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The short title is called The Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty. They signed it. so they do have to justify having a nuclear power program, not because we said so but because they themselves said so.

so We do have the moral justification to dictate this, because the govermenrt of Iran has said we do. And if they say we do then who are we to argue that point?

Okay im a soon to be graduate in Environmental Geoscience so without meaning to sound patronizing, condescending or like a know it all, please believe that i speak from education and not hearsay.

bigpopa8 - Its much, much more complicated than that, OIL is not everlasting,all of the fields in the North sea are at or past peak production now, that means reducing yield until its empty, of course every field will reach this stage eventually, it will run out. Projections are many and varied but around 60 years is a pretty well accepted figure by all but the die hard conservatives

Oil isnt just sitting there in the sand, its trapped in an aquifer type rock underneath an impermeable layer or geological formation, this layer often leaks and thats why we sometimes see oil at surface. The different types of aquifer rock and formation as well as how old the oil is (old oil is much stickier) dictate its ease of extraction and therefore partly its financial viability as a field.
Oil can be difficult to extract for many reasons, and uneconomical for lots more. You cant look at the total amount, some of it is just impossible to extract viably

Alternative to petroleum based fuels, pipe-dream or reality?

Sadly there is no replacement right now thats a fact, however there are many hopefuls, some current fads and some downright crazy ideas.

First some of the biggies

Ethanol - A massive fad especially in the US, a system which can never work.
Its popular because,
-its apparently eco-friendly which it really isn't when you look at the effect of the whole process.
-it is secure from foreign influence.
The problem is there inst enough farmland in the entire world to replace petroleum with ethanol, and besides all that its being used for food, were beginning to see food shortages and increasing prices already, its only going to get worse with a growing global population,the idea of making that problem even worse by converting farmland to ethanol is frankly nuts.

Hydrogen - Fundamentally the problem is it takes a lot energy to break water (H20) to get the H, thats the dream way of doing it but its very inefficient. You could extract Hydrogen from petroleum but that again makes it hugely expensive, and silly given a dwindling supply.

Nuclear - would be a great solution if there were more than around 60 years worth of energy profitable uranium left. Thats derived from current known reserves and TODAYS usage (not including future increases). The problem is the grade of the uranium ore, already weve almost used most of the 0.15% uranium ore, by 2016 it'll be 0.1, by 2036 0.07&, By 2066 it will more require energy to extract the ore than will be gleaned from it. That is of course if we don't find a large deposit of high grade ore, but its getting more and more unlikely (however exploration has slowed with usage in the past few decades but still unless you we two or three times the current planetary reserve it isnt the solution.) I hope you can all see that the efficiency of nuclear power is going to fall over time and combined with the extraordinary costs of dealing with the waste and decommissioning plants it becomes a poorer and less hopeful option.

Currently in the world no-one has actually started burying the High level waste, it just sits around in giant cooling ponds, not a great situation. (Sweden begins its first trial burial in around 6 years, you have to design the repository as if it will fail at some point in the future, the decay time for fuel rods so that they become safe depends on the decay product but the containers remain hot for up to 10,000,000 years. If theres a leak and 10,000 years after they are buried particulates come to the surface it will still be intensely ionising and dangerous, especially if it enters the water system. So there are lots of factors to consider when burying this stuff, it probably can be done, but it very difficult and extremely expensive.

After all this im still pro Nuclear but its not a panacea for power generation.

Wind - pretty good, lots a big wind farms up and running now and they produce a decent amount of power and they are very clean. problem is they will never be the whole solution, never generate enough power and they arnt constantly producing.

Tidal - very early stages, dont produce lots of power, not a lot of hope they ever will either, but it is very clean.

Solar - Way too inefficient, mabye technology can help here, also day/night cycle obviously and cloudiness etc etc

OTEC - actually never heard of this one, since i know of no known working examples even models, lets call that one a pipedream, personally i can think of million problems with this.

Lord_Draco - Very good points, there are some uses of petroleum which just cant be replaced, jet fuel especially ive read a little about the subject recently and there is no replacement for kerosene fuel to power planes, not even close.

Righto i hope ive dispelled a few myths most likely the answer to the energy problem will be diversification and technologically driven gains in efficiency.

This of course doesnt directly consider the very real and present danger climate change poses to us all and the next generation.

To all who are interested in the climate change issue even those who deny its existence i advise you all to check out this site its run by professors in the field working all over the world, one of which i have had the fortune to be taught by.

http://www.realclimate.org/

Its set up as being for and accessible by the general public, but keep in mind we are talking about a complex issue here so prepare yourself for lots of hard facts, projections, uncertainties and discussion. This is not a propaganda site no-one is telling you to change your life on this website its just a place where cutting edge science can be related to the general public via the wonders of the internet.

Alex

Well .. I also noticed that there are some screwbals that think tat everything is allright with our oil consumtion when it will run out there are other technologies that are just consealed because of oil compnaies ... such irrespnsible conspiracy theory wishfull thing is just scary ...

on the arab side well its possible that coutries ike oan will survie it but ... face it they are building somthing in a desert wasteland there fore with a sudden stop of cash flow there wil lbe a lot of problems for them ... ofcourse when the oil starts to run out there will be a huge rise in oils price

on Irans nuclear programe ... emm ppl take of your pink eyeglasses and face reality ... politics is not about whats 'right' its all about interests.
Do you really think its alright for a muslim fundamentlist country who's leaders constantly cuses the Wast and calls to wipe another nation from the map to have nueclear capabilities? the way i see it Iran is a potential threat even if they dont use them selves nuclear/dirtyweaposn they could make them availbale to terororists .. read the god damed Qran there you wil lfind some very interesting gods instructions about how should a true muslim treat pagons (aka ALL non-muslims).
Like I said about politics .. its all about intrests and gain and frankly I would feel a lot dafer if US remained the only global/regional super power. Not rusia not china and definatly not some muslim fundamentalits country.

but seriously saying they cant do that because it 'not fair' is childish. people and countries would and will do whatever is necesary to further their interest's

AJackal is mostly right, the joys of eduction.

Educated morons have been educating each other for millenia, the oil crisis isn't a new thing. Civilization has been a cascading prediction of doom since inception. This or that is always doomed to run out and will end life on earth as we know it.

His post is relatively accurate, well reasoned, but devoid of fact. We already ran out of oil reserves several times, the first time was over seventy years ago. Reactionists can come up with all kinds of doom and gloom, and reactionists are running the educational system. While yes, we do have a limited supply of known oil reserves and an expanding need for them that will run out in x years, we've had a limited supply of known oil reserves and an expanding need for them since we started drilling. It's a significantly larger number than it was ten years ago, which was a significantly larger number than 20 years ago, and so on and so forth. This isn't just oil either, everything has run out, food, trees, water, breathable air, even rock has been on the list of scarce resources soon to be used up.

This is a wonderful article. Paul Ehrlich is a genius in his field, respected world round, noted as a great thinker, and a fucking retard. It's really quite simple, morons consist of 90% of the population, the first step is to understand that the people telling you we're doomed are probably morons. The second step is to see what has been said in the past, by aforementioned morons, not many of them are fresh out of college. The third step is to see what actually happened. We aren't all dead from starvation, we still have trees, all the fish aren't dead, we've got breathable atmosphere, we haven't run out of this or that metal, the world isn't covered in a mile thick sheet of ice, and we haven't been eaten by the sun because we decided it was a ball of gas instead of Ra.

Doom is popular, it sells well, that they are, by and large, idiots, is irrelevant to the media that makes money off them. Your choice is to be a sucker, or to educate yourself on history. It's irrefutable fact that we haven't even explored for oil in much of the world and have absolutely no idea how much is actually out there. It could be that we're solvent for a few hundred years with the industrialization of the third world, it could also be that ten years from now we wont be drilling for it at all. Oil is rather easy to create, we know exactly how it's formed, have for years. It's just bloody expensive to turn current growth into oil today, as opposed to drilling for it. There is the matter of creating the energy to make it, but plastics and the other currently irreplaceable uses wont magically disappear even if we do run out of oil. They will either be made by other means, or replaced by other products that cover the same uses.

Ajackal, i like your post. I never actually thought of uranium as such a scarce resource... so much for nuclear power being "renewable". Honestly I think windpower is the way. Were going to ahve to sacfrice a LOT of acres, but it should provide a lot of energy.

But Ajackal, what do YOU think is the solution? Diversify in all energy sources or focus more on R&D?

On the nuclear note, America is in the process of passing a bill that will revamp all our nuclear warheads (basically rearm and make 'em shiny again).

AJackal, interesting post. Its truth that our world will not be able to complety subtitute oil as the main source of energy, but it can be greatly reduced with the aforementioned alternatives.

A very good option I've heard around a few times is to make each house in the US have solar panels and/or wind turbines. The aim would not be to make the house draw all electricy from the wind and sun, but rather to them being a supplement to the power from the normal utilities. And also, those systems in each house would be wired directly to the utility's power lines. Thus when the house is not using the electriticy it produces, that energy goes into the power lines and can be used by other loads. It is a radical change and would cause a lot of changes from the way things are now. But the good side of things is that all those empty rooftops could be put to use, and even though we would still need generators burning oil, it would be a lot less. Of course this is all wishful thinking right now, as this idea is nowhere near being economically feasable to implement at the moment.

And lol about ethanol, I prefer to eat the corn rather than burn it.

Again ethanol and everything else should be considered as a supplement, not as a subtitute.

Who cares what happens in the Middle East.

SpacePony: - I get the point, honestly i do, the main problem here is that often nuclear power and nuclear weapons go hand in hand, although the uk was told that its nuclear power program was for electricity production, it was realy a pretext so that we could produce lots of fissionable material (threat of the cold war).
So its very hard to distinguish the two

We (the UK) currently have 100 tons !! of weapons grade plutonium stockpiled, to put that into context, 6Kg of plutonium were responsible for Nagasaki.
With better technology you can increase the yield from X amount of plutonium, so we wouldn't even need 6kg to produce comparable destruction today.
Now i challenge anybody to say thats not overkill, im sure the states has comparable stocks if not considerably more, and we both singed up to reduce those amounts. (the big problem is what the hell do you do with it).

Nuclear fuel is already re-processed, we dont intend on burying useful and expensive fuel. The UK has Europe's, if not the worlds, largest re-processing site called Sellafield. Its very controversial as we get shipments of material from around the world re-processed here, its also where we stockpile our waste.
Either used fuel is separated from its spent components and re-used or its converted into MOX fuel (mixed oxide) a combination of uranium and plutonium products with which we supply France and Germany's MOX reactors.

Iran's current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is obviously full of rhetoric and big talk like any politician, but the idea that IRAN would launch a nuclear attack is i think misguided it would quite literally be suicide. All of the countries of the world even those opposed to war in iraq would rally against such an action to say nothing of the US retalliation which would be inevitable and severe.

"When a country that thinks "Death to America" is a reasonable expression of their foreign policy, I care that they are trying to build a bomb. Call me silly, but I get the feeling they might just want to use it"

A good example of the stupidity of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, hes an idiot but this kind of talk stokes national pride and respect in some quarters of Iran, but talk is very different from doing something about it, a war based on what someone said is ridiculous.
Its like Hilary saying she would obliterate Iran (another stupid and highly undiplomatic statement)

"It's irrefutable fact that we haven't even explored for oil in much of the world and have absolutely no idea how much is actually out there".

Yah, im sorry have to REFUTE that, its blatantly incorrect, what do you think oil companies do with their billions of oil revenue, a large part is spend on finding new oil and gas.
There is CONSTANT exploration and has been since the beginning of the oil phenomenon.
Petroleum exploration is one of the big topics every geologist is taught in many courses over the years of undergraduate study specifically because its a major avenue for employment, hell our departments are sponsored by oil companies, we have them come and give talks and such about what its like prospecting a field, factors you need to consider etc.
Now the world is a big place so it will take a long time until every field has been found, but the places oil can be found are limited by its (geological) history.

Actually ive applied for exploration jobs, (even if it would be like working towards the planets continued degradation) theres one in venezuela which pays $60,000 pa starting wage and constitutes about six months work, my friend who graduated last year got that job and now owns a house in Stockholm where he lives on and off for six months of the year and commutes to Venezuela as and when they need him.
Damn i want that job !

To the person who said, were not affecting the plant because there are still fish in the sea etc etc.

- There are numerous cases where overfishing driven by technological innovation and increasing demand has caused fish stocks to completely crash to very minimal levels. Just one example is cod fishing where some places affecting both US and EU fisherman have been made absolutely no fishing zones in an attempt to let the stocks recover.
- The loss of species diversity although constantly happening over time has accelerated (due in large part to the actions of man) to the point where todays species loss is comparable to the cataclysmic times in geological history where 50,60,70 even 90% of all species died out (remember this happened over tens or hundreds of thousands years in the past) its about the rate of loss.

oh using Paul Ehrlich (March 14, 1854 – August 20, 1915) as a source isn't very useful he's been dead for almost a hundred years.

Yup diversification (lots of different energy sources, hopefully greener ones) is the way to go, along with reduced usage (this is one of the hardest parts).

just a quick something on tidal, it is here already, albeit in protoype, check out the wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_power, theres pictures of the manufactured components.

Good point made by somebody (sorry am editing now) on generating ones own power:
One very big help in reducing overall power production is if each house generated its own power just a contribution by a wind generator on the roof or solar panels, the technologies havnt yet matured quite enough in this area for it to be an ideal solution but the hardest part would be the legislature needed so that every house would be built with such capabilities and getting older houses converted, now this may be impossible for some properties and mabye very expensive.

Remember that here in the "old world" we have lots of houses which are 60-100 years old and more than a few which are 100+, now apart from the logistical problems if re-engineering these old houses, its actually illegal to alter these old houses (listed buildings as they are called). The degree of listing dictates if you can knock down walls, change windows, add extensions, even add insulation etc.

It can be a real pain in the arse living in a grade 1,2 or 3 listed building, Grade 1 is so severe that you need permission to put up shelves and very minor things like that.

A big step forward in reducing climate change forcings would be to eliminate car emissions, even if the energy needed to power the cars is derived from hydrocarbons (oil/coal) its a lot easier (but not as easy as you might think) to trap escaping GHG's from one source.

Another solution to increased Green House Gas concentrations (CO2 is the big concern here) would be direct extraction from the atmosphere, no-one has been able to do this on a meaningful scale yet and it would be fantastic if it could be done.
In fact there is a large X-prise (like the Ansari X-prize for private space venture) for anybody who does it.

Alex

Hands up my bad, got the wrong fella. But i still disagree wholeheartedly, theres lots of evidence of the continuing degradation of the earth's environment and as i mentioned the loss of species.

"Oil is rather easy to create, we know exactly how it's formed, have for years"

This is also incorrect, the real problem is it happens over hundreds of thousands/millions of years, kind of hard to recreate in a lab. So no, nobody knows for sure although we have a fairly good idea of the major steps, diagenesis, catagensis and then metagenesis.

Your actual words were (copied) "we havn't explored for oil in much of the world"
Im saying much of the world has been explored, especially all of the sites which could hold potentially large fields.
Theres still exploration to be done and profits to be made doing so. But the prospects are nowhere near as good as they were 20 or 30 years ago and what you have to do is expand your criteria, constantly looking for newer less lucrative fields, while they may be a few very large fields found in the future most exploration geologists would say this is highly unlikely given all the exploration thats happened already.

Oh and its quite easy to plot up the trend in oil finds for the past 20 years or so and then say wow, they are finding less and less.

You also forgot to mention that with the melting of the north pole and the opening of the northwest passage as a result that large oir fields that were inaccessable are now becoming accesssable with existing technoligy.

When the oil runs out in the Middle East, The Middle East - except for perhaps Israel will become unimportant and fade into a bunch of warring states except for one thing. With all the money they are draining from us Saudi Arabia could pull it together and bring the entire region into the 21st century. But, I think Iran's influence will eventually suck the life out of the entire area and they along with Al-Quaida will eventually bring about Armageddon.

when we run out of oil we will use what we have available to us and or find something new... Nesisity is the mother of invention... We can replace oil right now if we wished, it would just cost us too much to be worth it to us. When that changes we will use other sources of energy. This is the same argument that took place a little over 100 years ago ... they were talking about coal then and allong came oil

100 years from now someone will say... they had this same argument 100 years ago only then they were talking about running out of oil