Were it not for fear and ignorance, we could completely eliminate the need for all energy mining for several centuries. That would mean no gas fields, no oil fields, no coal mines, fewer lanthanide and cadmium mines.
I went into this topic in detail - with lots of references as opposed to hand waving and selective attention - elsewhere:
Current World Energy Demand, Ethical World Energy Demand, Depleted Uranium and the Centuries to Come
I showed, that at about the twice the continuous average power consumption now utilized by humanity as a whole - not of course the scale of Americans, who are consuming monsters compared to everyone else - that a person living 100 years would consume about 100 grams of plutonium (made from uranium-238) in a lifetime.
I showed that the uranium already mined, along with the thorium waste from refining lanthanides to make useless wind turbines and electric cars, could easily last for centuries when converted into plutonium and uranium-233.
Uranium, which is present to the tune of 4.5 billion tons in the ocean alone, has an extremely high energy/to mass ratio. It is this extremely high ratio, absent in all chemical fuels, that makes it relatively trivial to manage. This mass density is so attractive that it possible to refine uranium from extremely dilute sources, like seawater and the run-off from weathered granite. In fact an entire recent issue, April 20, of the important scientific journal Industrial and Engineering Chemical Research was devoted entirely to this topic:
Industrial and Chemical Engineering Research, Vol 50, Iss. 15, Special Issue, Uranium in Seawater.
It is of some note, that whenever I point out the clear and unambiguous fact that the so called "renewable energy" scheme - which was after all abandoned by humanity at the beginning of the 19th century because the vast majority of human beings lived very short miserable impoverished lives - is a grotesque failure, someone immediately begins spitting horseshit about nuclear energy and its risks.
It has risks, of course, nothing like the risk of dangerous fossil fuels, nothing like the risk of contaminating millions of hectares of Southern China with cadmium, but it has risks.
So what?
People who point out this risks while selectively ignoring all other risks uniformly do not spin any concern about dangerous fossil fuels. Right now, in the primary scientific literature, in one of the references I provide in many of my posts, one can clearly find out that 7 million people die each year from air pollution, about half from dangerous fossil fuel waste, and half from burning "renewable" biomass.
And yet we still have people spewing trivializing nonsense that nuclear energy is "unsafe." Unsafe compared to what exactly? Can all of the people who whine endlessly about nuclear energy show as many deaths from nuclear power plant events as have occurred in the last week from air pollution?
Nuclear energy need not be without risk to be vastly superior to everything else. It need not be perfect to be a vast improvement over everything else. It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is.
The fear and ignorance associated with nuclear energy is responsible for a loss of life comparable to World War II every decade. There is no technical reason that nuclear energy could not replace all dangerous fossil fuels.
This selective attention is a crime against all future generations as far as I'm concerned, but like I said, I'm rather unique in giving a shit about the future.
Have a wonderful day tomorrow.
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