Reply To: Physics Nobel to Big Bangers

[dennisp]

Vansig it looks like you’re talking projected electricity usage, I think MTd2 is talking total energy consumption, which includes oil and natural gas for transportation and heating…Wikipedia puts that a good bit lower at 15 TW. Their source is a spreadsheet published by BP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_resources_and_consumption

If both numbers are correct then I’m surprised that electricity is such a small portion of the total. Maybe something’s still off somewhere.

I’m not sure you guys are talking about the same thing on FF efficiency either. Eg., laser fusion requires a steam cycle, so call it 50% efficient at recovering the output. But there’s also the power required to fire the laser. FF has a substantial power input as well.

If the researcher is correct, we just need 15,000 tons per year at current rates. If MTd2 is correct that his power output estimate is “a bit high,” call it 30K tons. But if energy is 50 times cheaper, we’ll use a lot more of it. We’ll desalinate lots of seawater, grow crops underground, holiday in orbiting hotels, and pull excess CO2 from the atmosphere. It’ll be the biggest economic boom in history, and it sure will use up some boron.

So we probably shouldn’t wait too long before investigating new boron sources. How much can we extract from a desalination plant? How much can we easily get from asteroids or the Moon? Etc.