Posted on 05/30/2016 9:06:03 AM PDT by Lorianne
[ Excerpts from the Hall, Lambert, and Balogh EROI paper. You may want to read the original paper here since I’ve left out charts, figures, and text. In my opinion, EROI is important because it is due diligence – society ought to find out if there is any energy resource that can replace oil for transportation, since without transportation you can not build electricity-producing contraptions and you’re wasting rare earth minerals, steel, fossil fuels, and other finite materials making them. It is unlikely transportation can be electrified for reasons explained in my book When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the future of transportation.
If decreasing numbers of trucks, rail, and ships will be running if oil can’t be replaced or heavy-duty vehicles electrified, our remaining energy should be used to clean up nuclear waste, superfund sites, the half million leaking mines, and other messes since future generations won’t have the energy to do so, lower our population ASAP to get within the carrying capacity of a non-fossil-fueled civilization (Plan B is bullets and disease), change our culture from one of consumption to one of sharing, teach different skills in schools to prepare the youngest generation, and prepare for going back to the age of wood (i.e. more insulation, gravity based water and sewage infrastructure that doesn’t require electric pumps where possible, and so on).
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513003856
All forms of economic production and exchange involve the use of energy directly and in the transformation of materials. Until recently, cheap and seemingly limitless fossil energy has allowed most of society to ignore the importance of contributions to the economic process from the biophysical world as well as the potential limits to growth.
This society must have an energy surplus for there to be division of labor, creation of specialists and the growth of cities, and substantially greater surplus for there to be wide-spread wealth, art, culture and other social amenities. Economic fluctuations tend to result, directly or indirectly, from variations in a society’s access to cheap and abundant energy
Today, fossil fuel re and economic expansion are eventually constrained by these higher prices (Jones et al., 2004). Economic growth and stability is dependent on not only the total quantity of energy accessible to society but also the cost of this energy to different sectors of that society.sources are among the most important global commodities and are essential for the production and distribution of the rest.
[snip]
Strip the thorium out of coal, use it in liquid fluoride thorium reactors, then use the electric energy produced to squeeze the coal for diesel fuel, like the WWII German Fischer-Tropsch process did.
We need to mine all the coal we can put to use and frack like mad.
This is the same mindset as those that told us in the 1970’s that we would soon run out of oil as our known reserves were approaching depletion and since the earth is a globe of a known size, there was a definite limit to what our globe, as with any globe, could contain.
We now have proof of how smart those “experts” were. We don't need more of their predictions and silly solutions.
But those same 1970 “experts” are now Obola’s Science Advisors running the EPA, the DOE, the DOT, the NASA, (the NSA too), and the DOD ....
How many government “scientists” can you buy for 92 billion dollars of global warming funds?
There may be thorium in addition to uranium in coal fly ash; but, the most available source of thorium is in Monazite sands, which are available worldwide.
The U233 which can be made from Thorium in a breeder process, is the actual fuel of reactor operation. A figure of 95-98 percent actual fuel burn-up in a molten salt breeder reactor using thorium as a precursor, is the goal for long term operation.
Short term, molten salt burners fueled from radioactive fuel assemblies and waste stored in cooling ponds could provide power for many-many decades. About 95% of the starting energy content of a fresh fuel assembly remains in the ceramic fuel pellets after a single pass through a reactor fuel operational interval. There is a vast amount of such material accumulated since the 1940’s until the present, to be processed as an energy resource.
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