day launch costs. Peak Uranium will never happen. And if it somehow did, thorium is roughly a thousand times more plentiful than U-235.