Reply To: Proliferation?

[zapkitty]

vansig wrote: Boron (as boric acid or borate ion) is a by-product of desalination and dietary-salt extraction from sea water, and is a well-known contaminant in fresh water wells. So you’ll be starting with a waste product, that is ordinarily regarded as a pollutant, and reversing the economics of dealing with its disposal.

http://www.trusselltech.com/media/1.pdf
http://www.lenntech.com/periodic/water/boron/boron-and-water.htm

Yet, boron is not in short supply. “About 500,000 tons are produced per year for a price of about $700/ton.”

With current commercial reserves of over 10,000,000 tons…. i.e. that’s just what they’ve staked out [em]at the moment[/em].

As for the thread concept I, myself, find it pretty meaningless. The X megawatts for X persons for X aeons is too displaced and too subject to gaming.

A more relevant comparison will be

[em]”Can we, acting in an environmentally responsible manner and without shorting ourselves in its other uses, safely get enough boron to see us through until the next, longer lived, energy breakthrough?”[/em]

And the answer will be measured in MW per person per millennium.

I hereby call this number the Zap.

belated edit: current commercial reserves are held at 10 million tons, not 10 thousand 🙂