From: Glenn Morton (glenn.morton@btinternet.com)
Date: Sun Nov 24 2002 - 07:28:10 EST
Blake wrote:
>Not to mention all those Road Warrior movies...
>
>You sound a bit overly Malthusian when the world is
>sitting on 500+ years of fission power at current
>energy consumption growth rates.
>
>BTW, IIRC China and India have larger standing armies.
>
I am a bit Mathusian in this regard. There are several things wrong with
your number of 500+ years of uranium. You have mixed up resources with
reserves. Resources are what is out there, reserves are what is
economically capable of being extracted. One clearly can't expend more
energy extracting uraniium from the resource than he gets back from it when
it is fissioned. We have around a 500+ year resource, but most of that
isn't economically viable. We have about a 40-50 year reserve.
"The present energy-generating capacity of nuclear power is expected to
increase slightly between 1995 and 2010 as existing and planned construction
comes to completion (17). At current consumption rates, there is about a
41-year supply of uranium reserves to fuel these reactors (18). Proved
reserves of uranium have declined in recent years, primarily because of mine
closures after an excess supply caused uranium prices to collapse (19)."
http://www.wri.org/wri/wr-96-97/em_txt3.html
I once did a model to see how many Nukes we would need to build over the
next few years to replace oil. I used a 700 Megawatt
6.29 bbl = 10.9 megawatt-hour
http://ecen.com/eee13/equive.htm
1 bbl = 1.73 megawatt-hour
700 megawatt = 404.6242775 bbl/hour
http://www.cameco.com/investor_relations/annual/2001/glossary/index.php
Megawatt (MW): megawatt-hour (MWh) A
megawatt equals 1000 kW. One
megawatt- hour represents one hour of electricity consumption at a constant
rate of 1MW.
6132000 megawatt-hour = 3544508. bbl/yr
30,000,000,000 bbl/yr
8463. 700 MW plants
1,250,000,000 dollars per plant
$1.05797E+13 investment
Now, this 10 trillion dollar investment for the replacement of oil is
equivalent to the Gross domestic product of the United States. Compare this
with the GDP's of various countries (millions dollars):
Country GNP Per Oil Consumption Number of
Cost % of GNP
(millions) Capita per yr 700MW plants (millions)
USA $10,533 $38 7165875000 2021
2526 23.98%
Japan $4,852 $38 1980673220 558
697 14.37%
Germany $2,242 $27 1023597660 288
360 16.06%
Britain $1,544 $26 602058220 169
211 13.67%
France $1,543 $26 741537120 209
261 16.92%
China $1,329 $1 1839934800 519
648 48.76%
Italy $1,260 $22 710184940 200
250 19.84%
Canada $760 $24 708367710 199
248 32.63%
Brazil $715 $4 680691880 192
240 33.57%
Spain $651 $16 550343680 155
193 29.65%
Mexico $578 $6 661783020 186
232 40.14%
South Korea $515 $11 815779460 230
287 55.73%
India $510 $0.5 756151800 213
266 52.16%
Australia $444 $24 308530920 87
108 24.32%
Netherlands $429 $27 345852620 97
121 28.21%
Taiwan $363 $16 283204200 79
98 27.00%
Argentina $300 $8 680691880 192
240 80.00%
Switzerland $286 $39 102259400 28
35 12.24%
Sweden $275 $31 118888800 33
41 14.91%
Belgium $264 $26 122624050 34
42 15.91%
Russia $252 $2 896459000 252
315 125.00%
Austria $226 $27 93969700 26
32 14.16%
Turkey $212 $3 241725580 68
85 40.09%
Poland $188 $5 148436100 41
51 27.13%
Indonesia $174 $0.8 399721700 112
140 80.46%
Thailand $132 $2 260557400 73
91 68.94%
The GDP data from http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/gnp.html
Clearly the world is going to have trouble investing this much money in
nuclear plants. Look at the last column, the percent of GDP. If countries
try to build that many plants, you can basically say that the government
must tax that percentage of the income in order to finance the effort. That
means that in the US, everyone's income would decrease 25%. In china it
would be 48%, Indonesia 80%. Such an effort wouldn't happen because of the
riots in the streets.
There are also terrorist dangers. Allowing everyone to go nuclear means
that some really nasty regimes would have the ability to build bombs. Not a
great idea in my opinion.
And if we increased the demand on uranium by several thousand times, that 41
year reserve life would last just a few months, the price of U3O8 would go
up dramatically, more supply would be brought to the market, but not 500
years worth.
Now, while oil will probably peak this decade, natural gas probably will
peak about 2020-2040 which means that in a couple of decades we must replace
gas also. To do it with nuclear plants will require about another 4000
nuclear plants.
glenn
see http://www.glenn.morton.btinternet.co.uk/dmd.htm
for lots of creation/evolution information
anthropology/geology/paleontology/theology\
personal stories of struggle
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