Good post!

I recently read a comment on an Internet forum where a driver of a large diesel pickup said he would *not* pay $6.00 per gallon for diesel! I thought to myself: “Yes you will… and you’ll also pay $7.00, $8.00, $9.00… and someday even $20.00 or more per gallon… unless you want to walk, ride a bike, or ride a horse.”

I think it’ll going to take some punitively high fuel prices to force us into “de-evolving” from our current carbon-based-fuel dependent society. $5.00 and $6.00 fuel prices aren’t going to do it. They’re helping to wake everyone up, but not nearly painful enough.

But I’ll bet $20.00 per gallon fuel (at today’s money value) would spur on a lot of quick innovation and change!

The following excerpt is from a weekly e-newsletter I receive from an energy supplier:

Looking ahead: What if the future of nuclear energy had a fuel that produced 70% less waste and nothing that you could use to make a bomb? That’s what Moscow’s Thorium Power is striving to produce. Thorium Power, operating since the mid-90s, when it was partially funded by the US Department of Energy as a way of keeping former Soviet nuclear scientists occupied, is testing a new fuel based on the chemical element thorium. Thorium is between 3 and 4 times more abundant in nature than uranium. The difference comes in the family of radioactive elements and isotopes that are created from its use in a reactor, with the key being the absence of weapons grade plutonium. Instead, thorium breaks down into several unstable uranium isotopes. In a test reactor, thorium has achieved a yield of 100MW days per kg of fuel, which compares with an average of about 60MW days in most uranium-run reactors meaning it can run a reactor up to 9 years as opposed to 3 for uranium fuel. As well as being more efficient, it produces 70% less waste.

Best regards,

JAL