08/11/10 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – Nuclear will give you, by far, the most energy for your money right now.
The best way to view this issue is in terms of what physicists call ‘energy density.’ That is, let’s measure the amount of energy stored in a given volume or mass of a certain substance or material.
Below is a table that I put together expressing the energy density of an array of materials in terms of megajoules of energy per kilogram. A megajoule – MJ – is 1 million joules, or approximately the kinetic energy of a 1-ton vehicle moving at 160 km/h (100 mph). The point is to show that if something has a high energy density, then less physical material will release the same amount of energy:
You can see the difference in energy density ranging over a variety of commonly available substances. Indeed, you can see why, for example, old wood-burning locomotives and steam engines gave way to coal-burning equipment. And the coal burners eventually yielded to diesel engines. You just get more energy from the same volume of material, which matters when you’re in the confined spaces of a moving piece of equipment.
It’s obvious, based on the raw numbers, that uranium – and by extension nuclear power – can supply energy with a density that’s orders of magnitude more than what you get from carbon-based fuels. With numbers so utterly lopsided like these, the world is going to find it impossible to support massive populations and deal with resource and energy demand without a global nuclear power industry.
Byron King
for The Daily Reckoning
Byron King
Byron King is the managing editor of Outstanding Investments and Energy & Scarcity Investor. He is a Harvard-trained geologist who has traveled to every U.S. state and territory and six of the seven continents. He has conducted site visits to mineral deposits in 26 countries and deep-water oil fields in five oceans. This provides him with a unique perspective on the myriad of investment opportunities in energy and mineral exploration. He has been interviewed by dozens of major print and broadcast media outlets including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, MSN Money, MarketWatch, Fox Business News, and PBS Newshour.
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“the world is going to find it impossible to support massive populations and deal with resource and energy demand without a global nuclear power industry”
agreed.
The problem as I see it are corporations are constantly chiseling away at programs that cost, such as safety. Always been that way,,, always will be that way.
All we need is a BP sized nuclear event.
Might take care of the population problem though.
No offense, Byron, but energy density is far from the most relevant metric. You have to factor in whole-cycle costs derived from discovery, extraction, refinement, transportation, deployment and disposal. Some of these pretty powerfully offset nuke’s better energy density.
Also, wind, hydro (both omitted for some reason) and solar are different in nature from the other sources listed in that they are not consumptive, except for those resources expended in the manufacture of the necessary gathering equipment.
So you need to factor in whole cycle financial costs, and whole cycle ancillary “costs” such as environmental damage. Bottom line – it’s a complex question.
Would harnessing nuclear energy be akin to landing on the surface of the sun?
A solar panel lasts 20-25 years so to correctly quote a solar panel (or wind farms etc) you would need to work out energy over it’s life span. A piece of wood 10 MJ over a period of it’s burning and is a measure of it’s entire output. By putting Solar at such a low number you completely discounting it’s actual lifetime production which would be close to 10,8000MJ* for a 50 watt household solar panel (*Taken from 10hours sunlight a day for 300 days a year for 20 years)
we are here to borrow money to buy gas
thank you….phil collins overpaid
The more meaningful measure is “available energy density per unit price”.
The ‘available’ part measures physical access. The ‘unit price’ part measures our technology ability to extract and distribute.
Measured this way, it’s a whole new ball game.
Hi Everyone,
What is your take on Lightbridge (LTBR)?
Chad
kenn said
“All we need is a BP sized nuclear event.”
…such as Chernobyl?
Of course, that was government owned, operated, and unsafe by design.
perelmanfan said
No offense, Byron, but energy density is far from the most relevant metric. …
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I have got to agree with perelmanfan and others.
Energy density is NOT the proper metric to use.
What is the total energy needed to mine and refine uranium into useful fuel?
How long does wind, solar, geo, and hydro last?
But if you use closed fuel cycle, using the uranium to breed plutonium, then it’s no contest: nuclear energy is superior to every other technology, regardless of metric.
The problem is, few have the guts to contemplate a world in which there is widespread use of a closed nuclear fuel cycle, because of the power-political ramifications.
The greatest technological breakthrough of the 20th century has relatively neglected, mostly because of power-politics!
In the future, I fear that historians will talk about our civilization much the way that historians in our times often talk about ancient China: “they knew about all sorts of powerful technologies, and for some reason never made use of them, for fear of destabilizing their Middle Kingdom.”
This is a very positive article, and I believe an accurate one. The problem, however, becomes apparent went you read the inane comments. All are posted by people that talk about the subject, but have no grasp of it, or of reality. I see not one supportive comment from people that actually understand the subject. The damage to the planet and the global economy that is caused by allowing a uninformed group of people to bad mouth and limit the use of a technology that would largely eliminate the problems of fossil fuel and energy dependence is absurd, but it will not stop until intelligent and informed people get off their butt and demand that nuclear power be viewed in an unemotional and unbiased manner. It has been my experience in life that the people that know the least about a subject make the most noise and have the most confidence in their opinion, because they are not interest in or guided by the facts, nor do they ever take the time to study them. This is certainly the case with nuclear energy. Eisenhower had it right, but the morons in this country would rather believe Jane Fonda, Ralph Nader, and the idiots that make comments like the ones following this article.
I think the same that just few groups of people thrust forward fossil fuels and don’t want to use technologies that can be less harmful to the environment. It is more then obvious for what purpose they doing that. The sources of fossil fuels are limited so it will last just for certain period of time. There I can see the chance to switch to solar, hydroelectric power plants or nuclear energy. I know that especially the last named one has to strictly follow the safety programs. We are standing on the crossing to find the right way for the future to use the energy we can live with.
Bla Bla Bla. Misleading Headlines. Fox style.
If Nuclear was not subsidized every step of the way, it would not even exist. Even the French nuclear industry is in trouble. Do you know of any other industry who won’t even take responsibility for their long term waste problem or the extremely expensive decommissioning of it’s old reactors?
Nuclear electricity is only a guilt product from the scientists who let this monster genie out of it’s bottle. The government wants this industry strictly to maintain their nuclear weapons industry.
It is a lie that it is the cheapest, it is a lie that it is clean, it is also a lie that it does not contribute to global warming and It is definitely the most dangerous.
And I understand that there is also a problem with peak uranium.
I wager that we are smarter than this and that we can solve this without getting mired in these polluting and dangerous technologies. Greed and old ideas should not be driving this.
I would mention two BIG disadvantages of using nuclear power.
1) Although not much waste is produced, it is very, very dangerous.
It must be sealed up and buried for many thousands of years to allow the radioactivity to die away.
For all that time it must be kept safe from earthquakes, flooding, terrorists and everything else and it’s tough.
2) Nuclear power is reliable, but a lot of money has to be spent on safety – if it does go wrong, a nuclear accident can be a major disaster.