20 Comments
Dec 7, 2021Liked by Tomas Pueyo

Tomas, Bill Gates has been a huge follower of research and books by Vaclav Smil. Since you are investigating energy issues, I feel that should not be missed in your coverage.

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Dec 14, 2021Liked by Tomas Pueyo

An excellent blog that covers this topic, written by a physicist, is Do The Math: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/ That was where I first heard the topic of energy density and physical limits of energy consumption growing equally along with GDP growth. Highly recommended!

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Dec 12, 2021Liked by Tomas Pueyo

Most of the examples sounds plausible, but I don't think extracting uranium from rocks on the ocean floor or recycling anything by heating it into plasma and separating out the constituent elements would be economically feasible with energy 10× as cheap as today, and I'm almost sure transmuting other metals into gold or rhodium wouldn't be even with energy 100× as cheap as today.

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Dec 8, 2021Liked by Tomas Pueyo

We finally do have nuclear-powered cars that go for thousands or tens of thousands of miles without ever being refueled: NASA's Mars Curiosity and Perseverance rovers. The conundrum for human use becomes radiation shielding.

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Dec 8, 2021Liked by Tomas Pueyo

Hi Thomas, entirely off topic but I'm not sure how to reach you best; could you consider a piece on the seemingly perpetual conflict zone Kushmir? Might be embedded into a broader piece about the Indus valley/geographical determinism. Maybe I'm being lazy now and should do my own research but maybe you already got something like this on the radar? Let me know!

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Henry Adams curve has the strong appearance of exponential growth.

Exponential growth on a planet of finite resources can only end badly.

We as a species will only thrive if we can learn to taper off our growth in consumption to remain in line with the capacity of the earth to produce the foods and other resources that sustain us.

Once the inhabitants of Easter Island had chopped down the last of their trees and otherwise denuded their island, their population crashed dramatically. At least some of them had somewhere else to go.

Once we strip this planet bare of forests, and hoover up the last fishes from the ocean, we will be in enormous trouble.

Within the human body, we have a name for the exponential growth of cells, we call it cancer, and it never ends well.

Healthy bodies work because the cells within it know when to stop expanding, when to stop reproducing, and to share the body's resources within reasonable limits. A healthy human society cannot escape this need to avoid continued exponential growth.

Unlike the residents of Easter Island, once we cook this planet, there's nowhere else to go. Elon Musk may launch himself to Mars, but he will have a hard time finding a Whole Foods from which to procure his evening meals.

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Not directly related, but I though this would be something you may be interested in (if you haven't already seen it): https://www.ft.com/content/4240569a-aa55-468e-8dc4-2953612c38d1?fbclid=IwAR2YYSzRz219-cjTOi32fIZxOu_LtW2BLBVp9Tao_c8Nr_JN6mTsqxagAXc

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Feb 22, 2022·edited Feb 22, 2022

The discussion here is far too optimistic about several things, especially nuclear power. Problems with the optimistic "too cheap to meter" fission/fusion future he's predicting here:

1) Nuclear power isn't a renewable energy, which matters because you still need to refuel the plant with uranium (even if it's only every 18 months). And where does that fuel come from? Uranium is common, but concentrated uranium isn't. Only five countries account for the vast majority of uranium mining, and the best indications are that we'll reach Peak Uranium in the coming decades, even under current consumption. Again, that's not to say that the earth is then devoid of uranium--it means that you don't have uranium at 0.25-1% concentration by volume anymore and the marginal returns of mining it get worse and worse. You could reuse spent fuel in "breeder reactors," but that increases the EROI, and even then, like recycling of plastics or paper, the fuel cannot be reused indefinitely.

2) Nuclear power (fission, but *especially* fusion) requires material strength and extreme tolerances that make it very expensive to build and difficult to miniaturize. It's not just the pressure and the need to have redundancies for safety. Radiation itself degrades steel and concrete over the decades. This is why we are now facing the inevitable decommissioning of plants built in the 70s: you can replace every single degraded part in the plant, but you hit a point where that becomes much more expensive than building a new one entirely. This is the same reason we don't have nuclear cars and planes and ships (except for aircraft carriers and strategic submarines, where capability trumps efficiency). Maybe the energy density of the fuel is great, but certainly not the "engine" that you must use to make it work. Similar problems plague natural gas- or hydrogen-powered transport: The fuel itself is energy-dense, but it's not stable and the "plumbing" you have to use to burn it for useful work must extremely robust and heavy.

3) Nuclear fission creates waste that remains radioactive for 100,000+ years. This is an externality problem as old as the first reactors in the 1950s and still hasn't been solved (not for lack of trying!). Sweden is arguably the only country with nuclear power right now with any kind of workable, long-term spent-fuel storage solution. But modern Sweden hasn't even existed for 500 years, so who's going to ensure the continuity of stewardship over this material in the next 100,000 years!? There are hundreds of other reactors in dozens of countries with far less conscientiousness and capacity than Sweden has (and even Sweden has has its share of "Level 2" incidents). The United States, for example, has a scary number of Superfund sites and leaking barrels full of nuclear waste that aren't even safely handled today, much less for the centuries to come.

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The intro says there would be a recording. After scanning the article I didn't see one. Where can we access it?

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