I don’t know the nuances of fission nuclear but I thought that breeder reactors had a net positive energy balance… Fusion? Great, if it happens. But it’s always soon, never here.

But still, personally, I am given the most hope by outfits like http://www.solarcity.com/ Solar City… they seem to solve the whole problem (if their hype is to be believed) of grid connected photovoltaics.

I agree with Kelly that burning valuable LEGO feedstock in our cars is foolish. :)

Ben’s right: biofuels are not a solution. We simply have no choice but to reduce consumption if we want to push back peak oil. Uranium isn’t much better: peak uranium is probably somewhere around 2040. Peak oil may have already happened, and peak coal is probably somewhere between 2150 and 2200. We need to stop using oil now, reserving what production we can get as an industrial feedstock in places where it cannot be replaced. That means going to electric everything because electric can be centrally generated using coal and distributed relatively efficiently. Nuclear power is of no real use as the fuel supply is just too limited, and should not be a major focus of attention. Even reprocessing spent fuel doesn’t gain that much (because the energy required to reprocess the fuel is close to or exceeds the energy that can be extracted from the reprocessed fuel). The only way to get past 2100 is either radical deindustrialization or the development of viable fusion power. It’s unlikely, in my opinion, that we can develop enough power solely from renewable sources to meet our current demands without fusion power.

Lies Lies Lies. Most frustrating of all: I’m reasonably confident that I’ve corrected you on this point in private conversation in the past.

The truth that underlies this often repeated untruth is that given the astonishingly wasteful way that the United States currently uses nuclear fuel there really isn’t much of it available.

As the nuclear fuel is used in a typical power generation reactor there is a gradual build up of atomic species which interfere with maintaining critical mass. Once enough of these waste products have accumulated the fuel rod is no longer useful. These ‘spent’ fuel rods still contain an enormous amount of fissable material which can be recovered through a process called nuclear reprocessing. Roughly 90% of a spent fuel rods mass is still usable, and modern recovery procedures recover about 95% of that.

Unfortunately, the US has a currently prohibition on reprocessing, due to concerns about nuclear proliferation. Some other countries do not.

Don’t just take my word for it, this is a subject which has been extensively studied by others. That previously linked paper estimates that with proper recycling the available nuclear fuel is roughly 155,520 exajoules. Proven world wide oil reserves are only 6,400 exajoules (narrowly beating out nuclear power without reprocessing).

Besides, we need oil for things other than power. A world with expensive plastics would be a miserable one indeed (think health care costs). Reprocessing is necessary in any case… without it the waste products from power reactors are highly radioactive for many tens of thousands of years. Processed wastes are far more safe and far smaller in volume. The way the United States handles nuclear wastes has no future, just like oil… but used intelligently atomic power still has an important role to play in our world.

And, quite honestly, the wholesale switch from wood to coal only happened about 200 years ago. If we don’t have anything better than fission in another 200 years, we’ve done something wrong.

Just finished up the DW premiere myself. It reminded me a bit too much of the pilot episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures, but there’s certainly potential there. Catherine Tate is best known as a comedian, and she’s also a bit older than the usual companion, which is nice. More to the point, I am curious to see Rose’s return, even if she wasn’t my favorite companion ever.

And this is off-topic, but I just saw the season premiere of Doctor Who. It was … eh. I definitely like Martha Jones better than this one. And the baddie of the week wasn’t particularly interesting.

(Especially since charging batteries at night is hard to do with PV, and the maximum theoretical efficiency isn’t that great anyway). My money’s on nuclear, although I also have a friend at MIT who is working on developing catalysts that could enable the electrolysis of water at much higher efficiencies than we see today.

Photovoltaics are great, but you’ll notice that a lot of really big solar installations, like the one going up outside of Phoenix right now, are concentrator/boiler designs that Archimedes could have built. The efficiency still isn’t there.

Oh, and another big push towards electric power will come, I think, from mass transit. There’s a lot of densely populated, urban areas in the US that have nearly zero rail infrastructure and have automobile-traffic nightmares as a result. It’s a lot easier to build electric trains and, I would argue from experience in Japan, often more convenient for actual residents.

Corn/ethanol biofuels are a subset of the entire class of biofuels. There are countless ways to use lifeforms to generate fuel, not all of which are made from subsidized corn.

One data point was given in one of the SALT talks, in which the speaker discussed bacterial lifeforms that could manufacture fuel (octane, iirc) from CO2 feedstocks were under development. These are, by definition, biofuels.

One of the expressed concerns was that this ethanol disaster is going to sour people on the concept of biofuels for when worthwhile biotech comes along.