Chris de Morsella <[email protected]> wrote:
> > No one is ever going to "recover" the dispersed Thorium in your garden's > dirt > > They could but no one will bother doing anything like that until ores of much much higher concentrations are used up, and at current consumption rates that won't happen for about a billion years. > > Only the much smaller amount of Thorium or Uranium that is actually > recoverable and that means not only technically recoverable, but also > energetically > As I say nobody would bother but even with today's primitive technology do you have any evidence that it would take more energy than what 37 tons of coal could provide to extract 12 grams of Thorium from one cubic meter of randomly selected dirt? > > Again only a very small fraction of the Thorium dispersed throughout the > earth's crust is recoverable and can be counted as a reserve. Which was my > point in bringing up the large quantities of gold dissolved in the world's > oceans. > And Thorium is 2000 times as common as Gold and is in fact almost as common as lead. And if that little one troy ounce Gold coin in your pocket were made of Thorium instead of Gold it could produce as much energy as 114 tons of coal. > > My point remains valid and salient. Whenever anyone speaks of some > resource reserve figure in practice what they are (or should be) referring > to is the recoverable reserve figures. The quantity of some resource in the > earth's crust may be interesting, but it is irrelevant in a discussion of > reserves. > So let's review: * Thorium is a element that is TWICE as common as TIN. * Some natural ores are 50% Thorium. * One POUND of Thorium can provide as much energy as 1,362 TONS of coal. * The best argument Chris de Morsella can come up with against the use of Thorium is that there just isn't enough of it. > > If LFTR is so great then why has it not been pursued > Four reasons: 1) in the early days military applications were considered much more important than civilian power plants, and small pressurized water Uranium reactors worked pretty well in submarines so Admiral Rickover decreed that's where virtually all reactor developmental money should go. 2) By their very nature uranium reactors create copious amounts of Plutonium but Thorium reactors do not. In the early days this was considered a huge advantage Uranium reactors had over Thorium reactors, but today not so much. 3) The culture of fission reactor design is far more conservative and resistant to change than any other area of science or technology. 4) LFTR's aren't just theoretical but could actually work, so environmentalists feel duty bound to oppose it with every fiber of their being. > Peak liquid petroleum has already happened BULLSHIT. > and conventional oil (as it is called in the industry) is already in decline around the world. This fact has been masked by the rapid rise in unconventional oil Then to avoid obsolescence the term "conventional oil" will need to be revised. > > As evidence -- look at just how far the production rate has dropped off > for the Cantarell field off the Yucatan -- it is the third biggest oil > field ever discovered. Production from that super giant field has plunged > by 80% from it's peak in 2004. > The Cantarell oil field is not only the third biggest it is also the most technologically primitive in the world, the reason is easy to understand. If you're a Mexican farmer and oil is discovered on your land you don't own a drop of it, the government owns it all and government bureaucrats have little expertise in the science of oil drilling; and those experts who do have such ability work for no government and prefer to apply their trade in places like the USA where they can get a nice share of the profits. For this reason the USA has not the largest but the most technologically advanced oil fields in the world, and is why the USA has experienced such a huge increase in oil and natural gas production in the last few years. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
