It is easy to get the impression that proposed new modular nuclear generating units will solve the problems of nuclear generation. Perhaps they will allow more nuclear electricity to be generated at a low cost and with much less of a problem with spent fuel.
As I analyze the situation, however, the problems associated with nuclear electricity generation are more complex and immediate than most people perceive. My analysis shows that the world is already dealing with “not enough uranium from mines to go around.” In particular, US production of uranium “peaked”about 1980 (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Chart prepared by the US Energy Information Administration showing US production of uranium oxide.
For many years, the US was able to down-blend nuclear warheads (both purchased from Russia and from its own supply) to get around its uranium supply deficit.
Today, the inventory of nuclear warheads has dropped quite low. There are few warheads available for down-blending. This is creating a limit on uranium supply that is only now starting to hit.
Nuclear warheads, besides providing uranium in general, are important for the fact that they provide a concentrated source of uranium-235, which is the isotope of uranium that can sustain a nuclear reaction. With the warhead supply depleting, the US has a second huge problem: developing a way to produce nuclear fuel, probably mostly from spent fuel, with the desired high concentration of uranium-235. Today, Russia is the primary supplier of enriched uranium.
The plan of the US is to use government research grants to kickstart work on new small modular nuclear reactors that will be more efficient than current nuclear plants. These reactors will use a new fuel with a higher concentration of uranium-235 than is available today, except through purchase from Russia. Grants are also being given to start work on US production of the more highly enriched uranium fuel within the US. It is hoped that most of this highly enriched uranium can come from recycling spent nuclear fuel, thus helping to solve the problem of what to do with the supply of spent fuel.
My analysis indicates that while advanced modular nuclear reactors might theoretically be helpful for the very long term, they cannot fix the problems of the US, and other countries in the West, nearly quickly enough. I expect that the Trump administration, which will start in January 2025, will see this program as a boondoggle.
[1] Current problems with nuclear electricity generation are surprisingly hidden. World electricity generation from nuclear has been close to flat since 2004.
Although there was a dip in world generation of nuclear electricity after the tsunami that affected nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011, otherwise world production of nuclear electricity has been nearly flat since 2004 (Figure 3).
US nuclear electricity production (Figure 4) shows a similar pattern, except that production since 2021 is down.
[2] The total amount of electricity generated by nuclear power plants is limited by the amount of uranium fuel available to them.
I believe that a major reason why the electricity supply from nuclear has been quite flat since 2004 is because total nuclear electricity generation is limited by the quantity of uranium fuel that is available for the nuclear reactors that have been built.
The price of uranium can perhaps rise, but this doesn’t necessarily add much (or any) supply very quickly. It takes several years to develop a new uranium mine.
In theory, reprocessing of spent fuel to produce uranium and plutonium is also possible, but the amount of that has been performed to date is small. (See Section [6].)
[3] The World Nuclear Association (WNA) published Figure 5 that hints at the world’s uranium supply problem:
The black line showing “reactor requirements” (Figure 5) is in some sense comparable to world generation of nuclear electricity (Figure 3). Both figures show fairly flat lines since about 2004. This relationship hints that there has not been a significant improvement in the efficiency of electricity generation using uranium fuel in the past 20 years.
Figure 5 shows a huge gap between the production of uranium from the various countries and “reactor requirements.” The single largest source of additional supply has been down-blended uranium from nuclear bombs. The EIA reports that the US purchased a large number of nuclear warheads from Russia between 1995 and 2013 for this purpose under the Megatons to Megawatts program. The EIA also reports that for the period 2013 to 2022, a purchase agreement was put in place allowing the US to purchase commercial origin low-enriched uranium from Russia to replace some of down-blended nuclear warhead material. In addition, the US had some of its own nuclear warheads that it could blend down. It was the availability of uranium supply from these various sources that allowed US nuclear electricity generation to remain relatively flat in the 2004 to 2023 period, as shown on Figure 4.
The US’s own uranium extraction reached a peak about 1980 and is now close to zero (Figure 1). The world’s supply of warheads is now over 85% depleted, leaving very little stored-away, highly enriched uranium to blend down (Figure 2)
A hidden problem is the fact that uranium production available today is largely from Russia and its close affiliates. The data underlying Figure 5 shows that uranium production in 2022 is dominated by close allies of Russia (55% of the total coming from Kazakhstan (43% of total), Uzbekistan (7% of total), and Russia (5% of total)). The US (at almost 0%), plus production of its close affiliates, Canada and Australia, provided only 24% of world uranium. This imbalance between Russia and its affiliates, and the US and its affiliates, should be of concern.
[4] The current conflict between the US and Russia adds to nuclear problems.
The US is trying to impose sanctions on Russia. The EIA reports:
“The origin of uranium used in U.S. reactors will likely change in the coming years. In May [2024], the United States banned imports of uranium products from Russia beginning in August [2024], although companies may apply for waivers through January 1, 2028.”
This seems to imply that a transition away from Russian uranium dependence must be made in only a little over three years. This is a short time frame, given the difficulty in making such a transition.
EIA data show that in the year 2023, the US sourced only 4.6% of uranium supplies from the US. (This could be partly or mostly down-blended nuclear warheads). Material purchased from Russia comprised 11.7% of uranium. Kazakhstan provided 20.6% of uranium purchased, and Uzbekistan provided 9.5%. Among US allies, Canada provided 14.9%, and Australia 9.2%.
[5] The WNA does not hint at any uranium supply problems.
The WNA is an advocate for nuclear energy; it cannot suggest that there is any problem with uranium supplies. WNA has the opinion that if there is a shortage of uranium, prices will rise, and more will become available. But even if prices rise, it takes several years to bring new mines into operation. Prices need to stay high, or companies will not pursue what appear to be opportunities.
Readers of OurFiniteWorld.com have seen that oil prices tend to spike and collapse. They don’t stay high for very long because if prices stay high, the end products made with oil tend to become unaffordable. I expect a similar problem occurs with uranium.
The necessary price threshold for high uranium extraction that is mentioned by the WNA is $130/kg in 2021. By coincidence, when a translation is made to dollars per pound using 2024$, this corresponds quite closely to the current price line on Figure 6. Indeed, prices do sometimes bounce high. The problem is getting them to stay as high as the dotted line for long enough to support the multi-decade life of a mine. Economists were forecasting a price of $300 per barrel oil a few years ago, but they have been disappointed. The price is under $75 per barrel now.
The country with the most potentially recoverable uranium is Australia. It produced only 9% of the world’s uranium in 2022, but is reported to have 28% of the world’s remaining reserve. Consistently higher prices would be needed for Australia to start opening new mines.
It is also possible that more uranium supply might become available if improved extraction techniques are developed.
The world seems to be past peak crude oil. By itself, the peak oil issue could limit new uranium extraction and transport.
[6] Recycling of spent fuel to recover usable uranium and plutonium has been accomplished only to a limited extent. Experience to date suggests that recycling has many issues.
It is possible to make an estimate of the amount of recycling of spent fuel that is currently being performed. Figure 3 in Section [1] shows about 65,000 metric tons of uranium are required to meet the demands of existing nuclear power generation, and that as of 2022, there was about an annual shortfall in supply of about 26%. Based on what information I have been able to gather, existing recycling of uranium and plutonium amounts to perhaps 6% of the overall fuel requirement. Thus, as of 2022, today’s recycling of spent fuel could perhaps shave this shortfall in uranium supply to “only” 20% of annual nuclear fuel requirements. There is some recycling of spent fuel, but it is small in relation to the amount needed.
There seem to be several issues with building units to recover uranium from spent fuel:
- Higher cost than simply mining more uranium
- Pollution problems from the recycling plants
- Potential for use of the output to make nuclear warheads
- Potential for nuclear accidents within the plants
- Remaining radioactivity at the site at the end of the reprocessing plant’s life, and thus the need to decommission such plants
- Potential for many protestors disrupting construction and operation because of issues (2), (3), (4), and (5)
The US outlawed recycling of spent fuel in 1977, after a few not-very-successful attempts. Once the purchase of Russian warheads was arranged, down-blending of warheads was a much less expensive approach than reprocessing spent fuel. Physics Today recently reported the following regarding US reprocessing:
“A plant in West Valley, New York, reprocessed spent fuel for six years before closing in 1972. Looking to expand the plant, the owners balked at the costs required for upgrades needed to meet new regulatory standards. Construction of a reprocessing plant in Barnwell, South Carolina, was halted in 1977 following the Carter administration’s ban.”
Japan has been trying to build a commercial spent fuel reprocessing plant at Rokkasho since 1993, but it has had huge problems with cost overruns and protests by many groups. The latest estimate of when the plant will actually be completed is fiscal year 2026 or 2027. The plant would process 800 metric tons of fuel per year.
The largest commercial spent fuel reprocessing plant in operation is in La Hague, France. It has been in place long enough (since 1966) that it has run into the issue of decommissioning an old unit, which was started as a French military project. The first processing unit was shut down in 2003. The International Atomic Energy Administration says, “The UP2-400 decommissioning project began some 20 years ago and may be expected to continue for several more years.” It talks about the huge cost and number of people involved. It says, “Decommissioning activities represent roughly 20 per cent of the overall activity and socio-economic impact of the La Hague site, which also hosts two operating spent fuel recycling plants.”
The cost of the La Hague reprocessing units is probably not fully known. They were built by government agencies. They have gone through various owners including AREVA. AREVA has had huge financial problems. The successor company is Orano. The currently operating units have the capacity to process about 1,700 metric tons of fuel per year. The 1700 metric tons of reprocessing of spent fuel from La Hague is reported to be nearly half of the world’s operating capacity for recycling spent fuel.
I understand that Russia is working on approaches that quite possibly are not included in my figures. If so, this may add to world uranium supply, but Russia is not likely to want to share the benefits with the West if there is not enough to go around.
[7] The concentration of the isotope uranium-235 is very important in making fuel for the proposed new modular nuclear reactors.
Uranium-235 makes up 0.72% of natural uranium. Wikipedia says, “Unlike the predominant isotope uranium-238, it [uranium-235] is fissile, i. e., it can sustain a nuclear reaction.” In most reactors used today, the concentration of uranium-235 is 3% to 5%.
According to CNN, the plan in building advanced modular small reactors is to use fuel with a 5% to 20% concentration of uranium-235. Fuel at this concentration is called high assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU. The expectation is that power plants with this type of fuel will be more efficient to operate.
Producing higher concentrations of uranium-235 tends to be problematic unless nuclear weapons are available for down-blending; warheads use high concentrations of uranium-235. Now, with reduced availability of nuclear warheads for down-blending, other sources are needed in addition. CNN reports that the only commercial source of HALEU is Russia. The EIA reports that the Inflation Reduction Act invested $700 million to support the development of a domestic supply chain for HALEU.
[8] The US is trying to implement many new ideas at one time with virtually no successful working models to smooth the transition.
Strangely enough, the US has no working model of a small-scale nuclear reactor, even one operating on conventional fuel. A CNBC article from September 2024 says, Small nuclear reactors could power the world, the challenge is building the first one in the US.
The new small-scale nuclear projects we do have are still at a very preliminary stage. In June 2024, Bill Gates wrote, “We just broke ground on America’s first next-gen nuclear facility. Kemmerer, Wyoming will soon be home to the most advanced nuclear facility in the world.” The plan is for it is to become operational by 2030, if it has access to HALEU fuel.
With respect to how far along the ability to make HALEU from spent fuel is, an October 2024 article in Interesting Engineering says, “US approves new facility design concept to turn nuclear waste into reactor fuel:”
“The facility whose conceptual design has been approved will be located at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). It will help turn used material recovered from DOE’s former Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II reactor) into usable fuel for its advanced nuclear power plant. . . The plan is to recover approximately 10 metric tons of HALEU from EBR-II fuel by December 2028 using an electrochemical process that was perfected over the years at Idaho National Laboratory (INL).”
Assuming this can be done, it will be a step forward, but it is nowhere near being an at-scale, commercial project that can be done economically by other companies. The volume of 10 metric tons is tiny.
Starting at this level, it is difficult to see how reactors with the new technology and the HALEU fuel to feed them can possibly be available in quantity before 2050.
[9] It is difficult to see how the cost of electricity generated using the new advanced modular nuclear reactors and the new HALEU fuel, created by reprocessing spent fuel, could be low.
As far as I can see, the main argument that these new modular electricity generation plants will be affordable is that they will only generate a relatively small amount of electricity at once —about 300 megawatts or less, or about one third of the average of conventional nuclear reactors in the US. Because of the smaller electricity output, the hope is that they will be affordable by more buyers, such as utility companies.
The issue that is often overlooked by economists is that electricity generated using these new techniques needs to be low cost, per kilowatt-hour, to be helpful. High-cost electricity is not affordable. Keeping costs down when many new approaches are being tried for the first time is likely to be a huge hurdle. I look through the long list of problems encountered in recycling spent fuel mentioned in Section [6] and wonder whether these issues can be inexpensively worked around. There are also issues with adopting and installing the proposed new advanced modular reactors, such as security, that I have not even tried to address.
The hope is that somehow, the whole process of building the advanced modular nuclear reactors and creating the HALEU fuel can be standardized and can be organized in such a way that economies of scale will set in. It seems to me that reaching this goal will be difficult. In theory, perhaps such a goal can be reached in 2060 or 2070, but this is not nearly soon enough, given the world’s current shortage of uranium from mines.
[10] The Trump administration will likely drop or substantially change the current program for advanced modular nuclear reactors.
The US plan that is discussed in this post has been developed under the Biden administration. This group was voted out of power on November 5. The Democratic administration will be replaced by a new Republican administration, headed by Donald Trump, on January 20, 2025.
I would not be surprised if the advanced modular nuclear generation plan disappears, almost as quickly as the currently subsidized offshore wind program, which Trump has vowed to end. The two programs have many things in common: Both programs provide an excuse for more US debt; they provide many jobs for researchers; and the devices that they relate to can be purchased in fairly small increments. But the cost per kilowatt-hour of electricity is likely to be high with either program. In some sense, as they are currently envisioned, they will not efficient ways to produce electricity. A major problem is the lack of fuel for the new modular reactors, and the slow ramp-up time to obtain this fuel.
I expect that under Trump, the sanction against purchasing HALEU from Russia might be replaced with a tariff. That way the US could have the benefit of HALEU, purchased from Russia, but at a higher price. This would allow research to continue, if desired.
[11] If solutions cannot be found, electricity generation from nuclear is likely to gradually disappear.
Over time, the world’s self-organizing economy tends to eliminate its more inefficient parts. When I look at the past experience with nuclear, what I see seems to be another example of the self-organizing economy squeezing out the inefficient parts of the economy (Figure 7):
In this chart, “Advanced Economies, ex US” are defined as members of the Organization for Economic Development (OECD), excluding the US. “Later Entrants” are non-OECD members, excluding Russia and Ukraine. They include China, India, Indonesia, and many other lower-income countries. Many of these countries are in East Asia.
What I see is that the relatively “flat” overall nuclear electricity production has been accomplished, to a significant extent, by the “Advanced Economies, ex US” dropping back in their use of nuclear electricity at close to the same time the “Later Entrants” have rapidly been increasing their use of nuclear electricity. The Later Entrants can make goods for sale in international markets much more cheaply than the Advanced Economies, ex US through their efficient use of cheap energy (often from coal) and their lower wages. This more efficient approach gives the Later Entrants an “edge” in buying the uranium that is available.
I expect to see more of this pattern of squeezing out in the future. In fact, new and recently re-opened nuclear plants will need to compete existing nuclear generation units for available uranium.
Given the way squeezing out takes place, very few people will realize that there is a problem with uranium fuel. It will just be that leaders of some parts of the world, as well as some parts of the US, will start emphasizing stories about how dangerous nuclear energy is. Instead of nuclear, they will emphasize electricity generation from wind and solar and allow these approaches to “go first” when they are available. The result will be wholesale electricity prices that will be far too low for nuclear power plants, much of the time. It will be these low wholesale electricity prices that push nuclear power out.
Thus, unless there truly are breakthroughs in recycling spent fuels, or in uranium mining, electricity generation using nuclear energy may gradually slip away from many parts of the world currently using it.
Remember the 80s song about shooting all that is not needed to Mars?
https://youtu.be/kPXg-6zw16g?si=ejCFpQRMUTUZgI1y
By the way, Tesla was also a Czechoslovak brand of electronics.
https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_(podnik)
Just to remind you some haunting past-present connections…
We do certainly end up with a lot of infrastructure that we cannot continue to maintain. Roads come to mind. Also transmission lines.
The narrative that we can move to electric vehicles makes no sense without transmission lines and roads.
More on small modular reactors. A nice summary.
This is a very good video by Sabine Hossenfelder. I saw it before I wrote my post, and I thought about linking to it.
But I discovered that US small nuclear reactors have a whole lot more problems than she mentions, off in a different direction, so I left it out.
It certainly supports my point that this approach seems to be a boondoggle.
If large nuclear reactors are not the solution, and small nuclear reactors are not the solution….
…. how about medium-sized nuclear reactors?
…. or giant nuclear reactors?
…. or micro nuclear reactors that you can install in your garage next to the Tesla?
Elon Musk’s real father is an iranian diplomat.
His Jewish roots experienced in Pretoria.
Interview to his adoptive father Errol
https://medium.com/@TheMostReliableSource/elon-musks-diverse-heritage-unraveling-his-family-roots-28319b7778b4
https://www.graphic.com.gh/international/international-news/went-to-hebrew-school-elon-musk-reveals-sa-jewish-roots.html
https://english.alarabiya.net/webtv/programs/special-interview/2024/11/14/errol-musk-discusses-elon-s-role-in-trump-s-administration-and-cost-cutting-vision
These are very interesting. It is surprising how diverse the backgrounds of millionaires and billionaires are.
With enough money (and energy) in the system, divorce is easy. Sending children to fancy schools is easy. Flying around to different parts of the world is easy. This leads to a whole different culture. These are the “wheeler-dealers” of the world.
Poor people are likely to stay in the same place and know primarily their close relatives, and people they grew up with.
Since a few people seem interested in the possible metaphysics of our current times, I’ll share this half-hour video I recently came across: bizarre occult messaging in a video communication shared by Mr. Musk.
Whether you think this is entertaining, or creepy, or both, consider that this is “*their*” messaging. Whether “they” believe in any of it or not, this is the message “they” are sending out for our consumption.
There doesn’t need to be the supernatural for there to be spell-casting, which this clearly is. I don’t buy into all of this presenter’s analysis, but there’s no real ‘normal’ explanation for all of the crazy stuff in this clip. It took a decent amount of work to put this together, certainly nothing casual about it.
Lidia, thanks very interesting.
AI is not demons. It can be creature of loving grace.
It is interesting to see that if one looks for Maye Cannes on the web (Elon’s mother described on the articke), it comes out automatically Maye Musk.
Her original surname Haldeman is also quoted by various sources, but not this middle surname ‘Cannes’ which apparently she used when she married with Khosrow Bagherzadeh (Iranian Consul in Johannesburg) in the 70’s, in South Africa.
So, if the automatic link is offered by the web, there must be a period in which Maye may have used ‘Cannes’ surname in South Africa, otherwise no automatic link should be offered on the web, at least this connection should be strange.
This marriage quoted on the above article is not denied by other sources, but there are apparently no other articles talking of this marriage with Khosrow Bagherzadeh, Iranian diplomat.
If this is all true, Errol Musk is just Elon’s adoptive father and Musk is not Elon’s original surname.
It could make sense for geopolitical reasons, because Khosrow Bagherzadeh was apparently an Iranian diplomat before the Islamic revolution, that is under Shah’s old regime, the one Western Countries would like to see back.
If the above articles are correct, Elon Musk’s life would seem the one of a spy movie.
Rich families can live unusual lives. I did a search on “Khosrow Bagherzadeh,” and all I found was an artist from Iran who died a few years ago.
Gail, that man was another person, Khosrow Hassanzadeh and yes was an artist, but he was born in 1963 and he couldn’t give birth to Elon in 1970.
I made the same search you did and yes, I confirm that it comes out from the search that same person.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khosrow_Hassanzadeh
Just to conclude, I’m not saying that these articles are necessarily correct, but only like to say that my impression is that there are things not completely clear for me in his life.
Good point!
Saw a recent post about education and the poster said EXPECTATIONS are much higher. Despite the realities, poor people are expected to attend fancy schools and travel to different parts of the world. Poor people who stay in the same place are considered “losers” by other poor people.
Saw another video about a person claiming (male of course) how isolated he feels and how selfish and self-absorbed people are in a large metropolitan area. The self-absorption and selfishness I think come the constant need people feel to out-compete other people and get ahead.
The people who are winning have, for the most part , a completely different view of reality than those who are losing ground. Social and political divisions tend to form around who’s winning and who’s losing.
I knew none of the details discussed but I could see that he was one.
For all the space fanatics, Gemini AI claims it would take 80,000 Starship launches and 27.88 Trillion Cuft of LNG to reach geosynchronous orbit
To get 1,000,000 tonnes to the moon of payload for say mining operations and space station etc, would be more than double this amount or 55 T cuft of LNG via starship..
A 1 million tonnes limit for the mining and processing of whatever ore is found (remembering it’s mostly basalt for 500 miles deep, as it didn’t have Earth’s concentrating activities), would be a small mine not producing much.
The world currently uses around 132 T Cuft per year and taking ‘stuff’ to the moon, including fuel to get back to earth, with a space station for refueling at GSO, would take more than 50% of current annual production.
To do this mammoth undertaking assuming just a 10% increase in LNG use per year, to make all the rockets, take fuel to the space station etc over 20 years, and have the rest of the economy grow to undertake such a giant project, would use up Earth’s remaining reserves in under 20 years..
It simply isn’t going to happen….
For them the laws of physics and thermodynamics do not apply.
Because of the Kessler effect, we won”t last launching 8,000 starships, let aone 80,000.
Space junk is a real problem. I ran a model and found that a power satellite moving from LEO to GEO in a spiral orbit got hit 40 times. The junk can be cleaned up with GW scale lasers.
I would bet that “GW scale lasers” are made with, and consume, fossil fuel energy. These need to be part of any calculation of the overall infrastructure needed. Also, somehow, these lasers need to be used in such a way that they don’t take out satellites involved with necessary activities, such as GPS services. There need to be trained people to use them, also.
“I would bet that “GW scale lasers” are made with, and consume, fossil fuel energy”
You have to put it in space, but once there, the energy to run it is from sunlight. The cost and mass is on a par with a power satellite, but you only need one of them compared to 1000 or more power satellites so the cost as a fraction of the whole project is negligible.
“don’t take out satellites involved with necessary activities, such as GPS services.”
Not a problem. It takes exquisite pointing to hit anything.
“There need to be trained people to use them, also.”
I kind of doubt this. It’s not like shooting skeet.
They are a weapon. That complicates things.
The single world fit to describe all of the above is ‘boondogle’.
It takes much more courage to admit something does not work than having to resort to Rube Goldbergish methods.
Power satellites make electric power, a commodity. With commodities if you want market share, you have to come in at a lower cost than the other ways.
If power satellites can’t compete, then there is no reason to build them.
Actually, if you can convince a government official that at some point, power satellites “might” be helpful, then it may be possible to get government subsidies to allow a big boondoggle to continue for many years.
The US has been able to handle quite a bit of the additional debt, since the dollar is the reserve currency. Perhaps it can add some more.
In general, if a whole system cannot grow up that pays back the debt with interest, there is a major problem.
I think that the CO2 problem is most likely to be solved by biological methods such as a plant that does not decay.
But it is also possible to take it out of the air and store it. All the CO2 put in the atmosphere since 1960 could be stored deep under the Mississippi valley without the land rising too much.
it takes a really large flow of air to do this and the industrial operations to do this are large and expensive. They draw a modest amount of power, and while the power could be renewable, the capital cost would be 3 times as high since the plants could only run 1/3rd of the time.
I have not worked it out, but the lower capital cost might be enough to justify the cost of steady power from space.
There is no profit from pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere. However, if a million people a year were dying from the heat such a project including the power satellites might be funded.
Underground CO2 can escape and smother people in the place near a CO2 leak. This creates a huge liability issue. There is a huge, “Not in my back yard” issue.
Keith, some simple physics for you, your GW lasers are not going to turn metal into energy that’s dissipated into nothing. They are going to explode the metal into many tiny fragments that set off cascading effects with other space junk, which is what will become of most satellites once we set off a chain reaction of fast emitted small particles moving at thousands of km/hr.
“some simple physics for you”
I was at a conference, Beamed Energy Propulsion: 6th International Symposium, American Inst. of Physics, 2010 where this was discussed in extreme detail. Enough laser power will evaporate anything into vapor.
If you have a counter example, there are people like Lowell Wood who would be most interested.
Keith, it’s a paper.. Has anyone actually done it?? No of course not.
Why wouldn’t a laser hitting shiny metal at a steep angle reflect off a large percentage of the energy while blowing apart, with outside bits projecting beyond where the laser hits shoot in all directions.
Just imagine that reflection hitting the new Chinese space station, unintentionally of course…
“Has anyone actually done it?”
About 15 years ago the biggest military research laser was a little over 100 kW.
The most recent class of carriers has 200-300 MW beyond what is needed for propulsion that they expect to power big lasers. I don’t know how the engineering will work out, but at least they have plenty of cooling water around them.
It harder in space, https://htyp.org/design_to_cost#Space_laser That’s artwork. mostly of the radiator, for a 4 GW laser. Philip Lubin of UCSB has proposed a 100 GW laser and a long term friend of mine is working on an interstellar probe that requires one that large. That community expect to have the laser when they need it. I am somewhat skeptical.
“”Why wouldn’t a laser”
Short pulses just don’t interact with a surface that way. You do get thrust at right angles to the surface that is blown off. There is a vast literature on laser propulsion you can dig into.
“that reflection ”
After hitting a surface, the light is no longer coherent, it scatters and is not dangerous.
I have first hand knowledge over a lot of subjects, but not high power lasers.
According to Wikipedia, the Kessler effect is
Which of course is just another reason why it wont and can’t happen. It’s all just hopium about the future that doesn’t exist.
“For all the space fanatics, Gemini AI claims it would take 80,000 Starship launches and 27.88 Trillion Cuft of LNG to reach geosynchronous orbit”
For what?
This is a subject I know intimately. It takes about 500 launches, 50,000 tons, to put up enough parts and fuel for one power satellite (at 6.5 kg/kW). A construct rate that would replace 1/3rd of current power in 20 years would require 25,000 launches a year. A power satellite repays the launch fuel in 66 days so it is a good deal from that standpoint.
However, other cheaper solutions may preclude this.
it repays the launch fuel in 66 days.
forgive my ignorance keith (at least i admit it)
but what about the kit itself, manpower, ground infrastructure and all the rest
you would seem to be proposing a global industry, of itself, entirely devoted to the setting up of space power industry.
and when youve got power ”up there”—you have to figure out a way of getting it ”down here”
and after that how to make use of it in the million variation we already have ”down here” that we use already.
“a way of getting it ”down here””
This has been understood since the 70s. Microwave optics (and the bird power limit) are what sets the large size. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power
i took the trouble to read the wiki entry keith
—-”This article possibly contains unsourced predictions, speculative material, or accounts of events that might not occur.”
nuff said
You don’t know much about how Wikipedia works. The complaint is about the sources, not the concepts. It has also been up for 8 years.
I have not looked at that article for years. Seems my work is cited in a couple of places.
The comment on rectenna cost is a bit misleading. A billion dollars yes, but that is only $200/kW or about 1 part in 12 of the whole cost. The economics is not that hard to understand, to get the cost per kWh you take the capital cost and divide by 80,000. So for power to cost 3 cents per kWh, the capital cost can’t be higher than $2400/kW. The cost breakdown is
Parts and labor $900/kW, rectenna $200/kW, lift cost $1300/kW. This is $200/kg to GEO at 6.5 kg/kW. To get that low takes electric propulsion from LEO to GEO. Strange, but the engine to do this exists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Enthalpy_Arc_Heated_Facility
The electric heat engine needs “air” to heat and act as propellant, so would need constant supplies of air.
What could go wrong when these are hit with fragments moving a thousands of km/hr from blown apart space junk by lasers??
The arcjet engines need hydrogen or possibly methane but only when changing orbits.
“blown apart space junk by lasers??”
The lasers completely evaporate the junk. The vapor gets blown away by light pressure. In any case, hitting vapor doesn’t do any damage.
Keith why wouldn’t metal vapor condense back into metal in the coldness of space?
These metals are solid in space now, just because you heat them to melting or vapor doesn’t mean none of it returns to solid metal.
Plus the size density and shape, orientation all come into consideration, which means there is some physics of the whole situation you are missing.
I’m also fairly sure if any large lasers are put up in space, they will be pointing at Earth mostly, for all the wrong reasons…
“metal vapor condense”
No. The atoms in expanding cloud of metal vapor don’t contact each other.
Now if you have a surface for the metal to condense on, it’s a different story. Long ago, 1977, Eric Drexler and I wrote a paper about a solar powered metal boiler to build massive structures in space. It was published in the L5 News if you want to read it.
I have written a fair amount about big military lasers. They won’t replace H bombs but the do have uses.
Keith, if we need a refueling platform in space to take stuff to the moon or anywhere else for ‘space mining’ it will be a lot of heavy equipment.
We are not going to be mining anything, anywhere else because of this requirement. You might know space stuff, but certainly not geology and mining operations.
“certainly not geology and mining operations.”
Actually, I do know both subjects. Published professionally on a closely related geophysics subject and worked as a contractor at one of the biggest mining operations in the world (Morenci). See also my paper on mining the asteroid 1986 DA. https://htyp.org/Mining_Asteroids
But your point is valid. A serious mining plant for an asteroid would take around 1000 starship flights. Among other things it would need a 30 GW power plant to melt the asteroid a little bit at a time.
I’ve had a lot to do with geophysics over the years and it’s a hit and miss tool, or should I say many tools that only give an indication of anomalies, they do not tell you the geology.
A lot of the time, for something like seismics there is ground truthing that happens first, as in drilling holes to depth so that the seismic results make sense.
Other geophysics magnetics, gravity and derivatives of them give rough indications that are often false readings only proven up by drilling.
The biggie though is that in space there is just not the concentrating activities like life, oceans, and atmosphere plus moving continental plates that combined have concentrated ores for us, which means perhaps Mars is the best candidate for most things concentrated, or perhaps Venus, but it’s a bit warm and acidic there.
Basically it would be decades of exploration before we found decent ore bodies in space and we simply don’t have decades until there will be no energy nor capital for any space program at all.
“it’s a hit and miss tool”
Indeed. I did some gravity, a fair amount of magnetics, and a lot of induced polarization/resistivity. Never found a thing or rather found a fair amount of worthless pyrite. First publication (as junior author and programmer) was a book of type cases.
“have concentrated ores for us”
Almost correct. The only small body mechanism in space that concentrates elements even a little is melting. The metal asteroids melted and the iron took the siderophile elements to the bottom. That’s what we get to mine. You might find https://htyp.org/Mining_Asteroids amusing.
“no energy nor capital”
Maybe. Out in space there is 1.3 GW/km^2. Sam Altman and Elon Musk have talked about moving the AI data centers off Earth to take advantage of the cheap energy.
If the current AI craze leads into nanotechnology, a coke can of seed is enough to industrialize the entire moon.
“Actually, I do know both subjects.”
If other people who know a thing or two about those subjects are constantly telling you you don’t know what you are talking about, the odds are that your understanding of those subjects is probably deficient.
Keith, the truth is that you are a crackpot at best and a charlatan at worst. It really doesn’t matter. You believe the nonsense you are spewing on here.
“worked as a contractor at one of the biggest mining operations in the world (Morenci)’
Until they found out you were wasting their time and money.
“Until they found out you were wasting their time and money.”
If so, it took them at least ten years to figure that out. What we designed built and installed was a multiplexer in the ball mill control room that allowed an IBM System 7 minicomputer to control the feed rate on 30 1200 hp ball mills. The multiplexer was a mass of cards full of reed relays. It’s been a long time, but the ball mills made beach sand out of crushed rock at 100 or 125 tons per hour.
Right below the ball mills were flotation cells, each with 10 or 15 hp motor whipping up the flow of sand into bubbles.
Astonishing place. The chemical added to get the copper sulfides to stick to the bubbles and float the copper out made an awful stink.
While I was there, I came up with an idea to improve the control and production. Phelps-Dodge management asked me to patent so they could license it. So I did, m;y second patent (the first one was for Burr-Brown). You can find the patent on Google’s patent data base if you want.
It was never implemented because about that time, autogenious grinding came along and it needed a different kind of control.
The multiplexer stayed in use longer than I maintained contact with the people there.
I hope no one thinks I’m picking on a hopeless romantic, here. There are lots of crackpots and
charlatans in STEM. Medicine is described partially as an ART as well as a science as well, which lets us know that marketing/perception/ politics/ fee-fees play an dismaying role in the development of medical treatments.
I did a lot of work in medical malpractice insurance, when I worked in consulting. There seemed to be quite a few doctors with 10 or more malpractice claims against them, sometimes for the same non-standard procedure. I expect with hospitals owning the practice of doctors, this kind of thing will be cut back greatly. While new pharmaceuticals need to approval by regulatory approval, new or changed surgical procedures do not.
There is a great deal of financial incentive for doctors and dentists to recommend procedures whose benefit is likely to be very low, relative to the price the health care system is expect to pay. “Prior approval” is supposed to stop this, but a recent WSJ article talks about the fact that people tend to transfer from “Medicare Advantage” plans (which often mandate prior approval) to “Regular Medicare” plans in the last year of life. This allows people in very poor health to receive high cost treatment with little chance of significant benefit to themselves, but a lot of financial benefit to the health care system.
https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/medicare-private-plans-insurers-389af1a0
Quote:
“High Cost
Medicare Advantage customers who switched to traditional Medicare in the last year of life cost taxpayers, on average, twice as much per day as longtime recipients of traditional Medicare in their last year.”
With respect to dentistry, there are dentists who will recommend a mouthful of high-cost implants to very elderly patients. I doubt that they work well if the bone structure is not there.
It needs to repay the launch fuel in kind, not in electricity. Electricity has limited uses. It doesn’t launch rockets, for example.
An awful lot of electricity is made by burning natural gas.
The LNG that you use for launching a power satellite is repaid in 66 days. After that you can use the gas you would have burned for something else.
I had never heard of LNG for power satellites, but when I searched, I found that LNG seems to be the new approach.
https://argentlng.com/blogs/news/lng-pioneering-a-new-era-in-space-exploration
https://www.energyconnects.com/opinion/interviews/2019/september/gas-and-lng-to-fuel-space-exploration-to-the-moon-and-mars/
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Aerospace-Defense-Industries/LNG-powered-rocket-offers-boost-to-Japan-s-private-space-industry
“I had never heard of LNG for power satellites”
Power satellites just don’t make economic sense unless the cost to put them in orbit gets down to $100/kg. The way LNG come in is that it is the fuel for rockets that look like they might get the cost down that low.
It’s not easy and may be impossible.
I have always wondered why the west does not use the military to steal resources from the rest of the world. Now I get it the wars in Ukraine and ME are those wars. All the chatter about reasons is PR.
I am afraid that you are right. And Israel is an outpost for the US military.
Without that we walk on the rain like the people of Tamil Nadu.
>> the wars in Ukraine and ME are those wars.
The West Bank has no oil, it is purely a Ziocon desire. The only way that support for Israel might in fact be a US strategic move (rather than Zio influence) is if we intend to use Israel as an incendiary to begin a war with Iran to take its oil.
PS – the fact that we have behind the scenes been trying to convince Iran not to attack, however, indicates that we are in fact NOT aspiring to go to war with Iran. This then leaves Zio influence as the remaining explanation.
Temporarily. I think in a year or so consensus will coalesce in DC that this is Iran’s turn. The US has always preferred to attack the lowest hanging fruit. Skipping a step and attacking immediately Russia proved disastrous. Obviously with all the new access denial weaponry now in Iran, it might be late.
There is offshore natural gas, near the West Bank, however.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_gas_field
In 2017, Leviathan was estimated to hold enough gas to meet Israel’s domestic needs for 40 years, having 22 trillion cubic feet in recoverable natural gas. The field began commercial production of gas on 31 December 2019. As of 2024, 90% of the field’s production was being exported to Egypt and Jordan.
I also noticed this article from October 2023:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/10/energy/israel-gas-field-shutdown-explainer/index.html
Wikipedia says:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_crisis_in_the_Gaza_Strip
In any reasonable scenario, Gaza should be getting its electricity from natural gas, not oil. Oil is far more expensive. I would think that Palestine should be getting some/most/all of the benefit of this offshore natural gas. Instead, its electricity supply is terrible. It is no wonder that Gaza cannot afford to pay for the oil–Cuba and other users of oil for electricity have the same issue.
This conflict seems to be partly about oil and natural gas! Also, too many people for the area, and a need to desalinate water to get enough to go around. Desalination takes energy, too.
a war with iran will not ”take its oil”
that implies defeating iran—then lining up fleets of tankers to take it away as some kind of ”prize”
major wars dont work like that
instead of me telling you how daft that idea is….try visualising it yourself
then get back to me
The system you mention already exists. The ships sail to China. All it takes it putting a gun to the head of the captain and saying sail to Amsterdam, sale to the oil port in the north of England.
yes
years ago they used to put a gun to the pilots head and say—take me to cuba
assuming you werent joking—i hope you were–the comment too silly to take seriously
The slump in the economy of China makes the people return to the rural areas, as the cities become unaffordable for living. That way technology returns the humans to the basics.
No fancy future, it seems.
Trump’s proposed tariffs exacerbating China slump.
Both Tump and Biden have been trying to scale back trade with China. This makes sense when a person understands that there is not enough oil to go around. There certainly is in enough oil for sending things long distance around the world.
Different parts of the world are going need to operate more independently, with only the energy resources they have. This will cause difficulty on both sides of the Pacific.
No tariffs will be applied and least on China. If tariffs are applied to China then the CCP will shutdown Tesla and it is goodbye to Mr Musk. Trump owes big time to Musk. American politics is ”You scratch my back, I will scratch yours”. 71\% of the goods sold on Amazon come from China. Annoy the richest and the second richest men on the planet? Not going to happen. As to Europe — I think Trump will disengage himself from Ukraine (no weapons to supply and cannot risk US dead bodies being flown back). NATO breaks down and Europe is let off. The whole EU elite and UK openly supported Kamala. This is logical, but then logic does not always prevail when vested interests are in play. The US is no more an industrial power house and China of 2025 is not the China of 2018 . Yearly trade deficit is USD 550 billion. How can they produce this many goods in the next 4 years of Trump in an energy decline environment. Trump won the election on basically two issues which are the economy and immigration. Foreign policy is not important for the American population. It is the price of gasoline that decides the winners. I know it sounds stupid but that is a fact of history.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/made-china-sold-amazon
You might be right. Everything has to be a compromise between what different factions want.
The prices of homes in cities around China have been outrageously high. People bought them for appreciation, but that made the prices too high for any family with a normal income to buy them.
Recently prices have been falling. Buyers have to put a lot down, and pay while the homes are being built. This may protect the banks somewhat, but it is still a problem for the economy.
As de-growth progresses we should expect the tier 4 and 3 cities will die. We are seeing that in China and in the US. The US still needs to decide if it wants to have tier 1 and 2 cities or just let it all go down.
“The data shows we’re in serious trouble. Enough with the naïve optimism. We’re an adaptive species, so let’s quit chasing impossible fixes and hoping for miracles—our focus should be on real, practical mitigation to prepare for what’s coming.
“That’s what we should do, anyway.”
https://www.artberman.com/blog/naive-optimism-vs-reality-the-true-state-of-our-planet-and-energy-future/
Art B. was one of the Oil-Drummers —
Are the situations he’s describing solvable by human initiative? Will reality assert itself some other way?
the elders know this and are working in stealth mode to kick the can down the road look at libya oil its ramping up then theirs guyana oil is it all a coincidence or maybe a platue instead of a dip occurs in world oil production causing higher prices
look up on search a top secret document from 1980 aachen the bilderberg file wikileaks thats 44 years ago thats all there is nothing else is available assange was locked up because of this the elders exist so look for this document it is interesting reading it proves extensive preparation for peak oil has occurred so dont worry the band will continue playing as the titanic keeps heading for the iceberg.
https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Bilderberg_meeting_report_Aachen,_1980/Text
10. The possibility, at some point, of something resembling a North American bloc embracing at least Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.
There is already an economic block , it is called NAFTA . A military block is not needed . The Atlantic and the Pacific oceans are natural barriers and in the North are only Polar bears . There are not enough resources to build ” an iron dome” to cover NAFTA from incoming missiles .
The best defense is a good offense.
I am afraid that humans cannot solve the problem. The self-organizing system will solve it for us. It likely will involve a lot of us dying, in one way or another.
But I expect that parts of the world economy will go on for quite some time. There still are a lot of resources left.
Hi Gail, nice comment, except the part about some places continuing with modernity, if that’s what you meant.
We have a 6 continent supply chain all based on modern technology. Many of the so called resources remaining, will remain in the ground as they require complex technology to extract. As we lose the technology less will be available to humanity to use, which will exacerbate the collapse.
We can use surface mined coal and peat without any real technological base. As you say much of what we use now including oil and gas is simply useless and inacessible without an advanced industrial system.
hate to introduce reality here guest
but without a technological base, all you can do with surface mined coal and peat, is set fire to it.
“parts of the world economy”
Yes, we would be well served to consider how the global economy turns into a global with several regions that carry on some level of trade.
Echos of what is happening in the US:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/we-must-do-whatever-it-takes-netherlands-reinstates-temporary-border-controls-curve
which is why i wrote this in 2018
https://medium.com/p/7a401c225171
Many readers will recognize Ed Dowd. I am afraid he is correct.
https://usawatchdog.com/trump-inherits-turd-of-an-economy-ed-dowd/
Trump Inherits Turd of an Economy – Ed Dowd
I got excited when Trump won then I realized that Biden has been cooking the books for a long time. He knows how to play the game better than anyone. I guess that’s why he’s happy to leave a big fat turd for Trump to deal with. The backlash will be huge as most people don’t understand basic economics. I figured 40 trillion when Trump enters office and another 20 trillion when he is gone. So 60 trillion
I have a new found admiration for Biden. It is good to remember one does not become president of the US without great skill at manipulating.
2 weeks ago, a cousin of my sister-in-law committed suicide. He shot himself. He had a ranch here in Slovakia, where he had a business including weddings in the nature, some race horses etc. He was diagnosed a serious illness. Before that, he, as a successful entrepreneur, led a life of a polygamist, i. e. had a bunch of kids with various women whom he economically supported.
I guess his illness was not the only reason for his suicide.
Years ago, and still in some parts of Africa, a man can have as many wives as he can afford. Maybe something went wrong financially.
If Elon Musk understands the real problems of the world like overshoot, he would not have many children with various women and would not encourage to have more children. I am affraid that he must be living under more and more pressure, does not look healthy, so he will finally shot himself to Mars alone.
Musk’s extremely distended chest and belly do look fatal.
if all the ladies are genuinely happy with the arrangement, theres no problem.
problems seem to kick in when the children grow up—then the whole thing gets out of balance
Recently, in my town a retired couple (police officer and teacher) just committed suicide. The husband shot his wife then called the police and said he was going to shoot himself next. Said they both had Alzheimer’s and wanted to have a “peaceful ending”.
Good for them.
I live in Rochester, NY. Rochester gets one-fifth of its electricity needs from the Ginna Nuclear Reactor. I wonder what effect “down blending” would have on the Ginna facility remaining in operation? I always felt rather safe and secure with Rochester having its very own nuclear reactor. Not so much after reading this article.
Down-blending is a big part of what allowed the US government to hide its own lack of ability to make fuel for nuclear reactors. This ability, plus the existence of guaranteed purchases from Russia through 2022, helped the US get an adequate supply of uranium for our reactors.
The concern is that, going forward, the US won’t have access to enough nuclear fuel to provide for our power plants. We still have some nuclear warheads of our own that we can down blend, that will help for a short time. But more and more nuclear power plants will need to go offline, to keep the system going.
The subsidy given to wind and solar of “going first” tends to drive nuclear power out of business by creating wholesale electricity prices (that nuclear electricity can be sold for) which are too low to provide an adequate profit for the nuclear power plants. If there is local wind and solar electricity consumption, nuclear power plants tend to fail for financial reasons, unless local governments give them big subsidies.
The Ukrainian people dont matter; big money calls the shots.
‘Moreover, enormous quantities of iron ore, coal, and rare and strategically important minerals such as uraninite (the base raw material for uranium), rutile, and ilmenite (the base raw materials for titanium), as well as lithium (crucial for battery production), are also found in Ukrainian soil. According to some estimates, about 5% of the world’s mineral reserves are located in Ukraine. Depending somewhat on market conditions, its value is estimated to be in the tens of trillions of dollars (some say about 19 trillion dollars) (!).
Immediately after the pro-NATO government came to power in 2014, lobbying began to lift the moratorium that stated foreigners could never buy more than two hectares of Ukrainian land. In an April 2021 report, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the monetary infrastructure of NATO, explicitly stated that lifting this moratorium was a necessary condition for providing funds to Ukraine. In June 2021, Ukraine capitulated and effectively lifted the moratorium. Subsequently, giant American companies like Monsanto, Cargill, and DuPont bought up approximately 17 million hectares, or one-third of Ukraine’s agricultural land, in no time.’
https://words.mattiasdesmet.org/p/why-some-are-steering-towards-a-third
Sad situation!
2025 predictions anyone?
DARK WINTER comes!
what bombshell did he drop? I do not have an hour plus.
I think the situation is much worse than we are being told. Even fatal.
Russia suffers from a “shameful embarrassment of riches.” Russia has vast reserves of natural resources — natural gas, real coal, real crude oil, real minerals, and real rare earths — that the United States has either run out of or is about to. Guess who wants Russia’s resources and is going to try and take them?
I think the United States outsourced the world’s largest economy back in the 1970s, because it was killing itself with trash, garbage, toxic chemicals, and pollution. That’s what industrialization does when you have a lethal over-population problem. Now China and India are committing suicide.
Here in Upstate New York, we have giant landfills, hundreds of feet high, situated at the head of the Finger Lakes (the crown jewels of New York State, the source of drinking water for millions in Upstate New York, and practically the sole source of drinking water for New York City). Is it any wonder that all the Finger Lakes are experiencing explosive algae blooms and something new — blue green algae (AKA cyanobacteria)? Our leaders brag about killing ourselves. That’s how thick the propaganda and cult of denial is.
The percentage of processed foods in the American diet has gone from 32-percent in the 1980s to over 70-percent in the 21ST Century. People are ingesting inert matter and empty calories. Anything that is in a bag or a box will kill you. The result is obesity in a culture that both hates and fears fat people.
We are running out of everything. Fracking is just scrapping the bottom of the barrel of oil wells that stopped being productive decades ago. For all practical purposes, the light sweet crude of coal, Anthracite, no longer exists in the United States. Is it any wonder Germany is de-industrializing? Germany is using Lignite (coal that is just one step above burning dirt) because the United States blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline. You cannot have a first world economy without cheap energy.
Saudi Arabia and the OPEC states are not suffering from a decline in demand. They are suffering from a decline in supply.
We have known we are killing ourselves since the 1970s. And nothing has changed. Have a lethal over-population problem? Open the borders, bring in 48-million illegal aliens, who will never be productive members of society, and put them on the government dole — in a country that can’t feed, clothe, house, educate, meaningfully employ its own citizens. And if your own citizens revolt and stop breeding, well there’s those 48-millon illegal aliens, and counting, in a country that was founded upon the buying and selling of human beings and cannot survive without a slave state.
The situation is so awful, and on so many levels.
Russian federation total resources USD 75 T , USA 45 T . No wonder the war .
https://www.voronoiapp.com/natural-resources/Ranked-Top-Countries-by-Natural-Resource-Value-2885
I am afraid you are right. One thing people don’t understand is “You cannot have a first world economy without cheap energy.”
Adding lots of immigrants does help increase reported GDP because it provides lots of low-wages workers who will also tend to hold down wages of people working at low-skilled jobs who are already in the US, making the US more like a third-world country. The “demand” of the new immigrants will help keep apartment rents up.
I wonder where Ukraine would rank on this listing of natural resources. It has some uranium, which is what allowed it to build nuclear electricity providing half of its electricity supply. It also has most of the higher quality (anthracite and bituminous) coal reserves left in Europe.
See above for resource numbers. Meanwhile…business as usual.
‘BlackRock, Vanguard, and Blackstone are heavily entrenched in the American military industry, and since NATO’s actions would almost inevitably lead to war, they could also prepare for a new round of monstrous profits (at the expense of the American people).
Moreover, BlackRock and Vanguard are also significant shareholders in American construction companies Bechtel and AECOM, which signed contracts at the onset of the war for the future reconstruction of Ukraine once it would have been nearly completely leveled by the war.
Adding to this is the fact that BlackRock, McKinsey, and JPMorgan Chase established a reconstruction bank for Ukraine together, leading to the staggering conclusion: the same companies that earn fortunes from buying up Ukrainian agricultural land and its natural resources also profit immensely from supplying the weapons to devastate Ukraine and will ultimately profit from rebuilding it.
The grinding gears of this money machine have meanwhile crushed more than a million young Ukrainian and Russian soldiers’ bodies; the thrum of the money press drowns out the moans of thousands of tortured bodies, the sobbing of thousands of raped women, the cries of a country bleeding from every pore of its fertile land. Trying to make money is undoubtedly human, but at the top, where it is ruthlessly elevated to the highest goal, it takes on diabolical forms.
After the Maidan power takeover in 2014 and the advancing NATO militarization of the entire Black Sea region, Putin anticipated the next step: after Ukraine, NATO would set its sights on Crimea. This meant that Russia would be cut off from its fleet in Sevastopol. Putin did not wait and annexed Crimea via a referendum, increasing Russia’s military presence on the peninsula. As a side note, Putin used social media and the internet for this referendum, which would be the reason Google and social media would significantly ramp up censorship thereafter (see this interview with Mike Benz).’
https://words.mattiasdesmet.org/p/why-some-are-steering-towards-a-third
Something to keep in mind:
“the same companies that earn fortunes from buying up Ukrainian agricultural land and its natural resources also profit immensely from supplying the weapons to devastate Ukraine and will ultimately profit from rebuilding it.”
Perhaps the chosen few to make it through the current bottleneck are the folks that are in charge at these companies. Of course, they need food, water, and moderate temperatures, just like the rest of us.
The elders are simply readjusting or redistributing wealth it will form the basis of an equal,inclusive or fairer system think about it poor people from a poor country go to a rich country where they raise their living standard in the process the family of t poor person also wins that family ends up with less children it is a win win for resources and the environment. This is the sustainable development goals being performed in this manner.
I put out some dog food ….chunky meat with gravy, and ants ate all the gravy and liquid, …what they left was some kind of styrofoam chunks that must be digestible but offers zero nutrition. Even the ants did not want it. I am sure this kind of thing is pulled off in human food also.
There were no meat chunks at all!!!!! LOL
The wrong chicken food gets you no eggs; Fake Food to go with the fake media etc etc
Why doesn’t New York burn that landfill to create energy Australia is now looking at this as a solution to expanding landfills
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I just did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation and realized with traditional reactors, if our current energy needs were replaced with nuclear, we would use up all known geological reserves in less than 5 years. So, it will have to be thorium if nuclear is the answer at all.
I believe all your calculations. Fusion is the answer, Starship is the path, Pt on earth is the intermediary, solar on earth is the ultimate power source; no exogenous solar for earth beamed from space, too much heat gain.
All manufacturing to space, earth is biology for now which is itself solar.
Another Starship goes up next week, hope for a good catch of the booster. They are pushing that very hard, serious problems must be much closer than we know; huge sums of money involved in making space accessible.
Dennis L.
What do you think of my idea for shrinking the population?
It doesn’t necessarily conflict with your space ideas. In fact it could make it easier to realise. Eventually, we might be able to get the whole human population aboard a couple of spaceships.
We don’t need a cubic mile of Pt. We might cut it with just a few cubic yards.
I took a quick look at past records and afraid it won’t be voluntary about shrinking the population.
People are not wired for that, for the most part.
Think about it, those, like myself, refrain not to have children, while others propagate without restraint
.those offspring have to genes in place to breed like their parents.
So, we may go the route of panels and camps.
That’s been done in the past, but hasn’t stopped the human hoard from rebounding without as so much as a misstep. YES, I’m referring to World War II,.
But anyway, good luck with your idea.
Fast Eddy was big on the idea too and still waiting for it to happen…
Oh, it will happen, but it won’t be very pleasant.
You misunderstood me. See below.
Not reducing the number of people. Rather making everybody – over time through genetic engineering – individually physically smaller, so as to consume fewer resources.
In deference to Kulm I expect the landowners would not have to shrink quite so much. They would physically dwarf the serfs – just as in the Golden Ages.
“There were giants on the Earth in those days”.
Well, we are way past overshoot, clickkid,
Let’s see, my mother just died and when she was born it was estimated to be 2 billion around 1920, I was born around 1960, it was about 3 billion.
Today’s it’s 8 billion plus…
Yes, that’s a classic J curve, all due to fossil fuels that enable science, technology and derived products like food and equipment to process and move it all
Well. Sorry we don’t have time for gradual.
In China they had a program in place to limit too, somewhat effective, but now they are facing a demographic issue and some better than equal members are adding more to the pile of children.
Yep, probably a famine and breakdown will occur like in the bronze age.
Sorry kids
I’ve seen that entertained in the past.
https://www.wired.com/2013/11/a-foolproof-solution-for-saving-the-world-shrink-all-humans/
Unless you set the population’s growth rate to 0 or less, nothing else is a long-term solution on a finite planet.
“population’s growth rate”
I was for a long time in the “we are alone” camp. It seems possible that there is a civilization in a cluster of at least 24 stars centered 1500 light years from us. The AIs think they have been in space for 3000 years or more. If what we see occluding one of those stars is a data center full of uploaded aliens, then there are a mess of them. The energy input to the object is 1.4 million times what humans use and the object is about 409 times the area of the Earth. If it is aliens or alien AIs of roughly human processing and power needs, there could be some trillions of them in the largest dimming we have seen.
Unless it is a dust cloud, but then you need to explain why it is not blown away by light pressure like a comet tail.
If it is aliens, they sure took a different path than what I projected some time ago.
https://web.archive.org/web/20121130232045/http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/04/12/transhumanism-and-the-human-expansion-into-space-a-conflict-with-physics/
no answer to that
“What do you think of my idea for shrinking the population?”
It’s not impossible. It does bring up the question of why any animal is the size it is. For mammals who have to maintain body heat, being small does not work well in cold areas. Still, I suspect humans will upload into cyberspace rather than shrink.
But who knows?
Your been watching too much of Star Trek
“watching too much of Star Trek”
When it was first on, I didn’t even have a TV set. Have seen a few, Trouble with Tribbles was written by a friend.
upload me scotty
eyerolling time again
nobody is getting uploaded anywhere
Cyberspace is not a place except in our imaginations. The future is going to be reality based though those still alive will wish it wasn’t reality.
“Cyberspace is not a place except in our imaginations”
Second Life.
i only want a 2nd life if i can know all i know know, when i’m 18– 2nd time around
now that really would be useful, particularly in certain areas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life
Close to a million people “live” there. It turned out to be highly attractive to disabled people.
keith
i was hoping against hope that you wouldnt refer to that particular piece of electronic nonsense….somehow though i thought you might.
we dont live in a gameshow—though that is looking more likeley as the orange wingnut takes the WH
“electronic nonsense”
I am not there, I don’t even know anyone who is. But close to a million people are. You might consider being polite to them.
i try to be polite to everyone, until they deliberately set out to insult my limited intelligence
i try to deal in reality—
i can write fiction, but i dont live it
Clickkid,
That is a choice and a job for God; I wish to have no part of it.
As for spaceships, they are most likely very complex with considerable size and self maintaining. We have one, spaceship earth.
Dennis L.
Concur. But your calculations assume a PWR, and a 0.3% efficiency from nuclear potential (mass) energy to electrical. I think it is almost certain that we will improve over 0.3%.
Unless we figure out spent fuel recycling.
“spent fuel recycling.”
The French do it.
Once, and not even 100%. I think we can recycle but over time scales of a century or three.
“Once”
i can’t find a link. Do you have one?
It was from memory when I was working on the subject (so 25 yrs ago). But I am fairly sure they reprocess once.
” fairly sure they reprocess once.”
You might be right. But the articles about French reprocessing reads as if they do it till the fuel is used up. Another article mentioned adding DU to the mix, noting that we have lots of the stuff. Will keep looking.
Here’s an idea for the techno-fantasists who think industrial civ can be saved.
How about we use genetic engineering to reduce the size of all human beings who are born – say by 90%. With everybody being much shorter and lighter, the resources requirements per capita will shrink massively.
Of course behaviour might adjust to take the new ‘bounty’ into account, birth rates might increase so that eventually we will have trillions of ‘little people’ as they say in Ireland.
No problem! We just keep on continually shrinking human beings, so that we always at least exceed depletion.
P.S – I know it’s not April 1st, but time is short – no pun intended.
Rats will inherit the earth then. or do you plan to shrink them as well?
also according to Kleiber’s Law, a 90% reduction produces only a 82% reduction in energy consumption.
Then our pets will eat the new humans; could work?
However, everything currently built will be redundant; cars/trucks/trains etc too big to drive, bikes, horses, boats too big to get aboard etc etc.
How about we keep 1 in 10 normal size, and downscale the balance.
Enough people to open doors, press elevator buttons, drive existing fleet.
Then once all the built capital has capitulated to time then 100% can be small.
My thinking is that we will end up with 50 billion smalluns tho’.
Very concise overview, Gail!
In discussions, I usually say, how long will it take to ramp up production from 4% to 100% or a substancial part of the primary energy supply? If we double the plants we are on 8%. Where do we place them, do we need cooling water?
The problem with the end of the abundance of ressources, with supply crunches or seller’s markets is, that it is likely to be abused for military purposes. The monopolist can demand what he wants, if there is no second supplier. With falling productivity due to resource restrictions, military superpowers, who can guarantee “free” markets, cannot generate the needed surplus. Similarly, I don’t see, how any One World concept could work. This leads to the necessity to produce energy nationally and states and unions will establish around these possibilities.
All new wonderful concepts are based on the general Brüter (breeding) technology, developed in Germany and France. This technology is very dirty. Russian production is cheap, because precaution standards in Mayak are very low. Impossible to implement such industries in dense settlements along Rhine or Rhone.
If we look to the political developments in Europe, following the US presidential elections, there will be a clear right shift, because voters will not understand, why to invest billions in a war, Trump ends in a quick deal.
Right winged parties or ultra conservatives center mainly around ideas, suggested by the conservative parties in the 80s, in Germany represented by Helmut Kohl. There are suggestions, like “Back to the economocal policies of Helmut Kohl!” But 40 years ago saw a different energy situation. This means, the opposition is not even developing or considering ideas to meet the challenges of today’s reality.
As far as I can see, the predicament developed and being discussed on Gail’s blog are very likely to come true.
Much easier to bring population from 100% to 4%
As a species, humans prefer power to truth. – Yuval Noah Harari
Thanks for your insights. I knew I was missing some things, but I have not been close enough to the situation to figure out your overview perspective:
I knew that there was more work being done in Russia than I had the ability to quantify. Of course, Russia has the “gift” of huge open spaces, so if there is pollution, the population doesn’t get too upset. It also doesn’t encourage newspapers to publicize the issue.
“ . . . we always hear about Chinese
40:50 aggression the us right now is waging a a proxy war against China they are using
40:56 armed groups all across the world to physically attack Chinese Engineers working on Belton Road initiative
41:02 projects and to attack and destroy the infrastructure itself everywhere from Myanmar to Pakistan and Beyond and so
41:12 this is already a war it’s just not an OP it’s it’s just not open Warfare yet . . . “?
“ . . .
about it’s it’s important to remember that there is continuity of agenda with
22:20
with US foreign policy no matter who is president a lot of people say this this proxy war against Russia and Ukraine
22:26
this is Biden’s War but it isn’t I mean he’s he’s obviously invested in it he’s
22:32
presided over it he in no shape form or way has ever opposed it but this has
22:37
been in in the making for for decades if you go all the way back to Bush Jr’s Administration let’s just start at the
22:44
beginning of the 21st century there were already attempts by the us through the National Endowment for democracy and
22:50
adjacent organizations to overthrow the government of Ukraine to install a client regime into power militarize it
22:56
and turn it against Russia it failed in 2004 uh they succeeded in 2003 in
23:03
Georgia they militarized Georgia and in 2008 according to the eu’s own investigation provoked war with Russia
23:10
and they lost it was a a mini version a preview of what the US would then do in
23:16
Ukraine successfully in 2014 under the Obama Administration they would successfully overthrow Ukraine then they
23:23
immediately began militarizing Ukraine it was during the Trump administ ation
23:29
that all of this continued uninterrupted but with the addition of the US finally supplying weapons to
23:36
Ukraine this was almost certainly the red line that was crossed that convinced Russia that the special military
23:42
operation was was necessary that it was unavoidable now the thing is when you decide something like the special
23:49
military operation is necessary an unprecedented large scale military operation into neighboring Ukraine you
23:56
don’t do it overnight it would take time time to organize prepare and launch and
24:02
it was just a coincidence that it unfolded during the Biden Administration they often say uh Trump if Trump was
24:08
President it never would have happened it most certainly would have happened and it will continue during the Trump
24:13
Administration L the US itself divests fully from it uh
24:18
so understanding that and then seeing where where this conflict is today and
24:26
then we can understand uh when we see Trump’s and Trump saying he’s going to
24:32
divest from Ukraine and we hear the Western media say Trump’s going to cut off Ukraine but if you’re actually
24:37
paying attention to the headlines over this last whole year maybe longer and we have been talking about this Danny you
24:44
and I on on our respective channels during our conversations together the US is already cutting Ukraine off because
24:50
they physically don’t have anything else to give Ukraine so how can Trump cut something off that already has long
24:57
since been exhaust it is all rhetoric it’s all rhetoric to sell us to the American people so at least half of the
25:03
population is going to get behind this or that part of of the agenda . . . “?
About all that the US can do is try to make a few additional weapons, using supply lines from around the world, plus more debt. There will be a long wait between any promised weapons and actual delivery of the weapons.
Maybe a negotiated end to this conflict can be arranged.
Ariana Grande sparks concern for her health as she looks ‘skin and bones’ on red carpet
https://www.themirror.com/entertainment/celebrity-news/ariana-grande-sparks-concern-health-802792
some “walking dead” s***
Thin is “in.”
That is disgusting.
Zombieitis
In your point #8
“[8] The US is trying to implement many new ideas at one time with virtually no successful working models to smooth the transition.”
You overlooked the working small nuclear reactors successfully operated by the US navy for the past 75 years.
https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/News-Stories/Article/3476093/
“31 July 2023
From Naval Reactors Public Affairs
WASHINGTON – August 4 marks the birthday of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, a joint Department of Navy and Department of Energy organization responsible for all aspects of the Navy’s nuclear propulsion, including research, design, construction, testing, operation, maintenance, and ultimate disposition of naval nuclear propulsion plants.
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In 1946, shortly after the end of World War II, Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act, which established the Atomic Energy Commission to succeed the wartime Manhattan Project and gave it sole responsibility for developing atomic energy. At this time, Capt. Hyman G. Rickover was assigned to the Navy Bureau of Ships, the organization responsible for ship design.
Rickover recognized the military implications of successfully harnessing atomic power for submarine propulsion and knew it would be necessary for the Navy to work with the AEC to develop such a program. He and several officers and civilians were sent to the AEC laboratory at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for a year to learn the fundamentals of nuclear reactor technology.
Although theories of nuclear power were understood, the technology to build and operate a shipboard nuclear propulsion plant did not exist. There were several reactor concepts; the real challenge was to develop this technology and transform the theoretical into the practical. New materials had to be developed, components designed, and fabrication techniques worked out. Furthermore, installing and operating a steam propulsion plant inside the confines of a submarine and under the unique deep-sea pressure conditions raised a number of technical difficulties. Faced with these obstacles, the team at Oak Ridge knew that to build a naval nuclear propulsion plant would require a substantial commitment of resources and a new level of Government and Industry commitment.
Rickover returned to Washington and used every opportunity from his post at Navy Bureau of Ships to argue the need to establish a Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program. On August 4, 1948, the Navy created the new Nuclear Power Branch (Code 390) with Rickover as its head within the Bureau’s Research Division.
Just seven years later, Rickover and his team put the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, USS Nautilus (SSN 571) to sea. Three years later, on Aug. 3, 1958, Nautilus accomplished the impossible when the ship reached the geographic North Pole, 90 degrees North. Cmdr. William Anderson was in command and had a crew of 116 Sailors aboard.
“Such a journey was previously unthinkable,” said Adm. Frank Caldwell, Director of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program. “But this single event demonstrated the awesome, asymmetric advantage that nuclear power afforded our submarines and America’s national defense. The Nautilus could go to any ocean in the world, anytime, and remain there virtually as long as desired.”
Ten years after the program started, the Navy was sailing four fully-operational nuclear-powered submarines and building the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise (CVN 65), with eight reactor plants. In the next two years, the first strategic ballistic missile submarine, USS George Washington (SSBN 598) went on its first strategic deterrent patrol.
Over the last 75 years, Naval Reactors has operated 273 reactors plants, taken 562 reactor cores critical including 33 different designs, and steamed more than 171 million miles with over 7,500 reactor years of safe operations. The Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program and the Navy’s nuclear-powered warships have demonstrated clear superiority in defending the United States – from the Cold War to today’s unconventional threats and strategic competition – Naval Reactors ensures the American Sailor and the nuclear-fleet are ready to fight and win the nation’s wars.
There is no substitute for presence and nuclear-powered aircraft carriers remain the most survivable and versatile airfields in the world, while nuclear-powered fast attack and large payload submarines hold adversaries at risk in both contested seas and open oceans. Today, the Navy operates 99 reactors and 79 nuclear-powered warships – including the largest, most capable warship ever built, USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) which is on its maiden deployment in European waters, underway on nuclear power.
“It’s an exciting time in the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program; we are fully embracing our responsibility to continue powering maritime dominance for the next 75 years,” said Caldwell.”
You are right. For some reason, when a person looks up this topic, the reactors used for the nuclear submarines are sufficiently different from the modular nuclear reactors that they are left out.
Rickover talked about the upcoming fossil fuel problem back in 1957.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2007/07/02/speech-from-1957-predicting-peak-oil/
Where does the Navy get the nuclear fuel? Does it really have enough because I understand the majority of the carriers are currently in port for ‘maintenance’.
Indeed the issue does seem to come back to the feasibility of thorium.
Speaking of small reactors, I can’t find the rating, but the NR-1 sub had a reactor that was a few MW. Tiny thing.
Everyone is ”Missing the woods for the trees” . We talk about electricity generation but more important and fragile is the grid . What use is a nuclear power plant without the grid? A Rolls Royce without petrol .😁
I wrote a couple of articles about the US grid back when I was at The Oil Drum. I am pretty sure that they are not available now.
Renewables, includes hydroelectric and wind, and commercial scale solar need a whole lot more long distance grid connections than power plants built near to expected users. These transmission lines are lightly used. Offshore wind is particularly bad for needing this transmission.
I am doubtful that the cost of transmission gets back into rates charged to customers in a way reflects their true cost. Transmission takes a whole lot longer to be permitted and built than the devices themselves (so often wind and solar are built but have to wait to get added to the grid). The costs tend to be spread widely, to other types of generation, as far as I can tell.
Transmission lines are notorious for starting fires. I don’t think any company is building this into the rates in advance, but both California and Hawaii have had big problems with this.
The intermittency of supply also leads to a need to build long distance transmission lines to share the power that is available.
If the plan with renewables is to share electricity generation widely, there is much less local interest in building new base-load generation. It is necessary to have a utility, such as Georgia Power and the “utility-type pricing” that is available in Georgia, to obtain the necessary financing for such a base-load system. Having a utility in charge allows the utility to charge its customers in advance for at least part of the cost of new generation. It also keeps the highly variable wholesale electricity rates available to new base-load power. (If wind and solar are given priority pricing, all other generation will tend to be pushed out.)
I am interested in your insights to the latest IEA forecast of oil surplus coming.
New IEA medium-term outlook sees comfortably supplied oil markets to 2030, though unwavering focus on energy security will remain crucial as powerful forces transform sector.
https://www.iea.org/news/slowing-demand-growth-and-surging-supply-put-global-oil-markets-on-course-for-major-surplus-this-decade
There can never be an oil surplus – Jevons’ Paradox.
Just to elaborate:
All oil produced will always be used. Human wants/desires are in principle unlimited. Therefore no oil will be left ‘lying around’.
When people talk about an ‘oil surplus’, they mean an ‘oil surplus’ at current prices – ie the price will fall. With oil there cannot be a surplus, because demand will always be there, although perhaps not at the current price.
Affordability issues lead to lower prices and lower supply. What looks like a surplus of pumped oil can build up in a period like the Great Depression, or a temporary disruption as in 2020.
In 2020, oil prices dropped very low due to special circumstances that reduced oil usage. Oil prices dropped very low. Some speculators were able to make money by storing oil offshore in boats until demand grew back.
https://www.vortexa.com/insights/products/the-rise-and-fall-of-floating-storage/
When oil prices dropped very low in 2014 and 2015, much more crude oil was stored in Cushing.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/crude-oil-stored-at-cushing-ok-through-jan-1-2016.png
If a major part of the world’s debt bubble collapses, I would not be surprised if there is a big drop in oil demand because many people lose their jobs and soon drain their bank accounts. Supply cannot adjust as quite as quickly as demand does.
I am afraid we are headed into a major depression. This could reduce demand and prices. It could temporarily lead to a surplus of oil, relative to what consumers can afford to purchase in end products.
To paste in my earlier post:
EIA has posted a figure for world crude oil production for last July (81.591 mb/d) –there was an oil-price surge then ( http://oil-price.net/ ), but will oil prices since then motivate keeping up the world oil supply? Was last December (83.082 mb/d) post-covid peak oil? ( https://davecoop.net/seneca )
https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/petroleum-and-other-liquids/monthly-petroleum-and-other-liquids-production?pd=5&p=0000000000000000000000000000000000vg&u=0&f=M&v=mapbubble&a=-&i=none&vo=value&&t=C&g=00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001&l=249-ruvvvvvfvtvnvv1vrvvvvfvvvvvvfvvvou20evvvvvvvvvvnvvvs0008&s=94694400000&e=1719792000000
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In actual oil production, it looks like the abundance may be over.
Yes, July is another fairly low crude oil production amount. It is below January, February and March, besides being below December of 2023, which is a locally high point.
OPEC+ production seems to continue its general trend downward in through October.
First quarter 2024 = 41,235,000
Second quarter 2024 = 40,935,000
Third quarter 2024 = 40,608,000
October 2024 = 40,338,000
Petrol and food prices will fall thanks to oil glut, says World Bank
The World Bank predicts a significant oil oversupply in the coming years, leading to a potential drop in oil prices below $60 per barrel.
“We’re headed for a historic supply-demand gap in oil markets, the size of which has only been seen twice since the mid-nineteenth century, when the oil industry was born. A report this week from the World Bank has set off alarm bells about a coming oil glut that has the potential to seriously disrupt global economics and trade patterns.
“Next year, the global oil supply is expected to exceed demand by an average of 1.2 million barrels per day,” World Bank stated in its latest Commodity Markets Outlook report. The scale of this oversupply is difficult to overstate; these numbers have only been exceeded twice in history, in 1998 and 2020. As a result, a barrel of oil could cost less than $60 within the next six years.
The oversupply is due to the confluence of a number of discrete factors including flatlined economic growth in China, climbing electric vehicles sales (which will exceed 23% of new vehicle sales this year, and reach 40 million cars in 2030), increasing use of trucks powered by liquefied natural gas, projected production bumps from non-OPEC+ nations, and persistent overproduction from OPEC+ members as well, who are currently pumping out an extra 7 million barrels per day, “almost double the amount on the eve of the pandemic in 2019” according to a World Bank blog post accompanying the bombshell report.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Looming-Oil-Glut-to-Reshape-Global-Energy-Landscape.html
Perhaps we are headed for deflation, in other words. Lots of debt defaults.
My POV . IEA is an arm of the West just like WB , IMF , WHO etc . It reads from what is provided to it from Washington/ London . Mike S calls IEA ( Intentionally Exaggeration Agency ) . However IEA data is unimportant because it is Hodge podge . They give C +C data that includes shale oil , NGL, NGPL . The problem is that of the peak of 84 mbpd about 16 mbpd is that does not give transportation fuel . I would be looking at refinery utilization . We do not buy crude oil , the consumer buys petrol, diesel . I had in the last post put up a link how Total refinery in Antwerp was going to shift from making less transportation fuels to making petrochemicals because the required grade of oil is not available , also on refinery closures in the West . Two years ago IEA was giving the narrative that demand will be more than supply and we must invest in renewables . This lead to malinvestment in renewables and an investing bubble that has now burst . The job of the IEA is to keep oil prices so that they are ” not so hot and not so cold ” for the West . Now they say there is a glut — how ? Worldwide inventory of crude is lowest since 2017 . Why doesn’t the US replenish the SPR of 700 million barrels which is now only about 300 million ? I study what they say but the markets are another thing . The problem is that the price of oil is set in NYMEX while the actual production is in KSA and Russia . Oil is a financialized commodity and 15 times the actual worldwide production is traded everyday at NYMEX .
There is no real price discovery . It is a casino . As they say ” Trust but verify ” . I do not trust but always verify what they spew because it is tainted .
https://marketnews.com/global-oil-inventories-at-lowest-since-2017
I would agree with “IEA is an arm of the West just like WB , IMF , WHO etc .”
I did a post for TheOilDrum.com years ago. OECD is an organization of “Advanced Nations.” IEA is (or at the same time was) housed in the same building in Paris as the OECD. The IEA was the one giving the IPCC estimates of fossil fuel resources that are vastly higher than the amounts shown in the reserve estimates shown in published reports.
You say, “Mike S calls IEA (Intentionally Exaggeration Agency). That has been my experience, as well. They are the home of the $300 per barrel of oil estimates that will allow huge amounts to flow.
“the price of oil is set in NYMEX while the actual production is in KSA and Russia . Oil is a financialized commodity and 15 times the actual worldwide production is traded everyday at NYMEX”
that is another thing to worry about!
Quark in Spain exposes the IEA . Use translator .
https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2024/11/un-ano-de-estadisticas-medias-verdades.html
Terrific post Gail. Very informative. We should explore the breeder and thorium angles more in the future.
It sounds like France and the US are in for Uranium fuel problems. Is the UK still building or planning to build a nuclear reactor?
Also, I recall that Ukraine formerly obtained their fuel from Russia and after the US coup in 2014, the US promised to supply US sourced fuel, which may have had a compatibility problem with the previously supplied Russia fuel. Are not several NPPS in Ukraine idled right now? Perhaps their fuel needs have dropped accordingly.
I am suspicious that the Russia-Ukraine conflict is partly about uranium for reactors. You will notice that I show the combination of Russian and Ukrainian nuclear electricity production on Figure 7 of my post. This combination is fairly stable, but if a person looks at the amounts separately, it looks very much like Russia’s nuclear power generation has been growing by about approximately the same amount that Ukraine’s nuclear power generation has been falling. This might be viewed as squeezing out, I would think.
Ukraine’s nuclear generation is down 39% between 2021 and 2023. I don’t have figures for 2024 yet.
I am mystified regarding what US-sourced fuel might be for nuclear power plants. Nearly all of our power plant fuel needed a lot of assistance from Russia, as far as I can see. The US can make promises, but they can be baseless promises.
This timing sort of matches up with US purchases of enriched uranium from Russia. US’s guaranteed ability to purchase enriched uranium from Russia ran out in 2022. US’s down blending of warheads ended in 2013.
Couple of points, weapons are almost all plutonium, using them in power reactors takes making mixed oxide fuel where the plutonium substitutes for U 235. The other thing is that the South Koreans seem to have found a way to pull uranium out of sea water at relatively low cost. I don’t have details on this yet.
From what I’ve read about seawater extraction, fouling would be an issue and it’s not been proven economical yet. Lmk if you find otherwise.
https://www.acs.org/pressroom/presspacs/2023/december/extracting-uranium-from-seawater-as-another-source-of-nuclear-fuel.html
There seem to be lots of links to this topic.
I’ve never seen a solution that appears scalable and economic.
In the link you provided there are tons of problems:
* they use a coated cloth, which will presumably have fouling and reusability issues
* it required an external power source/circuit – EROI is unclear
* THEY DOPED THE SEAWATER with additional uranium so any successful extraction is exaggerated, we don’t know by how much
From my point of view, influencial proponents, probably Blackrock, have the idea to implement higher energy prices to support wind and solar generation and to make the industry “fit” for the new conditions.
Behind that is the idea that higher prices because of higher production costs will act inflationary and thus the huge investments can be paid. From my perspective this investments reduce productivity. What is more the technology does not work as expected. Above that the new technology will lead to consequnces in the supply chains (e.g. steel costs), that will make a switch to alternative energy impossible. The driving forces obviously come to other conclusions. There is also T.I.N.A. involved, there is no alternative, which is always a bad advisor.
The war against Russia for sure has been used as a disruptor to switch to the new technology. I am afraid they have failed, though, look to VW.
Rumours say, Blackrock and Goldman Sachs have placed high ranked secretaries in the German government (which leads the EU). The opposition leader Merz of the conservative party? is former head of Blackrock Germany.
The leader of the right conservative party Alice Weidel is a gormer Goldman Sachs employee, but she swears this was in her jobstart only and she has no high ranked contacts.
We have to expect this strategy to go on, because too much has already been invested.
In September 2025 the WHO contracts become valid and Mr Ghebre-Jesus can overrule parliament and jurisdiction. It is said that the driving force behind the asset managers and the WHO is the same man: Bill Gates.
Explore breeder or thorium angles more in the future? They’ve been tried, they didn’t work. There will be no resources spare to experiment with them further in the future with a shrinking economy.
The idea that nuclear energy would fail because hydrocarbon fuels will not be sufficient strikes me as assuming a couple things. One is that it would not be given priority over other less critical uses. The second is that a non-traditional use would be to have it used for heat rather than electricity. Heat could be used to create liquid hydrocarbon fuels from coal. There really is no constraint on energy return from investment. Who cares if it takes more energy than the energy you actually get from the liquid fuel. You have millions of times more energy per unit of mass. The circle could be:
-Prioritized use of hydrocarbons to increase nuclear
-Use nuclear heat to create liquid hydrocarbons from coal far in excess of the amount used with priority
-repeat first two steps as needed
I think the main value in analysis of the issues and difficulties in our current path is to see in advance and find ways to mitigate and/or change how we do things. Linear extrapolation indicates a future disaster. We can all say that if we continue to do things as we do them today everything will eventually wind down and there is no hope. Or we could start thinking non-linearly and see what we could do differently to upset and derail the current path. I find it is especially frustrating when amazing technology that existed when I was in kindergarten was ignored due to our capitalistic system that drives out all things that interrupt current profit paths. It is the economic equivalent problem of Machiavelli’s description of the politics of change….an array of enemies who like it the way it is while the people who would become the future defenders of the new approach do not have any current reason to advocate for it as they yet do not benefit from the future change.
I am afraid you don’t understand our current situation very well. The world is short of crude oil, coal and uranium, at the same time. Natural gas is affordable in many parts of the world. Also, there isn’t anyone who allocates particular resources–it happens indirectly through markets and governmental laws.
A big part of the US’s problem is that the US is the world’s biggest user of nuclear electricity, but we have essentially no uranium sources of our own. We are also lacking facilities for spent fuel. We have depended for a long time on international markets, and in particular, buying resources we need from Russia.
When there is not enough to go around, Russia is not willing to sell enriched uranium to us.
On a long term basis I agree with your assessment on uranium and the other fuels. But, in the short term I think a lot of our problem is highly artificial. The US government is deliberately suppressing the production of oil world wide. As examples, sanctions on Venezuela, Iran, Russia, China. As for natural gas, we destroyed the Nordstream pipelines thereby creating an artificial shortage in Europe and causing an artificial need for highly expensive LNG shipments. Coal is being suppressed despite enormous supplies due to “climate change” silliness. Your statement about governmental laws is a very high impact and very anti-supply situation in our world context.
The uranium fuel issue for the US is purely because we did not pursue better technology in the 1970s. We could have switched to Thorium breeders in the late 70s/early 80s and had for practical purposes infinite domestic fuel supply. The Uranium reactors could have been retained until end of life and then shut down. Given the lower fuel costs of Thorium, they probably would have been shut down as soon as large numbers of Thorium reactors were available before end of life. No one would even care about mining uranium in that alternative time line.
If the government was not suppressing oil, gas, natural gas, perhaps we would have enough to get to a time where we could manufacture liquid fuels from either coal or even carbon dioxide from the air if we had large amounts of nuclear power for heat and electricity. Instead our leaders accelerate our demise.
I see your analysis as being very helpful in identifying our future projected path of existence if we continue to follow our failed policies and suppressive world politics. So, we need to get off this path. Maybe where we differ is I do not think it has to be as hopeless as our current situation is making it. The phrase “when you are in the hole, stop digging” comes to mind here.
Kevin, the reason your leaders are being ”green” is because they want to cull. Not speedify the standard of living to even higher to have another population boom because jonny with 95 iq has a factory job with $100k/year and can speez his sperm in and breed another 5 babies. Do you get it or not?
Philosopher…, I would have guessed that the main reason was to introduce more skimming activities like carbon taxes. I do not know if there is much of a correlation between standard of living and fertility rates in countries with easy access to birth control. All I have seen for a long time is articles “concerned” with population decline as most developed nations are below the fertility replacement rate. Do you have any pointers to discussions on standard of living effects in the context of societies with birth control access?
Where in the world are these enormous supplies of coal that aren’t being mined due to climate concerns? I don’t think they exist.
Guest2, a quick check on google shows a government agency claiming recoverable coal reserves are about 440 years at current consumption rates assuming 58% of reserves are economically accessible. If you search for it you can usually find interesting info from the US Geological Survey that points out the locations of minerals.
Mining is slowly shutting down due to politics in places like Illinois which are passing laws to force coal generated electricity out of business by 2035.
Natural gas has been very cheap in the US since about 2011. Competition from natural gas has reduced US coal mining considerably because it is also very inexpensive to build devices that burn natural gas for electrical power. The cost of “peaker plants” is especially low. They are not very efficient. More efficient plants are more expensive, but still less expensive than plants to burn coal, with all of the required filters and other devices to try to handle pollution.
I don’t know how much coal is easily and cheaply extractable. At different points around the world, I am pretty sure someone will figure out if there is really more coal that can easily be extracted. If there is more warming, it may make resources in Alaska easier to get to. Perhaps in northern Russia as well.
Current estimates of available coal include large amounts under the North Sea. I will believe that these resources are available when it actually happens. Some people have suggested that perhaps the coal could be burned in place to produce electricity.
There are lots of resources for oil, coal, natural gas, uranium, lithium, copper, and any number of other resources that we get out of the ground. The problem is keeping the price high enough to encourage extraction.
The theory behind all of the suppression of resource extraction is that maybe keeping other suppliers out will help keep the international price higher. This will make extraction, outside the parts of the world with sanctions, more feasible.
This whole issue is related to, “How much reserves are really available? The theory of economists is that prices can rise very high. Real-world insights seem to come to the conclusion that prices do not really rise very high. The big issue is trying to force supply down, so that perhaps prices will rise high enough to make the extraction system (including taxes and borrowing costs) work.
Gail, thanks for the information on Uranium. I do not know.
I have followed the story, at least a bit, since Oil Drum days. Michael Dittmar, who worked at CERN (international research organization), used to write about this subject. Back in 2010, he wrote the linked paper. It says
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/what-nuclear-energy-renaissance
When I look at Kazakstan’s production now, it never hit 30,000 tons. It hit 24,689 tons in 2016, but it has been generally down since then. Production was 21,227 in 2022, according to the WNA. An August 2024 article says that production in Kazakhstan dropped to 20,900 tons in 2023. This suggests that world uranium production is falling, more or less, year after year. WNA shows peak uranium production in 2016.
https://astanatimes.com/2024/08/kazakhstans-uranium-industry-sites-and-production/
Mining values are for years 2013-2022. % of world demand presumably means percent not taken from weapons stockpiles.
tonnes U3O8 69,966 66,087 71,113 74,357 71,361 63,861 64,554 56,287 56,377 58,201
% of world demand 91% 85% 98% 96% 93% 80% 81% 74% 76% 74%
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/mining-of-uranium/world-uranium-mining-production
All that said, in-the-ground-reserves are supposedly much larger than needs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_reserves
A guess is scaling:
The sun works because it is big enough to be relatively constant in output; yes that is changing.
Not an expert, but it seems the universe does not split atoms on any kind of a routine basis. Need fusion, supernova for the heavier elements.
The universe seems to be self renewing, that is a miracle if you like which means we don’t yet understand it.
I am a believer in this site, it has eliminated many/all of the things which do not work. Uranium works for Russia in part due to its size and willingness to pollute large sections of a very large country.
With current engineering, if we are going to have a solution it is above our heads, Starship is working so far, one can hope. Refueling is going to be interesting, but there is plenty of CH4 in space, collecting it could be interesting.
Terrestrial solar cells might well work if the heavy industrial demands for energy were met in space, pollution is also not an issue there. Of course, this assumes a cubic mile of Pt.
Need to go back and see what is happening to the “delivered” cost of electricity over the last ten years; I keep good records and scan receipts so it would be one supplier and one governmental jurisdiction for taxes, etc.
Dennis L.
Some decades ago had a class of Public Economics and term paper written was on the origins of commercial nuclear electric industry…titled Uncle Sam’s Baby.
From what I recall, the reason to establish the “too cheap to meter” fantasy was a public relations ploy to put positive support among the voters here in the United States.
Remember, there was an arms race and a missile gap frenzy that needed to be countered by a nuclear energy for the benefit of the general public.
Of course, it was subsidized and even shielded of any lawsuits from accidents or mishaps, something like we experienced recently from the COVID vaccines.
The concerns were buried or push aside with the standard promise of future technology will solve the waste issue.
So, here we are today, still dreaming of this fix for our predicament…
Humans are indeed rather amusing…
Mike , maybe Mr B has some answers . 8 min read .
https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/can-we-escape-our-predicament-2d22831f4438
An excerpt:
I agree. The problem has been hidden from view.
There are at least two ways to cope, one is going into space, the other is AI/Nanotechnology. Both interact.
keith
theres 8bn of us on earth—give or take
the ”going into space” thing is pure fantasy—as is AI
have you thought about freezing everybody–except for a few hundred kept defrosted to feed the electric meters so everyone doesnt end up as slush?
space” thing is pure fantasy”
Several hundred billion dollars a year Call it fantasy if you like.
“—as is AI”
I suspect you have never interacted with an AI. I use them frequently. They have limits but I find them useful. They will be substantially better with the next release in Dec.
several hundred bn $ a year is spent by NASA PHd’s in job creation schemes—that is no answer to 8bn of us stuck on earth, and still using the same force to get off earth as the chinese did 1000 years ago.
We on earth need future support, spending $bns wont deliver that—asteroid mining or no asteroid mining. We are a carbon based species, and must consume carbon based food sources.
As to AI
when you demonstrate “AI” , with no other energy input whatsoever, moving a 1 ounce weight 1 inch, I ‘ll believe it to be an energy producer (ive made this offer before)
until that day, it remains an energy consumer
and no scientific formulae or calculation or future promises will make it otherwise
nanotechnology is a word pulled from the dictionary of BS—we are people—we can’t eat nano-food. (thats what it comes down to)
As to cryo—bet your life, if you want to, that the lights are going to be kept on for the next 500 years, and that somebody will actually care whats in those ancient cylinders in a cave somewhere.
dead is dead keith.—-excercise your fantasies to believe otherwise–it has no more bearing on reality than Father Christmas or the tooth fairy.—i realise its hard to undo 40 years of cryo-certainty, but i can’t help that…..it is what it is.
“spent by NASA PHd’”
No, talking about space services, around $300 B per year. NASA budget is perhaps $20 B per year.
“we can’t eat nano-food. ”
Most food has been constructed by nanomachines. Natural one mostly, but that will change. Right now you could buy sugar that was not grown. Food production is remarkably inefficient. We use about 1000 times as much energy on food as everything else.
“wcryo-certainty ”
We have always been upfront that there is no guarantee. But when you are put in cryonic suspension, what other choice do you have?
Far as AI is concerned, not surprised that you don’t think it is real. I have been aware of it coming along since the early 80s when I was editing Drexler’s first book and when the LLMs got good enough to make sense, it was still a shock.
This could work. If we freeze everyone now and store them in the vacuum of space the electric meters could be fed by space solar. But the few hundred thawed folks on Earth running mission control and thorium reactors (except the space based engineers) might have too much free time and the cycle would start all over again.
youve solved the problem Rep
pass the info onto Keith
Well said, Norman.
You’ve called out some of Keith’s more preposterous fantasies and brought him back down to earth a sadder but doubtless wiser man.
Keith, you are a child of the universe.
No less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should,
and eating nanofood and freezing your head is not going to add a single day to your lifespan.
Bill Gates has invested a lot in nanofood, but what is his actual diet?
Apparently, Gates’s eating habits aren’t much better than other billionaires. He’s said he eats Cocoa Puffs for breakfast. Though his ex-wife Melinda Gates has said in the past that he skips the meal altogether. He also apparently loves cheeseburgers.
“add a single day to your lifespan. ”
Ask again in 20 years.
“Bill Gates … Cocoa Puffs”
Why should I or anyone else care what he has for breakfast?
keith
i did not infer that AI isnt real—of course it is, but it is NOT a physical entity.
a friend of mine has an auto-mower. it knows where it is, where its been, and when it needs a recharge–it goes round his lawn doing its thing, ostensibly with ‘intelligence’–it has a brain if you like.
but only so long as someone buys electricity for it to run on.
It cant cook dinner or do laundry or drive a car. (now do you understand?)
but the offer is still open
when AI can, of itself, with no external inputs whatsoever, move a 1 ounce weight 1 inch , I will willingly pay the cost of freezing your head for the next 500 years.
space services merely supply information on how to consume energy, more efficiently agreed—but that just burns more of it (Jevons again i’m afraid)
spending $ billions does not create surplus energy, —but spending surplus energy does create $ billions (temporarily)
then those $billions dissipate—why? because the value of money is sustained only by the flow of energy input
cryo choice?
for 000s of years rich fantasists have been certain that death could be cheated (check the pyramids)—it really can’t mate.
but your delusions are ultimately harmless, and spark conversation on OFW
i respect your intellect–i just think its taken you down the path of delusion.
“It cant cook dinner or do laundry or drive a car.”
You have not been keeping up with the news. Ever heard of a Tesla car?
Energy. AI will do the design and nanotechnology will manufacture solar panels for no more than the cost per kg of firewood. 1% of farmland will make ten times the non food energy we use. If we need liquid fuels, they will be no trouble to make.
You may miss it, and I may miss it, but technology is on an exponential upward curve. Those who understand this don’t expect it to take 500 years, more like 5 to 20. That’s scary even to someone who has been out on the bleeding edge for the last 50 years.
I can’t blame you for being terrified of the future and denying things like self driving cars. Civilization falling apart as predicted here or a very high tech future are both scary.
And we have not even started to talk about uploading to data centers hundreds of times the area of the Earth out between Mars and Jupiter.
keith
your fantasy level is beyond belief—but at least it provides amusement—most post on ofw i dont read—i never fail to open yours, if only if only to witness the latest mental acrobatics youve put yourself through.
i persist because you have an intellect of high order…..though sometimes i do wonder if age hasnt brought on some kind of metal aberration—it happens to all of us eventually. … we always deny it btw, that too is normal
i was describng an auto-mower—pointing out that it couldnt cook dinner or drive a car
you come back with waffle about tesla cars—as if they are somehow connected—i find that very odd. ( i mean seriously weird—an intelligent 10 year old would recognise that the two devices cannot be held in comparison)
keith–me old mate–they are two separate things, designed to carry out separates tasks—neither can subsitute for the other or swap tasks—and never will….yet we are told of interplanetatry data centres or whatever that will justify out existence—-somehow.
human intelligence, the only one there is btw, can do both and a million more things besides
you cant build a tesla car without fossil fuel inputs—its the same as a ic car, just with a power source thats elsewhere
i can assure you—with absolute certainty—that technology will remain on an upward curve only so long as cheap surplus energy remains on an upward curve.
humankind cannot live on the output of calculators—no matter what results are show to be ”correct”
sorry–but there it is.
“fantasy level is beyond belief”
I am active in other places on the web. Some of them, like the Extropian mailing list, the things I discuss are the common baseline.
“human intelligence, the only one there is btw”
You don’t follow AI work, you don’t use them. I don’t think you are entitled to an opinion. It is true that the AIs so far fail the Turing Test. Why? They are nicer than humans.
“you cant build a tesla car without fossil fuel inputs”
Utter nonsense. There is nothing magical about fossil fuels. Ask half a dozen engineers. As it is, the fossil fuel input to making electric cars is falling fast.
“with absolute certainty”
That level of arrogance is not realistic.
”The philosophy of extropians; the belief that cultural and technological development tends to oppose, and will overcome, entropy.”
hmmmmmmm
in the entire history of humankind—nothing
nothing
has overcome decay.
that applies whether you are coating the underside of your car, or freezing your head.
i made the point that an automower couldnt drive a car or cook dinner, you countered that with a tesla car as an example.
the automower does what it does by an external power source, and a guide wire embedded in its lawn perimeter.—no doubt you will equate that with mining the moons of saturn or something.
small wonder then that my ‘weird’ alarm set off.
i repeat—–i can assure you—with absolute certainty—that technology will remain on an upward curve only so long as cheap surplus energy remains on an upward curve….
Cheap energy gives you technology, technology does not, and never will give you cheap energy. ‘arrogance’ in that statement is amusing, nothing more.—as if choosing to follow extropianism brings exemption from the laws of physics—it does not.—any more than christianity grants you eternal life… we both know that is bs too.
before we had cheap energy, our society was static more or less—when we dont have cheap energy, that is the society we will have again
fantasisng wont change that.
tell you what keith
lets try to define AI another way
When one “AI” has an orgasm by the interaction of another “AI”
no human interference allowed of course!!!!!
dont think anyone has thought of that before
This is the image that M. King Hubbert used in his paper.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/hubbert-_nuclear_fossil-fuel-to-50001.png
I thought of including it in this post–it is so misleadingly wrong. Hubbert must have known that the amount of uranium easily mined in the earth’s surface is quite limited.
I agree that nuclear energy has a lot of common with vaccines. Governments push them. They give them unlimited liability. People are lead to believe that they can be our saviors, when they clearly cannot.
I assume that Hubbert was expecting nuclear fusion power to be workable. As most of us here realize, it’s simply not viable. It’s been 20 years away for over half a century.
Hubbert was correct that nuclear output would be flat.
He was misleading us about what he meant by “output”. He was misleading us about the time scale.
The energy from nuclear fission in the environment, in the form of nuclear power waste, could potentially be much more than what humans were extracting from fossil fuels in the 1950s. The problem is this energy is waste and is mostly unusable.
The amount of time nuclear power could power industrial civilization seems to be off by two orders of magnitude. Instead of 5,000 years of nuclear output, we seem to only have about 50.
I always found it odd nuclear power plants were being decommissioned for no disclosed reason. One reason could be that the Uranium supply dried up .Without a supplier, a nuclear power plant could have no choice but to shut down.
In theory, nuclear power could be used to produce even more Uranium fuel but breeder reactors have been inexplicably abandoned. The reasons being presented for abandoning the construction of them are nonsense, imo. Example “uranium is cheap and abundant” .
No one is willing to explain the real story of limited supply of uranium from the ground, and the large share that ends up as waste.
We have talked about the trouble in Germany . France is no better . 1200 fired by Michelin tires .
https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/factory-closures-threaten-thousands-jobs-france-warns-industry-minister-2024-11-09/
with fewer cars being sold, it seems natural that fewer tires are also being sold. I note that my recently installed winter tires are Pirelli. There is a niche that is still available for export.
Closed factories mean less demand for a wide range of energy products and materials. It also means many skilled jobs disappearing. The population will be able to afford to purchase fewer cars and tires in the future.
our prosperous lifestyle is entirely dependent on producing and selling more this year than last year, and repeating it next year.
thats not some ”opinion”–in recessions, people lose jobs and begin to starve.
if work picks up–things improve, until next time
when the rule kicks in again
and the entire process requires cheap surplus fuel to keep rolling.
Nuclear fusion, thorium reactors , modular reactors , bio mass and blah , blah so that we can have BAU . The problem is that we have entered into a period of ” energy poverty ” and so all these ideas are not going to scale up to commercial level .
I am afraid you are right. Lots of things might work, in a period of cheap, growing supply of fossil fuels. As we hit the end of fossil fuels, the add-ons, such as nuclear energy, today’s hydroelectric, wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries, all tend to disappear.
Thorium reactors were tried and didn’t work. Small modular reactors solve nothing and need specialised more highly enriched fuel that would be a big problem to produce. They will simply never happen.
“So the thesis of this book stands or falls with the correctness of the decline rate that Brown gives us. Therefore I have calculated with several different parameters as regards the decline rate, and all point in the same direction. The difference between them is a few years at most. Therefore I assume that my thesis is solid, which is that the end of global net oil exports in 2030-2032 (Brown’s scenario) is a best-case scenario.
Collapse can, I think, begin in earnest already in 2026, only because of too little diesel exports. Observe that oil exports vanish successively, more and more, not all at once. . . . Almost only when Gail Tverberg is allowed to post the blogposts from
her own blog there, which happens about once a month, the reality of Peak Oil is coming through. I follow this site regularly. ”?
https://un-denial.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/lars-larsen-the-end-of-global-net-oil-exports-13th-edition-2024.pdf
Thanks for the quote. This is nice of Lars Larson.
I agree that diesel is critical. It is not “oil” in general, but “diesel” that allows the underlying structure of the world economy to continue.
The Statistical Review of World Energy gives diesel consumption by part of the world. I decided to look and see where diesel consumption has risen (or fallen), between 2018 and 2023. This is what I found:
World +1% (Shift to less jet fuel and a little more diesel)
OECD =”Advanced Countries” -7%
Non-OECD = +9%
United States -11%
European Union -8%
Japan -8%
Europe ex EU -3%
Middle East +14%
CIS = Russia +Southern Allies +25%
China +12%
India +7%
Brazil +13%
Central and South America ex Brazil +5+
Africa +2%
More diesel is used where inexpensive industrialization is done. This is often in coal-using countries. Coal reduces costs. “Fighting climate change” adds to costs.
Going to war, and making weapons yourself, is a good way to ramp up diesel consumption, as shown by the results for CIS.
The Middle East, as a major oil exporter, does indeed use more than its share of diesel, but I am somewhat doubtful that this makes a whole lot of difference in the overall picture. Countries with a high cost of production, at least partly from using a lot of oil (which can be imported), tend to be squeezed out.
assuming we get unlimited generation of electricity
then what?
electricity of itself is use-less, in the literal sense…. as is coal oil and gas.
the global economic system is based on energy–yes, but it actually FUNCTIONS on buying and selling STUFF—that is where wages come from, wages are made at the point where one energy form is made into another.
wages cannot just be printed.
stuff has to be made using finite materials. these are critical, and no amount of modular nuke plants is going to alter that.
if they came on stream, they would ultimately serve to deplete our resource base.
if ev’s became cheaper to run, the resource base (diesel powered) that makes them would not change–merely deplete faster,—and thats just one example.
You’re right there, Norman.
Electricity is one of the ingredients of the enormous complexity that allows me and millions like me to sit at home or in the office banging away at my keyboard earning money and spending it. Another important ingredient is the Internet/WWW, a third is credit cards and other non-cash payment systems, and a fourth is reliable delivery services.
In my case, these things have eliminated the need for commuting, shopping and banking trips. If I want beer, cat food, books, California organic raisins or Turkish figs delivered, I just tap on the right keys in the right order and Bob’s yer uncle. It’s the next best thing to using the Force.
But we live in a finite world with finite amounts of many kinds of resources, so it is only a matter of time before we run out of affordable mission-critical things such as Diesel, or copper, or some of the rarer rare earths. Sure, we can substitute this material for that one, or change the way we do things. But in the end, like a juggler trying to keep too many oranges in the air, we will drop the lot.
I am surprised that so many of us have carried on consuming this much for this long, to be honest. I was expecting the end of affluence to have arrived before the Millennium. Perhaps this is because I was unduly influenced by Paul Ehrlich. He really had me going for a while back in the sixties and seventies.
you function as i do Tim
its completely crazy that i order something for £5 and a man with huge van has to drive miles to bring it to my doorstep—and there millions like him, everywhere.
while bezos gets ever richer
The man with the van is not making that trip just for Norm. Is it not more efficient then all those millions of consumers driving their cars to the stores individually?
the entire system is energy-inefficient
we are using energy debt to buy energy-convenience
The US is using financial debt to get a disproportionate share of the world’s physical resources.
same thing
just a matter of scale
Nice analysis Gail. Thanks for the new post.
“Over time, the world’s self-organizing economy tends to eliminate its more inefficient parts. When I look at the past experience with nuclear, what I see seems to be another example of the self-organizing economy squeezing out the inefficient parts of the economy”
….
“The Later Entrants can make goods for sale in international markets much more cheaply than the Advanced Economies, ..”
All of this also applies to oil of course, especially on a net export basis.
https://un-denial.com/2024/07/29/book-review-the-end-of-global-net-oil-exports-by-lars-larsen-2024/
I would tend to disagree with Lars Larsen on his point three:
The US has had strong economic growth primarily because the US$ is the reserve currency. In practice, this means that the US can pump up its economy by more and more government debt and other debt, and still be able to afford imports of all kinds. Thus, the US, as an oil producer, has had fast growth, but this growth will end when this debt bubble pops. The US is an oil exporter, but most of its oil exports are offset by imports of different kinds of oil.
I would debate whether Saudi Arabia and Russia, as major oil producers, have had rapid economic growth. Oil prices don’t stay high, which is a major problem (which modelers tend to overlook). Saudi Arabia’s population has grown rapidly, but Russia’s has not. With low oil prices, as we have now, oil exporters are in a terrible position. They can’t afford to develop new acreage, which tends to be more expensive. Their production tends to drop. They face the problem of “peak oil,” badly affecting their economies.
Low production at a low price leads to a need for debt. I understand that Saudi Arabia has slipped into a net debt position:
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Worlds-Largest-Oil-Producer-Slips-Into-a-Net-Debt-Position.html
The world economy is so tightly integrated that I have doubts about the proposed relationship holding for the long term. At a minimum, this assumption needs to be looked at more closely, today.
It’s difficult to stay on the same page these days as with a Trump win it’s hard not to get caught up in the euphoria. Many people are saying that money will rush into the U.S as countries need dollars. There’s always talk of the BRICS but they can’t get anything done.
Matt Mushalik has an interesting view . He points out that instead of looking at world peak oil we must look at individual country peak oil .
” The focus is also too much on the global peak. Look at the Mexican peak
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gbu1qk5b0AEBBDf?format=jpg&name=large
It caused a huge wave of migrants which has created anger in the US society, sweeping Trump into power.
Peak oil in Venezuela. Peak oil in Yemen where Houthis have made shipping more costly
Peak oil in UK caused Brexit etc. etc. ”
Response from Loadsofoil :
You are absolutely correct, peak oil is far more relevant on a country by country basis. Syria could no longer subsidise fuel for farmers who were already hard pressed and this pushed many to bankruptcy. The protesters were killed by the security forces and civil war broke out.
Egypt has had riots and a military coup since its oil production peaked.
But all these countries have two other things in common, widespread corruption that has robbed billions from the economy and crippling incompetence. A country where every level of government is corrupt and incompetent will suffer greatly once income from natural resources start to decline.
Some of the richest countries in the world have very little in terms of oil and gas.
Extracting fossil fuels or uranium doesn’t get a country very far. There needs to be a whole system, holding the economy up. This system works under the laws of physics.
When government leaders have great power, but there is little energy to go around, there does indeed tend to be a lot of corruption. Wages, based on what the system can afford to pay tend to be very low. (Lots of wage disparity because of not enough to go around.) People discover that bribes work to get people in power to act on their behalf. So bribes become part of the system.
Thanks for the article, Gail. It seems to my casual observation that the “Religion of Progress” that John Michael Greer has mentioned covers the nuclear industry as well. I’ve read nothing but upbeat reviews of newer tech with nuclear, and the only obvious downside is the past history of economic viability.
Apparently mankind still isn’t ready to deal with Finite Resources on our planet. Your articles focus on the most important aspect of the future (energy), and our culture is pretty slow at getting to a realistic view on the topic.
I agree. People are not ready for my message. No politician can tell this story to voters. We get various versions of half-truths.
Predictions about the Trump admin go here. My take:
1) internally, Trump will take the blame for the upcoming depression. The point is to disqualify the resistance to globalism for a few years. The shock that takes it down may even be intentional
2) externally, war with iran, inconclusive I expect
I note the lack of opposition to Trump. I think it was decided Trump is the best option at this time.
aaaand, rubio is secretary of state. amazing that people still vote for this clown. so war it is.
drb, Dimitry Orlov on the Trump presidency . Lame duck .
” There are those who view Donald Trump’s victory with a razor-sharp focus that is deserving of better uses. Trump is old; at 78, he will be as old at inauguration as Joe Biden was, and we all know how well that went. Being so old a dog, he is unlikely to learn any new tricks; meanwhile, the world has changed dramatically and his “art of the deal,” to put it bluntly, would no longer apply to international relations were he to try it.
But even to get to that point, he would have to reform the federal agencies, which are currently stocked with his enemies — some would-be assassins, some simply passive-aggressive. This process is likely to take him through most of 2025.
Domestically, he is looking at an unavoidable financial train wreck as interest spending on national debt tops one major category of federal spending after another and as federal debt itself continues to blow out. Any attempt at reform would result in economic negatives, causing Trump’s party to lose control of the Congress (as is traditional in midterm elections in any case) at the end of 2026.
Thus, Trump would only really have a year to act, from the fall of 2025, by which point he might be able to whip the Washington federal swamp into a semblance of responsiveness, and the fall of 2026, when he will lose control of Congress.
And if Trump does act, he will most likely do what he has been promising to do. This will mostly involve throwing up barriers: border walls, tariffs, sanctions, demarcation lines… He will also threaten, applying the hard-nosed acumen he accumulated as a real estate magnate. Thus, he seems to be planning to threaten Putin that he will arm the Ukrainians (which the US has already been doing in all ways possible short of starting a world war) and simultaneously threaten the Ukrainians that he will STOP arming them: this sort of ill-logic is worthy of Biden!
What Trump, and with him the vast majority of Americans — whether they voted for him or against — will most likely fail to understand is that the world has moved on leaving the United States in the dust. There is a new world order in the works that explicitly excludes the United States. But all that Americans (Trump included) know how to do is to negotiate from a position of strength. What strength? ”
That fizzled fast .
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/trump-rally-fizzles-futures-drop-dollar-yields-extend-surge
“America has made a big show about ground-based systems like ATACMS and HIMARS (launchers) in Ukraine, but HIMARS is a 1990s system and ATACMS are discontinued. What we’re witnessing is actually a going out of business sale from the American military, not a resurgence.
The Americans are dumping old junk on Ukraine in an accounting fraud with no hope of winning at all. For themselves, America has replaced ATACMS with PrSM, which is also a non-killing joke. Those missiles cost $1,666 million apiece, and they produced 30 of them in 2021. As of 2024, production is up to 54 missiles a year.”?
https://indi.ca/how-america-is-losing-the-rocket-wars/#ghost-comments
Neither system really works in a war against a peer opponent since they depend on GPS and the GPS signal gets jammed. Same with guided shells and bombs.
Modern war only “works” if one of the countries is significantly weaker than the other. Modern warfare between two peers is mutually assured destruction. The destruction is even worse if they are developed. Plutonium-enriched bombs and emp bombs could reduce population levels in war regions very sharply, leaving no winners.
Such wars might help solve the overpopulation problem, however.
Dmitry makes interesting points!
It is Ground Hog Day, the movie when the day repeats. Trump hire the swamp rats for his cabinet. They will stab him in the back just like last time.
Sadly, short lived joy.
Yes, I suspect the Trump victory was a bit too convenient. Let him and the republicans take the blame. Always a risk though if things manage to somehow trudge on for a few more years. Nobody wants to be in charge when TSHTF. Eventually somebody will be (at least for a while).
From now to 2030 should be extremely interesting for old dudes like me that won’t be around much beyond that to see what comes next.
You have to wonder if that thing in Butler was staged, with some vial of red liquid handy right under the lectern.
if the lectern had collapsed—you could have blamed the WTC conspiracy lot—at it again
Here we are, after all that rhetoric, with Rubio as SoS. He is essentially a male Hillary Clinton, including the intellectual stature.
they are all so terrified of trump now
that they will do anything he tells them to
and i do mean anything
as usual you change the subject…
it was your daft comment about the vial of red liquid—not mine
i guess that was what what killed the guy behind him too?
The Don happened to have a packet or two of MacDonald’s tomato sauce in his back pocket, left over from that side job he was doing to help finance the election campaign, and it burst when he was pulled down.
Suddenly feeling damp and thinking he’d be shot in the butt, he put his hand into his pocket, then brought it up to his face to look at it, thinking there was blood on it. In the scuffle, it smeared his ear and his cheek. No conspiracy needed.
Too good to be true? It sure does feel that way.
“old dudes like me that won’t be ”
Not certain. At some point I expect that people will mostly quit dying. If you think you will miss this point and want to see how it works out, there is cryonics. I have been signed up for 40 years.
id contribute to a cryo-trump experiment
the ultimate kicking of the can down the road i’d say
The legend of Endymion shows that the ancient Greeks thought that so
And the apostles thought the second coming would occur in the lifetime of at least one of the disciples, and St. John, the guy who wrote the Revelation, was thought to live forever since Jesus had said one of them would see his return
John did live for a long time, close to 100 years, but he died in Patmos around the year 100
Immortality is only possible by the eradication of entropy, and since the laws of thermodynamics precludes that possibility, there is no quitting of dying
And I do not recall anyone coming back from death after they were frozen
“do not recall anyone”
Of course not, the technology is not up to that yet. It may never reach that level, but unless the wheels come off of civilization in the next decade or so we will reach that point.
We are in for weird times.
You contradict yourself in the same paragraph
“contradict yourself”
Can you point out where?
“New study uncovers major problem with fuel touted as a ‘bridge’ to cleaner future: ‘Substantially worse than coal’
A new study has found that liquefied natural gas — a form of natural gas that has been cooled to a liquid state for shipping — produces more carbon pollution than even coal, which is widely considered the dirtiest fuel source. ”?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/study-uncovers-major-problem-fuel-113055244.html
I more or less expect that this is true. An awfully lot of LNG is burned off as fuel, as the LNG is transported. There have been papers on this subject for years. Natural gas is methane.
The US has been the major source of new LNG production. This year, the US seems to be having difficulty with natural gas extraction.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=63506
https://blog.gorozen.com/blog/us-natural-gas-production-is-plummeting
If things don’t change, the US will have to slow or stop and eventually stop its natural gas exports.
“Strangely enough, the US has no working model of a small-scale nuclear reactor”.
Sorry, but not strange. The US is about defunct for new tech involving hardware outside of Musk and a small no of other players.
Refer Andrei Martyanov for the spectacular decline on the military front, which is the canary in the coalmine for a broad spectrum decline.
The US has gone off into the “add debt to create artificial growth” direction. Since the US has the reserve currency, this seems to work, at least temporarily.
At some point, the debt bubble has to collapse.
I notice that the WSJ is reporting,
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/ceo-of-saudi-arabias-futuristic-city-project-leaves-abruptly-43489eb4
“CEO of Saudi Arabia’s Futuristic City Project Leaves Abruptly” Longtime CEO Nadhmi al-Nasr left Neom, Saudi Arabia’s marquee development, which has been plagued by delays, cost overruns and staff turnover.
This goes along with reports that Saudi Arabia is in a net debt position now.
Oil is no longer the engine of growth that it was for Saudi Arabia.
The US needs to add an incredible amount to of debt ($2 trillion or so) to show growth. Something is wrong.
that neom thing was truly laughable
a monument to the vanity on mankind (a woman wouldnt be so daft as to think it up)
On a par with the pyramids and cryo-watsit, but at least the pyramids got built
Do not agree. Breeders work and are a way around the U235 limitation, but are politically blocked because of proliferation concerns. Same story as with using highly enriched U in civil reactors.
Has anyone heard of a manufacturered global famine being planned for 2025?
Are you getting any signs? A volcanic eruption may be the culprit. Check out inexpensive dry whole foods in #10 cans to survive the mini-ice age or year without a summer. Keith mentioned something about a volcano.
volcanic eruptions are being manufactured all the time
i wouldnt worry about it
its those elites again
I hope you are wrong on this one Norman. I will take your suggestion to not worry.
This has got to be a joke. Humans don’t have any control over volcanoes, earthquakes, or weather. Or the tide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_tide Knowing what we can’t do (yet anyway) saves a lot of effort.
it was my poor attempt at irony
blaming the elites again
Mike Adams et al have been talking about it for ages.
E.g. see this interview with Dr Leonard Coldwell. https://www.brighteon.com/ecc164f8-ef4c-4172-9244-1d643d0deffd
They quote some mind boggling nos for upcoming vax deaths too. Make your own assessment.
No, but I’ll make sure I make even more of a pig of myself over the coming yuletide season than I usually do, just to be on the safe side.
There’s a lot happening in the EU, with them restricting production for ostensibly ‘green’ reasons.
https://x.com/SteviesQuotes/status/1857331186705531014
(translate post link underneath)
The ostensibly green reasons seem to work better than telling them the truth: The country can’t afford all of the imported oil and other products required to do very much of this kind of farming. Something has to go. Diets will need to change.
It seems to me that nuclear power has always been kind of an adjunct to fossil fuels — otherwise, how could the steel, concrete, etc. in them exist, & have been transported & constructed?
And what about the power grids they serve?
Nuclear energy could not be built without the use of lots of fossil fuels.
As fossil fuels deplete, I am afraid that we necessarily lose the benefit of nuclear. In fact, the same argument applies to hydroelectric.
It is the complexity of electricity that makes it even more difficult to use. Adding wind and solar makes it even more complex. California is having real problems with its push toward electricity. I expect that any place will have that problem.
That’s right. Nuclear power can’t stand alone.
I think this article confirms that in the early 1970s when the government had a 50/50 chance of choosing the right long term approach for nuclear power it chose the wrong answer.
I think the IAEA credibility on this subject is perhaps confined to Uranium and not to being an authority on Thorium. The statement on the cost of extraction seems to ignore the quantity needed. To get one ton of Thorium fuel you have to mine one ton of thorium. To get one ton of uranium fuel you need to mine about 140 tons of uranium. Of course both get multiplied by some factor to represent the % of the ore that is actually the element needed. The point being that you have to mine roughly 100x more material to get the same number of atoms of fuel. How could the mining cost if uranium be lower than thorium? Next the cost of enriching uranium which is a step not done for thorium. Next the cost of creating solid fuel rods versus just melting the thorium flouride into the fuel loop. I have seen some analysis that indicates enriched uranium fuel could be up to 90 times more expensive than liquid salt reactor fuel.
The US has 3000 pounds of U233 starter fuel stored at Oak Ridge. Thorium is easily obtained. There was a research project in the 1950s and 1960s that included a working reactor from 1965 to 1969. This project was killed because entrenched interests were making money from U235 cycle and the military expected to extract plutonium for bombs from the spent fuel. The Thorium to U233 cycle burns all the fuel so there is nothing left for bombs. Inexpensive fuel, no bombs, nobody wanted to give up the money and bombs. Now we all pay for that stupidity and greed.
There are so many other advantages to a liquid salt nuclear approach that it should be the highest priority new energy approach.
The implementation could be traditional huge reactors or smaller reactors. This is an independent dimension of the problem. The reason to go with small reactors arranged as an array is not because it is superior to a large reactor. The reason is to he able to have a stable, highly trained work force in a factory able to make a large number of units efficiently and to be able to ship the major pieces to the site in shipping containers so they pieces can be put together rapidly in months instead of years.
One last comment on fuel availability. It is estimated that there is at least 4 times more Thorium easily accessible than Uranium. But only 7 out of 1000 atoms of uranium are fuel. So the comparison is not 4:1 but 4000 atoms: 7 atoms. Almost 600 times as much fuel. Thorium is unused waste you get when you mine other materials. No new mines are needed. You just process some of the current waste.
There is a lot of good material to study at
energyfromthorium dot com
and
flibe dot com
If you want to learn more about all the other advantages of the technology.
Even if everything you say is true, we need fossil fuels to accomplish what you are talking about. And those are running short.
Extraction of a mineral is a whole lot easier if it is concentrated in various mine-able locations around the world. If it is simply scattered in tiny quantities, and has to be mined as a co-product of other materials, extraction is likely to be a problem. The whole process needs to be economic.
Here is what I could find on US and world thorium deposits. We have to remember to adjust for the amount of fuel per ton. So, the 65,000 tons of uranium per year corresponds to about 455 tons of actual U235 fuel. The tonnage numbers below need to be compared to 455 per year and not 65,000 per year.
From google:
The United States has an estimated 400,000–598,000 tons of thorium reserves, making it the third largest in the world. The largest concentration of thorium in the United States is in the Lemhi Pass district in the central Beaverhead Mountains, on the Montana-Idaho border.
Thorium reserves
United States 400,000–598,000 tons
India 963,000 tons
Australia 489,000 tons
Turkey 344,000 tons
Venezuela 302,000 tons
Brazil 302,000 tons
Norway 132,000 tons
Russia 111,000 tons
The Lemhi Pass district contains thorium-rich veins and is estimated to have 64,000 metric tons of thorium oxide reserves. The district’s 10 largest veins contain 95% of the identified thorium resources.
(note: looks like the thorium is concentrated in 10 veins so hopefully that is economic)
There is also an interesting government brochure from the geology service:
https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1336/pdf/C1336.pdf
(based on the map on page 15, it looks like Idaho is a Thorium superpower)
(For more context, I have seen other analysis that indicates 6000 tons of Thorium per year could support all the energy needs of the entire planet if there were actually reactors to use it. I would also hope that over time that the reserves would increase as no one really is looking that hard to find them now. Much like people look hard for fuels now)
Again, I agree with you that the U235 approach is fundamentally flawed and doomed but I think there is still time to get some alternatives in motion. Will they need priority access to hydrocarbon fuels if they run low….yes, I agree to that as well.
There are some pie-in-the-sky proposals for meltdown-proof reactors that can burn thorium, spent fuel, depleted uranium, etc. Instead of requiring an ongoing self-sustaining reaction (criticality), they rely on an external source of neutrons provided by an accelerator. Some are theoretically capable of almost completely burning up spent fuel and other heavy isotopes, negating the need for mining any fuel for the next 1000 years. Others would operate on thorium, although this would have to be mined and refined. Given the level of complexity and all of the new design work which would have to be proved out, the need for large amounts of exotic materials and the need to transport and process spent fuel and/or obtain thorium, the likelihood of any of these technologies coming onto the market anytime soon is pretty small, IMO. However, there are some research reactors, the construction of which which have been started. Given the dearth of new information and recent developments, it looks as though most of these have been mothballed.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/accelerator-driven-nuclear-energy
https://www.iaea.org/publications/10870/status-of-accelerator-driven-systems-research-and-technology-development
https://accelconf.web.cern.ch/linac2022/papers/tu2aa01.pdf
https://inspirehep.net/files/df2693db96e79639f4914277e54348fa
China has at least one thorium reactor that works, but it’s a demo: https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20210912-why-china-is-developing-a-game-changing-thorium-fuelled-nuclear-reactor
They plan to build a larger (non-demo) one according to other articles.
I think that this is a reference to the somewhat larger thorium reactor in China.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-06/china-building-thorium-nuclear-power-station-gobi/104304468
I studied those. The efficiencies (conversion of thermal energy to electrical energy to beam energy to neutron energy) are horrendous. Accelerator driven reactors is about as realistic as cubic miles. I think it could become marginally possible given new accelerator technology. Specifically you need a lot of beam energy to extract a neutron, but also the thermal-to-beam efficiency is of order 0.2% given current tech.
Thank you for the new post I guess our only hope now is natural hydrogen it has a couple of negatives but the earth is endowed with thousands of years supply for everyone at a low price
I am skeptical that hydrogen will work. It takes a lot of energy to separate it from oxygen in water molecules. Hydrogen is very difficult to store.
Thanks for the new post Gail.
About BHP’s Olympic Dam deposit is something I’ve been researching for well over a decade.
It’s the largest single mine of Uranium in the World and the largest single deposit, with just under 2M tonnes of Uranium in the ground, where most of it will stay.
Olympic Dam is mined for the value of the copper, it’s an underground mine with the ore body between 350m deep to 1,350 deep and currently mined at around 2% copper grade. Over the last 15 years the mine has lost money because of the constant high costs of refurbishment, all while they are high grading the ore mined.
The overall deposit average copper grade is 0.58%, yet they mine an average of 2%, with the Uranium being a by-product of the copper production. The uranium mined is also around 0.58kg/t but the overall deposit average is 0.19kg/t.
As they can’t make a profit with the high grade ore, then all the low grade will simply stay 1000 metres below ground.
The same type of shenanigans happens with all the so called world reserves of every metal and mineral by bodies like the USGS. they count all the copper and uranium at Olympic Dam as ‘reserves’ for their calculations of world reserves, which are simply going to stay inn the ground.
I suppose that if we can maintain the extraction of some of these extracted minerals, in theory, we can get the thorium out, also. With fossil fuel supplies running low, this is likely to become increasingly difficult to do.
EIA has posted a figure for world crude oil production for last July (81.591 mb/d) –there was an oil-price surge then ( http://oil-price.net/ ), but will oil prices since then motivate keeping up the world oil supply? Was last December (83.082 mb/d) post-covid peak oil? ( https://davecoop.net/seneca )
https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/petroleum-and-other-liquids/monthly-petroleum-and-other-liquids-production?pd=5&p=0000000000000000000000000000000000vg&u=0&f=M&v=mapbubble&a=-&i=none&vo=value&&t=C&g=00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001&l=249-ruvvvvvfvtvnvv1vrvvvvfvvvvvvfvvvou20evvvvvvvvvvnvvvs0008&s=94694400000&e=1719792000000
I wish these devious people had to report oil output in energy units, not volumetric units.
I am not sure how good the conversions are, but some amounts are converted to energy units.
This is an article that shows graphs of US production and consumption in British Thermal Units.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62407
This is chart shows that US production of fossil fuels, nuclear and hydro are all up in 2024 compared to 2023.
https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec1_3.pdf
There goes the data centers for both cryptocurrencies and AI
Oops.
Natty. We think Tech Bros will have no choice, and will pay double retail electricity rates to do it if they have to. Some/many will permit and build turbines on site behind the grid in states like TX.
We will see how well intermittent energy works for AI. Wind can be low for weeks or months.
Very interesting and non concensus view. What do you think the future holds for the price of Uranium over the next year or two ?
Price probably won’t rise much. The whole system behaves strangely. Lack of supply causes fighting more than it causes high prices.
I got to thinking that the Ukraine – Russia conflict may have something to do with uranium supply also. Ukraine is a large user of nuclear. Its uranium production is down recently. But this was a whole different area to consider.
Thank you Gail, for another fine post. You are faithful. I remember how surprised I was the first time I read about about nuclear warhead down blending.
It struck me as strange too.
Now I wonder if the self-organizing system helped the economy along in this way. We stored up uranium like Easter Eggs. Now, it is very valuable to keep the lights on. It likely makes owners of the nuclear warheads think twice about using them for war. They may be more valuable for providing heat and lights.
I had the same thought. Warheads may become to valuable to use as weapons! Upside to everything I guess, until we run out of options. Glad things are staying togeather as long as they have, but changes may be on the horizon. Great commentary Gail. Good information on blending uranium. I’d heard that before but did not realize how widespread it actually is.
I have seen A LOT of pro-nuclear posts/marketing over the past year+ and very much framed as THE solution to our energy and environmental predicaments (only framed as a very solvable problem, and great investment, not as a predicament). My sense is that if there’s money to be made, there will continue to be such a concerted push (especially by those seeking to profit from it) just like there is for many such technologies that promise the world…
I expect that Trump will continue to look into nuclear. I would hope that he would use a different approach than Biden.
How much would you bet that the fate of our “down-blended” gold in Fort Knox is the same as our “down-blended uranium from nuclear bombs.” How seriously will the United States be taken if the news gets out it has neither gold nor nuclear bombs.
What do you think of nuclear reactors based on Thorium? Besides the lack of research and much less experimental work about Thorium and Plutonium, what other problems do you see in reactors not entirely dependent on U235? I understand the risk of nuclear weapon and accidental release for these highly toxic materials.
Thorium, which converts to U-233, is more than sufficient to last thousands of years. Furthermore, breeder reactors overcome any constraints on relying on mined U-235. We have plenty of U-238. About 100X more than U-235. This article sheds no new light on the nuclear power industry and simply raises an endless parade of red herrings. Boring and should be ignored.
I know I have read something like that, also. But then I read the IAEA analysis I quoted in another comment, and I wondered if some part of the picture is not well understood.
Where is your blog so we can learn your amazing insights?
If you found it boring, it’s a pity you didn’t take your own advice and ignore it, Matt. But no, no, no, no, no! You couldn’t restrain yourself from making a comment that manages to come across as mean, puerile, know-it-all, and holier-than-thou all at the same time.
About that “endless parade of red herrings,” (which are, as most of us know, are defined as “facts, ideas, or subjects that take the reader’s attention away from the central point being considered”), name six of them.
And if you can’t do that and do it properly, we’ll all know that you were just trolling by leveling unfounded acquisitions at our fair hostess because of your own delusions and zealotry regarding the practicalities of making nuclear energy work long term as a source of electricity.
This issue is not limited to what is imaginable, physically possible, or potentially doable given the resources, technology and adroitness,, but also extends to what is economically, politically and socially feasible in the current world in which we live.
It takes time and money to breed U-233 from Thorium.
Some people would say we don’t have thorium in quantity, either.
Neither thorium nor breeder reactors work reliably.
I understand that China is working on a thorium-based reactor. It still will need uranium-235 to start the reaction, I believe. For example,
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-06/china-building-thorium-nuclear-power-station-gobi/104304468
I discovered when I was looking for articles on this subject that thorium is not necessarily easy to mine.
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/thoriums-long-term-potential-in-nuclear-energy-new-iaea-analysis
According to the IAEA,
Researchers have been working at making thorium a suitable fuel for a long time. They haven’t been terribly successful. I wouldn’t hold my breath.
>> Researchers have been working at making thorium a suitable fuel for a long time.
Not that long. Articles claim it was abandoned because they wanted plutonium, which it doesn’t produce, so work stopped.
They can use 233U, which can be produced directly from thorium.
https://energyfromthorium.com/ieer-rebuttal/
It’s really quite baffling that people still believe nuclear can be the future. Admittedly I hadn’t seen that chart of Uranium Oxide supplies before so I didn’t know the decline was that drastic but I knew it was down. I’d really love to see how people expect to build and maintain nuclear plants or refine ore without fossil fuel inputs.
Magic!
Thank you for the new post.