[ExI] cost of SBSP and thorium

[John Clark]

On Fri, Aug 17 Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:

> there are no thorium power reactors


Today that is true but if this was before1969 it would not be.

> in spite of places like India having a lot of it and needed energy badly.
>  Why?
>

That's the only substantial criticism I get, if it's such a great idea why
aren't we doing it?  I could ask you the same thing about power satellites.


> > 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.
>

One pound of Thorium equals 3 million pounds of coal, so it all depends on
if mining Thorium on the moon is more than 3 million times as difficult as
mining coal on the earth. But of course there is no need to go to the moon,
there is plenty of Thorium right here.


> > 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.


As I pointed out in my last post it would only take 2000 tons of Thorium to
equal the energy in 6 billion tons of coal that the world uses each year.
There is 120 TRILLION tons of Thorium in the earth's crust and if the world
needs 10 times as much energy as we get from just coal then we will run out
of Thorium in the crust of this planet in 6 billion years, and we will run
out of sunlight for your power satellites long before then. Keith, maybe
there are problems in a Thorium based economy but lack of that element is
not one of them.

> 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.


A Thorium reactor has produced 7.4 megawatts of power for several years,
and it used technology that was over 40 years old; but even with today's
technology a power satellite has not managed to produced one watt for one
second.

  John K Clark
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