The Bigger Picture
|
If you have watched the youtube video "There is no Tomorrow".
I'd like to expand on some of the points of the video: Rare Earth metals: They are actually available other places on the planet and not all are actually rare. China controls the market economically. If you want them from else where, you probably can. You might have to build a mine and processing plant to do it though. See https://www.lynascorp.com/Pages/home.aspx |
|
Fast Breeder and Thorium nuclear reactors:
Generation 4 reactor general description. Read more..
Currently there are 4 operating, 2 under construction and another 18 or so that were operating. Read more...
(Although new ones are being built, don't hold your breath, it's going to take along time for them to be economically viable. Renewable energy will be well entrenched before this happens).
The debt problem: Depending who you read you'll get a different answer but one source puts world debt at $53.3 trillion dollars. Australian debt clock...
USA debt clock....
The Global debt clock.... What they don't show is the money in the bank or the ratio to GDP or income. Debt to GDP ratio for 2013:
Australia 20.5%
USA 101.5%
Greece 175%
Japan 227%
China 22.4%
Source. (by the way GDP includes all the bad things like storm damage and locks on doors).
Electric cars: They point out that it takes fossil fuel to build an electric car. My response is that if we built the renewable energy power stations first, that problem starts to disappear.
- We don't have them because they are harder to build, more expensive and there are still some technical details to solve, some involving safety.
- Current Nuclear power reactors (Generation 3) use about 1% of the available energy.
- Their (Generation 2 & 3) waste lasts for in the order of 250,000 years.
- Fast Breeder, Thorium and other variations (Generation 4 &5) can use about 99% of the available energy.
- There waste lasts mainly in the order of centuries, about 600 years for a lot of it.
- They are also capable of using up most of the current waste from Gen 3 power stations.
Generation 4 reactor general description. Read more..
Currently there are 4 operating, 2 under construction and another 18 or so that were operating. Read more...
(Although new ones are being built, don't hold your breath, it's going to take along time for them to be economically viable. Renewable energy will be well entrenched before this happens).
The debt problem: Depending who you read you'll get a different answer but one source puts world debt at $53.3 trillion dollars. Australian debt clock...
USA debt clock....
The Global debt clock.... What they don't show is the money in the bank or the ratio to GDP or income. Debt to GDP ratio for 2013:
Australia 20.5%
USA 101.5%
Greece 175%
Japan 227%
China 22.4%
Source. (by the way GDP includes all the bad things like storm damage and locks on doors).
Electric cars: They point out that it takes fossil fuel to build an electric car. My response is that if we built the renewable energy power stations first, that problem starts to disappear.
- Electric cars cost half as much to run as petrol cars. (fuel and servicing).
- The batteries are very reliable. There are Prius taxis in Australia that have traveled over 400,0000 km on the original set of batteries. In Canada there is one (some) that have done 500,000 km.
- Toyota have a 180,000 km warranty for their batteries.
