German Military Braces For Peak Oil 764
myrdos2 writes "A study by a German military think tank leaked to the Internet warns of the potential for a dire global economic crisis in as little as 15 years as a result of a peak and an irreversible decline in world oil supplies. The study states that there is 'some probability that peak oil will occur around the year 2010 and that the impact on security is expected to be felt 15 to 30 years later. ... In the medium term the global economic system and every market-oriented national economy would collapse.' The report closely matches one from the US military earlier this year, which stated that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact."
Transition Movement (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Prophecy (Score:5, Informative)
Thorium Reactors people! (Score:5, Informative)
Check out this google tech talk on Thorium reactors; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8 [youtube.com]
Some Wikipedia Articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor_experiment [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor [wikipedia.org]
Thousands of years of safe carbon-emission free energy. Working reactors were developed and operated successfully in the 60s. Small scale reactors are currently running in India with plans for larger scale reactors. Nobody put any research effort into it back in the 60s because you can't make nuclear bomb material with it and the government wanted to go with only one design. Anyway, check out the video, it explains all the nitty gritty technical details.
Re:Peak wood, peak peat, peak coal... (Score:2, Informative)
Peak coal hasn't happened yet.
And states without fossil fuel alternatives usually collapsed after reaching peak wood.
Re:Countries already are planning to cold turkey (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Old news, buy oil stocks. (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, but when they mess something up with extraction, it will make the recent Deepwater Horizon incident a nice memory. Methane clathrates are quite unstable, and when things go wrong you get a big-scale fuel-air explosion.
Re:Prophecy (Score:4, Informative)
Someone please moderate +5
The deniers seem to be incapable of simple logic and mathematics, it's nothing short of fascinating just how short minded these people are.
The earth is not limitless in it's capability of producing food, oxygen, oil and hell even landmass and space to live in.
Sooner or later, oil will run out - once you understand just what's made with oil (hint: It's a hell of a lot more than just being used in vehicles) you'll start to understand.
Even if oil doesn't run out soon, eventually it will, it doesn't magically grow back every 6 weeks.
Re:Raise fuel taxes for individual POV's (Score:2, Informative)
I don't know what a POV is, but raising taxes does not work to reduce consumption.
I drive in the UK where taxation on fuel is something like 75% and growing - nobody drives less, because if they drive less they're doing less work and get paid less. They just have less money to spend on other things.
Re:Old news, buy oil stocks. (Score:1, Informative)
"Nobody (except maybe the usual few paranoids, and perhaps the usual tabloid corporate mass media that loves them) said in the 1970s that oil would run out by the 1990s."
I think that statement is just wrong. Unless you want to call most of the members of OPEC and The Club of Rome paranoid.
If you read Oriana Fallaci's "Interview with history" you'll find some remarkably prescient comments by the then Saudi minister of oil, Ahmed Zaki Yamani, in 1974.
Re:Peak Oil (Score:3, Informative)
I'm all for efficiency, but two points:
1) You don't avoid a global Peak Oil with direct consumption/demand-side efforts, you mitigate it's effects. Because oil will peak is a feature of oil production, the only way to actually avoid it would be to produce less, which would obviously not help the people who want to consume oil. This is not a value statement in the usual sense. Though usually "mitigate" is worse option than "avoid", in this case the opposite is true. In the long run we don't want continue burning oil at ever increasing rate, so ability to avoid Peak Oil is useless in the best case and harmful in the worst case.
2) The 70's Peak Oil was a local peak in the US. It's effects were mostly cancelled out by increased production elsewhere and globalization that brought those resources to the global market.
Are you retarded? (Score:3, Informative)
Your problem, sir, is one I refer to as "reading comprehension failure"; possibly compounded by some things I call "dumb as a rock" and "willful refusal to be educated", but let's take one thing at a time. I'd rather think you didn't have time to read the material, or look it up, than think you were just too stupid to comprehend it.
Please allow me the privilege of raising your awareness level.
For instance, try this link [lmgtfy.com]. It should lead you to a wiki article on breeder reactors, along with a nice little news article about India's new reactor projects. Note: projects, plural; as in more than one.
Your reading, at this point, may enlighten you to the concept of a "sealed breeder reactor", which produces far fewer waste products than conventional reactors, is easier to control, and should it have a "meltdown", the effects are much less pronounced than "conventional" reactors (as in, the nearest 30 miles aren't irradiated, and nothing blows up).
A little further reading [lmgtfy.com] may grant you the information required to understand that thorium is hugely more prevalent than you seem to currently believe, and is actually easier to produce at a fissionable quality than uranium. As a matter of fact, one way to produce uranium is to put thorium in a breeder reactor. Ooh, look, a two-for-one deal!
So, it's cheaper, easier, and safer... a direct contradiction of your uninformed statements of "fact".
Yes, reactors of many types have been built. The problem (and my point) is that none of those experimental reactors built have delivered the safe and inexpensive power that was promised.
Worse, none have even shown that the respective technology has the potential to become safe and inexpensive.
Conclusion: Once you have a basic understanding of the topics you so vehemently protest, perhaps then we will listen to your meandering bullshit.
Re:Is this a Godwin-invoking comment? (Score:3, Informative)
*sigh* fisher-tropsh is a way to ADD energy to coal to make oil. Nobody doubts it's going to work, IF we find this outside energy source. Nuclear *might* work.
Fissile material (Score:4, Informative)
The estimates are that the cheaply available fissile material will be gone in about 70 years at the current rates of production.
True, but extremely misleading. Nuclear power is energetically profitable even with very expensive fissile material. Nuclear power plants consume astoundingly small amounts of fuel - a pound of uranium generates as much energy as 400,000 pounds of coal. A 10% increase in the price of coal makes a big difference to a coal plant. A 10% increase (or even 10000% increase) in the price of uranium is negligible to a nuclear plant. The energetic and financial cost of nuclear fuel is miniscule compared to the overhead costs of operating a nuclear plant.
A lot of people (including you) have no real idea just how much nuclear fuel the Earth contains. If we allow breeder reactors (which President Carter banned for political reasons related to nuclear weapons), uranium fuel will last for billions of years [stanford.edu] at current rates of consumption. Even if you allow for a drastically increased rate of consumption, it's still enough for several hundred million years.
What's most striking about the calculation in the link above is that it is so simple. It's not like oil reserve estimates where governments can fudge the numbers, and even the experts disagree. Anyone can take a sample of seawater and check the concentration of uranium.
These figures are with presently proven technology. No assumptions about future technology are required.
Re:Are you retarded? (Score:2, Informative)
"New" Nuclear Reactors, Same Old Story [rmi.org]
The dominant type of new nuclear power plant, light-water reactors (LWRs), proved unnanceable in the robust 2005–08 capital market, despite new U.S. subsidies approaching or exceeding their total construction cost. New LWRs are now so costly and slow that they save 2–20× less carbon, 20–40× slower, than micropower and efficient end-use. As this becomes evident, other kinds of reactors are being proposed instead—novel designs claimed to solve LWRs problems of economics, proliferation, and waste. But on closer examination, the two kinds most often promoted—Integral Fast Reactors (IFRs) and thorium reactors—reveal no economic, environmental, or security rationale, and the thesis is unsound for any nuclear reactor.
Re:Are you retarded? (Score:3, Informative)
Besides, coming across as an ass is rarely a useful form of debate unless your in politics.