More power to us

Petrol prices being unreasonably high again, it seems a good time to get into a ramble about how we will continue to support an advanced technological society. If it was easy everyone would be doing it, but it seems that salvaging a decent standard of living for our kids and grand kids will take some work and imagination.

For the moment, oil rules the energy world. It is abundant (Peak Oil pundits notwithstanding), and the most easily transported source of dense energy, but the sky is not blue for consumers and the economy. Yes we have lots of it, but what we're running out of is cheap, easy to get oil. If the Abiogenic Oil hypothesis is correct it may be renewable, but not on any timescale that will help us so that's largely irrelevant even it happens.

The Alberta Oil Sands were "mothballed" for years because the price of oil was too low for them to be commercially viable. The fact that they're being worked in a big way today is proof that the days of cheap oil are over. That said the current high prices (c.$1.25/L) at the pumps are mostly speculation, and such high prices at the sharp end are not justified on the supply side.

The cost of transport going up over 20% in the last year has placed great inflationary pressure on individuals and businesses which in turn sets off a vicious circle of higher prices for everything and less discretionary spending. It also increases costs for government operations (fire, police, military, etc.) and lessens the amount of sales tax they (fed and provincial/state) pull in. At the municipal level it means higher property taxes, further eroding spending power.

I hope those examples suffice to make my point, which is: Cheap Energy is the Key to Prosperity. Prosperity is fundamental to the kinder gentler welfare states we try to pull off, so wherever you fall on the political spectrum/Venn diagram you should be in favour of prosperity. The news to a lot of people seems to be that the money for policies has to come from somewhere (that would be you on the Left), and squeezing the taxpayers is a process of rapidly diminishing returns. You do indeed run out of other peoples' money...

The good news is that as long as we can keep the clueless Luddite environmentalists at bay we have clean sustainable options. I will go on record here as saying that wind turbines are NOT included in this, as they are worse than useless for large-scale power generation, kill birds and bats in huge swathes, blight the landscape and very possibly make people ill with the vibrations they cause. Not in MY backyard; I'd rather have a nice quiet thorium power plant.

Fear ruins so much of what we might accomplish. The radiation bogeyman easily has people shitting their pants even when there is no massive disaster to give them something to be concerned about. This is obviously an allusion to the Daiichi reactor incidents. The earthquake which precipitated the tsunami which overwhelmed the redundant safety features on those 40+ year-old designs was massive, and there are limits to engineering.

Lessons had been learned since those plants were designed and even more can be done; after all that natural disaster killed over 18,000 people and destroyed billions of any unit of currency in property. The radiation from the leaks hasn't killed anyone to date and even if (IF!) a few die of cancer a few years early that's still a formidable safety record even in failure considering the forces and substances involved.

More (smaller, better designed) fission plants, check. The Grail of nuclear energy is fusion power, but that is perennially "30 years away" so I'll disregard it. I've mentioned it before, but our best option to replace everything we don't like (read: coal) is some form of Thorium reactor. We have lots of it, the technology needs tweaking but is within the state of the art and it's as safe as anything involving toxic metals at high temperatures can be. That sounds flippant, but they can't explode or melt down, so any accident would be an industrial one and do a lot less damage than say a refinery explosion.

Sold; when do we get them? What else? Space-based solar would be great but I don't see it happening even in my lifetime. Ground solar is not yet efficient enough to offset it's cost and the fact that the sun isn't always shining on you, but improvement continues. If battery tech can advance with them we'll have worthwhile home systems, at least for those who can afford it.

This comes back to the "cheap" part of the energy question. Every dollar that you need to spend on energy in any form is money you don't have to keep businesses going, keeping people employed, keeping taxes going to fix your roads, etc., etc. Spending $50K to wean yourself off the fickle (where I live anyway) grid with solar power will take a long time to pay off. Think of the economics of the current generation of hybrid and electric cars; less at the pump, sure, but how much gas could you buy with the extra you spent for the low-rate production semi-experimental vehicle you're driving?

Again with the "no free lunches". I don't see a lot of political leadership which either thinks things all the way through or encourages the public to do so, I guess that's why I keep doing this. Start working on Thorium power now, not in 20 years when we'll have needed it for 10. Go ahead political leaders, surprise me and actually do something with legitimate foresight.