I agree with this. The big concern in my mind is that the physical wherewithal be available to do whatever we might choose to do in 2050 or 2100. Thorium reactors can't hurt; the idea is at least worth exploring enough to build a few testbeds. And just looking at the math, it means we get three times more mileage out of our uranium over the long haul or whatever- again, it can't hurt.Guardsman Bass wrote:Honestly, at that time frame in an environment of rapid technological and social change, speculating what capitalist society will be like in 50-100 years is incredibly difficult. We have no idea as to what their demand for resources will be, due to changes in efficiency and services/goods demanded. I've pointed out in other threads that you could have an extreme services-oriented economy where most of it is relatively low impact on everything but absolute amount of energy used, with growth in digital services making up a good chunk of your economic growth.
In the worst case, it's the nuclear-power equivalent of what tar sands are to the oil industry: they're the uneconomical mode that will still (hopefully) be there when it's become uneconomical to extract energy by current means. Expensive methods of generating power are better than no methods of generating power.
Thorium is definitely cheaper than uranium-from-seawater. As to the rest, maybe there's irrational fear of uranium reactors that makes thorium reactors more likely to be built. What of it? We live in the world that is, not the world we fantasize about, and in the world that is, yes one of the big obstacles to reliable exploitation of nuclear power is fear of uranium.Would thorium reactors be entertained as a serious alternative source of nuclear power if it weren't for the stigma surrounding uranium-fueled plants? It's not as though uranium is difficult for a non-stigmatized state to acquire - if land sources fail, you can get it from seawater at a very high price per pound, which isn't too massive a problem because the cost of fuel is only a very small percentage of the cost of the plant.
Personally, I think everything I said and everything you said are compatible. Capitalism, along with other major social forces, has worked well for the last 200 years. The question of whether it will continue to work indefinitely is still relevant. So I do appreciate the fact that at least someone is still out there thinking about alternative models, models which might turn out to be better suited to the world of 2100 than the one we have now is.I tend to see capitalism as symbiotic with a couple other ideological/social/political developments, all of which have made people much better off and happier with the exception of a few outlier societies (overall, people in richer countries are happier than people in poorer countries). Capitalism played a critical role in driving the adoption and development of new technologies that raised productivity and human welfare, in creating a "churn" that broke down the powers and privileges of older elite segments of societies (although the pace was uneven), and in putting some actual daylight between concentrations of wealth/economic power and concentrations of political power (although it may not seem like it at times). But it does its best in a democratic society with a high degree of social trust, and a willingness to do some redistribution to mitigate the pains of economic dislocation and essentially "buy off" the "losers" of economic and social change.Simon_Jester wrote:Since the greatest thing that we've been able to do to make people better off and happy in the past two centuries has been economic development, we often assume that capitalism is the source of all this happiness and good, because capitalism is good at causing development. But perhaps that is not true. Perhaps capitalism is simply best at optimizing some other thing, which under certain conditions is correlated with human happiness and well-being, but under other conditions is not.
One of the things that bothers me most in futurism is when people say "the world will be changed to accomodate the changing conditions, so it won't be a problem!" The reason I disagree with this is that when we look at every great social change in real life, we see places where some visionary came up with the answer years ahead of time, and that answer had to be slowly implemented and prototyped before it could become truly successful.
It sometimes worries me that if we become too conservative in how we arrange our technology*, or how we arrange our society**, we will find that when we need innovations, they won't be available, because the groundwork has not been laid, the interesting new social theories do not exist, the pure research that told us how to build what we need will not have gotten done.
As the pace of change accelerates, this seems more likely- that we will run into (or already have run into) problems that result purely from the fact that the problem appeared 'out of nowhere' before we'd had time to think up the trick that could be used as a solution.
So I never discourage people from thinking about alternate ways to design a civilization.
*No need to start thinking about energy independence NOW, there's fracking to take care of our needs!
**Of COURSE an economic model based on permanent growth will work forever! What could go wrong?
And this is what I'm talking about.energiewende wrote:In simple terms, because fuel costs are a large proportion of the total lifecycle cost of using a liquid fuel engine to generate power. In contrast, fuel costs are a very small proportion of the total lifecycle cost of using a nuclear reactor to generate power. The R&D costs of a new nuclear power station design are also much higher than those of a new type (or more usually, modification of existing type) of liquid fuel engine. Some of those costs are inherent, some are artificial (political/regulatory).
So with liquid fuel engines you can put up a fairly small amount of money, to potentially save a lot of money with a cheaper fuel. With nuclear reactors, you must put up a lot of money for R&D to potentially save a very small amount of money with cheaper fuel.
If humanity moved to a nuclear economy in a big way the price of uranium would rise, and a multitude of solutions would become interesting both to the market and more competent governments, including novel means of uranium recovery (phosphates, seawater), thorium, and fast breeders.
There is a very long lead time in getting new types of nuclear reactors to work. There are concepts first put together in the 1960s and 1970s that still aren't in widespread use, because we as a society do not build or decommission nuclear power plants lightly. When the facility takes ten years to build, and shutting down an existing one turns it into a massive exercise in dismantling and disposing of thousands of tons of radioactive garbage, you don't just switch casually from doing things one way to another way. The barriers to entry are high; so are the barriers to leaving.
Because of this, if you want a thorium reactor to be available to you as an option in 2040, in response to unexpected changes in the cost of uranium, you need to start working on it now, even if right now there is no demand for it.
By the same token, if you have a large number of working reactors based on old principles, you will tend to keep them for a long time, which is where countries like France come in. If the price of uranium shifts drastically in 2035, though, the French may be screwed if they're not already prepared in advance to make a shift to thorium or some other method of generating electricity. At best, they're left importing their thorium reactors from elsewhere, which means writing off their existing, rather vibrant, nuclear industry.
