This crisis is coming soon, he predicts: the crisis will bite, not when he last drop of oil is extracted, but when oil extraction can’t meet demand – perhaps as soon as 2015 or 2025.
This tells me that the original author (Goldstein) or the guy quoting him is either not very smart of lazy in his choice of words. Assuming there's no artificial force (e.g. government rationing) that overrules the market, there will
always be enough oil to meet demand--at the price set by the market. The exact same situation we have right now and since the first drop was discovered.
Moreover, even if we magically switched all our energy- guzzling to nuclear power right away, Goodstein says, the oil crisis would simply be replaced by a nuclear crisis in just twenty years or so, as uranium reserves also became depleted.
Unlikely. (
Link)
The amount of Uranium that is available is mostly a measure of the price that we're willing to pay for it. At present the cost of Natural Uranium ($165 per kg) is a small component in the price of electricity generated by Nuclear Power. At a price of $US110 per kg the known reserves amount to about 85 years supply at the current level of consumption with an expected further 500 years supply in additional or speculative reserves. The price of Uranium would have to increase by over a factor of 3 before it would have an impact of the cost of electricity generated from Nuclear Power. Such a price rise would stimulate a substantial increase in exploration activities with a consequent increase in the size of the resource (as has been the case with every other mineral of value). The price of Uranium rose to a peak of over 300/kg in 2007 but has since declined to $165 by early 2008.. The world reserves of Uranium have increased by around 50% since the end of 2003.
So, there's quite a bit of uranium out there, even if we started using a LOT more of it. And, all the above assumes we don't develop and use fast breeder technology--which is already within our technical capability (they've been used for years in Japan), will be economically viable if uranium prices go up, and which uses uranium fuel up to
60 times more efficiently than we do at present. There are safety/proliferation concerns, but compared to the virtual certainty Mr Gore has presented us with--boiling our oceans and chocking to death on CO2, these minor concerns seem trivial.
And then there's thorium. Thorium can be used in reactors in a way similar to uranium, but not quite. It is a fuel, but cannot sustain a chain reaction on its own, you need to add uranium, plutonium, or another neutron source in the mix, but then it provides plenty of energy. There's about as much thorium in the earth's crust as uranium, so were' talking about maybe hundreds of years of additional energy ath the prsent rate of consumption (less if we start getting ALL our electricity from reactors, but even 100 years would be plenty--we'll have fusion or something else by then).
About thorium reactors: (
Link)
What if we could build a nuclear reactor that offered no possibility of a meltdown, generated its power inexpensively, created no weapons-grade by-products, and burnt up existing high-level waste as well as old nuclear weapon stockpiles? And what if the waste produced by such a reactor was radioactive for a mere few hundred years rather than tens of thousands? It may sound too good to be true, but such a reactor is indeed possible, and a number of teams around the world are now working to make it a reality. What makes this incredible reactor so different is its fuel source: thorium.
All these wonderful, clean developments will come our way once oil and coal get more expensive. So, everyone should do their part to hasten that day--drive an SUV, crank up the air conditioning, buy a house like Al Gore's, and fly to the environmental summit angst-fest in your private jet.
