> There is something around fifty million tons of pure gold dissolved in the > world’s oceans
>>That's nice but Uranium is far far more common than Gold and Thorium is much >>more common than Uranium, in fact it's almost twice as common as Tin. And Thorium is easier to extract from its ore than Uranium. And at best a (non-breeder) Uranium reactor only uses .7% of its fuel (and usually less than that) because it can only get energy from the rare U235 isotope; but natural Thorium has only one isotope and a Thorium reactor can use 100% of it. My point remains valid and salient. Whenever anyone speaks of some resource reserve figure in practice what they are (or should be) referring to is the recoverable reserve figures. The quantity of some resource in the earth's crust may be interesting, but it is irrelevant in a discussion of reserves. Only the much smaller amount of Thorium or Uranium that is actually recoverable (and that means not only technically recoverable, but also energetically (the EROI has to be significantly greater than one) as well as economically recoverable. No one is ever going to "recover" the dispersed Thorium in your garden's dirt; so to count is as a Thorium reserve is incorrect -- the same being true of any physical resource. > Most of the Thorium in the earth’s crust is not recoverable…. And yet you > speak of it as if it were. Why John? Isn’t that dishonest. >> High quality ore that can approach 50% Thorium and if at random you picked >> one cubic meter of rock anywhere in the Earth's crust you would find about >> 12 grams of Thorium in it. if placed in a liquid Thorium reactor 12 grams >> would produce the energy equivalent of 37 tons of coal, enough to power one >> person's western middle class lifestyle for about a decade. I know as well as you do that Thorium id relatively plentiful supply -- it exists in other mine tailing -- REE mines for example. I have a question for you. If LFTR is so great then why has it not been pursued -- anywhere by anyone. I know about the experimental LFTR reactor in Oak Ridge that was shut down four decades ago or so. Why has LFTR development essentially stopped for forty years? >>One ton of Thorium contains as much energy as 3 million tons of coal so you'd >>need 2 thousand tons of Thorium to equal coal. The U.S.Geological Survey's >>latest estimate says that one company, Thorium Energy Inc, has 915,000 tons >>of thorium reserves in Idaho and Montana. That alone could replace coal for >>about 450 years, and that's just from the claims that one company has in 2 >>states. And Norway has as much Thorium as the entire USA, and Australia >>about twice as much, and India has about 3 times as much. And we've already >>discovered Thorium deposits on the Moon and Mars. >>It would only take 2000 tons of Thorium to equal the energy in 6 billion tons >>of coal that the world uses each year. There is 120 TRILLION tons of Thorium >>in the earth's crust and if the world needs 10 times as much energy as we get >>from just coal then we will run out of Thorium in the crust of this planet in >>6 billion years. Again only a very small fraction of the Thorium dispersed throughout the earth's crust is recoverable and can be counted as a reserve. Which was my point in bringing up the large quantities of gold dissolved in the world's oceans. Just because something is there does not mean it is recoverable. > Global liquid petroleum has peaked and is in decline That is certainly true in any universe uncontaminated by facts. LOL -- whose facts -- the highly selective ones (that may even have been borrowed from the fiction of some dubious source) used by John Clark's or the facts compiled by the various energy reporting agencies around the world that are based on reported production figures. Peak liquid petroleum has already happened, and conventional oil (as it is called in the industry) is already in decline around the world. This fact has been masked by the rapid rise in unconventional oil -- e.g.. shale oil & gas + tar sands, which you are lumping in together with conventional oil. As I have pointed out -- and backed what I said up with facts and references (something you do not do) -- there is a lot of evidence that the oil majors are very sharply pulling back from the non-conventional oil plays, in which they have invested huge sums of capital for what is proving to be very little return. Unconventional oil is not a replacement for conventional oil and within a few more years will begin to decline itself and then the rates of overall global supplies for liquids and gas will drop off at a very high rate of depletion. Oil fields can be kept producing near peak, using tertiary recovery techniques such as steam injection for example, but once these have squeezed out the last bit of oil that is there to squeeze the rate of depletion is shockingly high. As evidence -- look at just how far the production rate has dropped off for the Cantarell field off the Yucatan -- it is the third biggest oil field ever discovered. Production from that super giant field has plunged by 80% from it's peak in 2004. Similar dynamics are at play in the world's big oil fields. Attached a graph showing Cantarell's decline. Chris de Morsella John K Clark > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
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