[ExI] cost of SBSP and thorium

Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org
Fri Aug 17 16:56:42 UTC 2012


On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 08:04:20AM -0700, Keith Henson wrote:

> I might add that there are no thorium power reactors in spite of
> places like India having a lot of it and needed energy badly.  Why?

That's because alternative fuelcycle breeders don't exist.
If they can be made to work, which is doubtful, they will not
arrive on time to make a visible difference.

Ditto solar power satellites. However, if we manage the
transition to renewable we will need SPS rather soon, as
photons caught by photovoltaics can't be used for
photosynthesis, and we're already appropriating a considerable
fraction of the planet's net photosynthetic production.
 
> For power sats, I can tell you one reason.  Before early this year
> there were no proposals to get the transport cost down to where power
> sats made sense.
> 
> >> That wasn't the question.  If the human race were pulling the majority of
> >> power from thorium reactors, how long would it [Thorium] last?
> >>
> >
> > The amount of coal mined per year worldwide is about 6 billion tons, the
> > USA accounts for only about 1 billion tons of that. One ton of Thorium
> > contains as much energy as 3 million tons of coal so you'd need 2 thousand
> > tons of Thorium to equal coal. The U.S.Geological Survey's latest estimate
> > says that one company, Thorium Energy Inc, has  915,000 tons of thorium
> > reserves in Idaho and Montana. That alone could replace coal for about 450
> > years, and that's just from the claims that one company has in 2 states.
> > And Norway has as much Thorium as the entire USA,  and Australia about
> > twice as much, and India has about 3 times as much. And we've already
> > discovered Thorium deposits on the Moon and Mars.
> 
> I think the chances of mining thorium on the Moon or Mars is close to
> zero.  If we had that kind of space presence, power sats would be the
> obvious choice.
> 
> By taking the known and projected reserves and figuring in using
> thorium to make synthetic fuels (unless you want to give up jet
> travel) and world wide energy growth rates, the thorium doesn't last
> as long as a century.  Now admittedly that's probably long enough to
> reach the singularity and who knows what the energy situation will be
> then.  More?  Less?  Hard to say.  Going from none to 30,000 one GW
> thorium burners is as much of a boggle factor going from none to 30 TW
> of power sats.  Or so it seems to me.
> 
> Keith
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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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