[wolfekeeper]

Oh well then.

The Prof David MacKay is pretty good, and I was very impressed the first few times I looked at it his stuff, but he tends to be a 'there's needs to be A solution to all this' kind of guy; 'oh and by the way it's nuclear.'

But it doesn't look like it's going to be like that. There's going to be a mixture of different power sources. Great gobs of intermittent wind, some biofuels to fill in when the wind isn't working, and solar for midday, battery cars which can act as temporary storage for a month or two, hydro wherever that is available and some fossil fuel plants probably with carbon capture or only as a backup.

In combination these things have been proven to work, they massively reduce pollution and aren't much more expensive than the current network, and in the long run will probably be cheaper, maybe even massively cheaper due to mass production- wind is still getting cheaper and cheaper, and solar has reached grid parity for consumers already pretty much.

Nuclear is theoretically really good, but Chernobyl and Fukushima. And if anyone ever says 'oh they were old plants, badly designed' just point them to the Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_accidents

which shows there's been a serious incident every two years, with absolutely no signs of improvements. Bad design is a thing that is impossible to stamp out by dictat; it takes many generations of designs to do that, and there just haven't been enough nuclear generations. And each generation probably has a Fukushima in there.

[alancalverd]

Depands on your definition of "serious". The interesting column in the "nuclear accidents" article is "deaths". Apart from Chernobyl, the total is 11, all plant workers. That's about one week's worth of dead coalminers or construction workers, spread over 55 years. And no civilian deaths to date, compared with 12000 from coal smog in London in 1952 alone. Chernobyl wasn't a proper accident - it was caused by operators intentionally contravening the instruction manual, which was written precisely to prevent this sort of thing happening.

Fukushima is an ongoing cockup but entirely containable, unlike the tsunami that caused it and killed 20,000 people in a day - why does nobody talk about that anymore? Baseless public anxiety sites nukes on the coast, where they are most likely to be damaged by the forces of nature!  Apart from the pressurised water reactor, which is (a) inherently not failsafe and (b) the avowed choice of the UK government for future expansion, all the current civilian power reactor designs are OK as long as nobody tries to destroy them, as at Chernobyl. 

[cheryl j]

In general, I believe the average worker today in the USA, and most of Europe is better off today than one century ago, two centuries ago, or three centuries ago.

However, one concern is that not everything follows the same inflation curve. 

Land and housing prices often go up at 5% to 10% a year, while wages and the price of commodities increase at a much slower rate of perhaps 3% a year. 

Part of the increase in land values is pushed up by an increasing population, and rarity. 

A century and a half ago, the government could hardly give away land, especially on the frontiers.  Today, that land giveaway is all but gone, and there is increasing competition for the land due to population growth.

There is, of course, always the goal to get "bigger and better", but I presume if the population would stabilize, then home prices would also stabilize. 

But, obviously with supply and demand, anything that becomes rare with respect to demand will also cause the inflation disjoints.

I would also agree that in general workers are better off today than they were a hundred or two hundred years ago. Many of the benefits to people, though, are the result of things that were sort of all/ or nothing benefits for society as a whole, and could not be withheld from anyone at the lower end. There is either clean water running through city pipes, or there is not. There is either a fire department that puts out fires or there is not. There are either health and safety rules in a factory or offices or there are not. It became harder in some ways to withhold certain benefits provided to others, or perhaps another way to phrase it is that everyone benefited from advances that were only created to benefit a few. But despite that overflow effect, at some point if you keep paying workers less and less, they can't sustain themselves. For example, it costs me one day out of five to pay for the gas to drive to my job the rest of the week. If my child was still in day care, it would  cost another day to pay for five days of daycare.

So what I guess I am asking, is there a way that mathematicians can predict when an economical system becomes unstable. A small example would be the number of people paying into social security and the number withdrawing from it. At some point, the predicted numbers of people paying in can no longer support it. The other unsustainable aspect is that things that used to be small luxuries (store bought clothes, appliances) are incredibly cheap, but big ticket items, like a university education or houses or land (which you mentioned), are becoming more and more expensive, almost out of reach for an increasing number of people, which only seems to increase the economic divisions in society more and more, and if one dies poor, with uneducated children and no inheritance to pass on, those economic divisions only increase.

[alancalverd]

So what I guess I am asking, is there a way that mathematicians can predict when an economical system becomes unstable.

I think the one thing that is certain about economics is that economists are not very good at prediction - especially about the future!

 

The other unsustainable aspect is that things that used to be small luxuries (store bought clothes, appliances) are incredibly cheap, but big ticket items, like a university education or houses or land (which you mentioned), are becoming more and more expensive,

The difference here seems to be between those things that are mass-produced in third world sweatshops, and individualised one-offs produced in or native to the western world. It's not entirely clear to me what will happen in the future. As I grow older I'm less inclined to buy clothes and gadgets but pretty obviously vast amounts of money are moving eastwards in small quanta as people change their iphones and underwear for this year's model, and major Chinese and Indian capital funds are now rescuing undercapitalised western enterprises (like Jaguar Land Rover) from extinction. Two other huge financial gyres are oil revenues (which start wars) and illegal drugs (which keep crime and poverty on the streets), all of which drain money from the developed world and concentrate it in a few hands. Whilst the oil sheikhs seem to be investing openly in western industry and homeland development, it's not too clear where the drug money is being spent - largely, I suspect, on the revenue costs of running the trade by supporting small criminals along the supply route.

It's a far cry from the techno-capitalism of Brunel and Ford, or the philanthropy of Bazalgette and the New York Water Board.

[MarkPawelek]

Nuclear fission still can still give us plentiful cheap energy for thousands of years to come.

The main factors driving the high price of nuclear fission energy have been bad reactor designs, draconian regulation, and bad (for the customer) business models.

Most of today's reactors are pressurized light water reactors. This design goes back over 60 years. It was developed to power US navy submarines. It is inefficient in many ways.

1) By running a reactor at a higher temperature than the PWR more of the heat produced can be transferred. e.g. LFTR. The PWR is inefficient at using the heat produced.

2) Waste. PWR creates a lot of waste. Fuel must be periodically replaced. Only a tiny fraction of the fuel added is used. The remaining spent fuel is then most likely waste. It would be OK if it could be recycled but there are only 3 reprocessing plants on the planet. The spent fuel just festers away somewhere giving nuclear energy a really bad rep.

Because today's reactors almost all use Uranium as a fuel, they create a lot of plutonium and actinide waste. Very nasty.

A better design, such as a LFTR, would burn up all its Thorium fuel, leaving no spend fuel. At the end of the reactor life the waste would be a tiny fraction of that made by a PWR, and such waste would be low in plutonium and other actinides. It's even waste, as such, because it can just be added to another reactor.

3) Today's PWRs use Uranium as a fuel. Thorium is less damaging to the environment. 1 ton of Uranium needs 800,000 tons of ore to be mined. Thorium is often found in nature with the lanthanides. All the Thorium we need (to power the world with electricity) can be obtained as a by-product of lanthanide mining, with the vast majority left over for the future.

4) The LFTR is far safer than the PWR. It's reaction vessel is not pressurized. It intrinsically safer.  Melt-down is impossible, even if hit by a meteor, earthquake, terrorist attack, your worst nightmare, etc.

Next generation IV GEN reactors are far better than today's obsolete, 60 year old, reactor designs.

Coal and gas electricity plants both emit far more radiation than nuclear plants, orders of magnitude more. Coal also emits particulates responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths annually. We should replace all electricity from fossil fuel with IV GEN reactor designs.

Recommended: Thorium remix 2011.

[evan_au]

big ticket items, like a university education ... are becoming more and more expensive, almost out of reach for an increasing number of people.

Education is partly a problem of getting information and experience from those who have earned and learned it to those who have an incentive to learn.

Unconventional sources of education are now available from the Khan Academy, and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are now available from a number of universities.

At this point, it is not clear how to get a recognised certification from these institutions - or how these institutions are going to charge a reasonable fee for the course material.

What is clear is that a lecture that was once given to 100 students can now be viewed by 10,000 or more; and it doesn't cost the lecturer much more effort to deliver it. The challenge will be for students to get help when they get "stuck" - the equivalent of the traditional tutorial. Some institutions are letting students work together in online discussion forums to help each other.

[MarkPawelek]

We have a lot of energy reserves: Global energy resources in ZetaJoules
- chart compiled by 1984 Nobel physics laureate Carlo Rubbia

We'll be fried before we run out of oil and gas.

The slide can still be found on page 7 of : Carlo Rubbia's ThEC13 presentation

[alancalverd]

big ticket items, like a university education ... are becoming more and more expensive, almost out of reach for an increasing number of people.

Unconventional sources of education are now available from the Khan Academy, and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are now available from a number of universities.

At this point, it is not clear how to get a recognised certification from these institutions - or how these institutions are going to charge a reasonable fee for the course material.

Not a problem! London University ran correspondence courses, initially for military personnel and prisoners and later for anyone (?possibly limited to Commonwealth citizens) leading to BA and BSc degrees, and also operated a worldwide scheme for mentoring PhDs. I guess that represents the expensive end of the scale - certainly extremely hard work for the students.

Not sure whether LU still do, but the Open University developed the concept in the Sixties with radio and TV lectures and demonstrations supplementing the correspondence material. They now offer 250 modular degree and diploma courses to over 250,000 students in the British Isles and Europe, with partnerships worldwide. The standard, at least in mathematics (I took some modules some years back) and physics (several of my engineering colleagues have OU physics degrees on top of factory or military apprenticeships - perfect preparation for a professional) is excellent and the postgraduate supervision seems to follow the old London model of mentoring workplace research - rather more practical than most "internal" PhD projects. How do you get a recognised qualification? Usual method: hand in your coursework, take the exams (usually held in school halls during vacations), and turn up for a viva. It's very tough (60% dropout in undergraduate maths!) but very satisfying and I think represents the future of education.

[evan_au]

We have a lot of energy reserves

I agree that there are a lot of currently untapped fuel reserves.

A number of countries are actively looking at Thorium reactors (like India). Despite being demonstrated in the 1960s, I imagine that they attracted little interest from the superpowers because its not so easy to make nuclear weapons with a Thorium reactor.

I think the important measures of energy extraction are:

• How much energy do you need to inject to get energy out, over the whole lifecycle?
  
• How much environmental damage do you create in the process?

There have been places in the world where you drill a hole, and the oil spurts out. But those oilfields are now spent, or in decline.

For liquid/gas fuels, now we have to look at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, where methane turns into a solid and gums up all the pipes, arctic oilsands, or in deep-ocean clathrates. It is getting more expensive to produce a unit of energy, because we have used most of the easier options.

Similar scarcity is striking other industries like fishing - we are using more powerful and sophisticated technology to chase fewer and fewer fish - leading to the collapse of some fisheries. Defining a sustainable fishing industry is a major political challenge in Europe at the moment.

[alancalverd]

I imagine that they attracted little interest from the superpowers because its not so easy to make nuclear weapons with a Thorium reactor.

More to the point, it's not so easy to make a thorium reactor! 

Defining a sustainable fishing industry is a major political challenge in Europe at the moment.

Exactly. It's a political challenge, not a scientific one. The object of the EU fisheries policy, as with every other aspect of EU regulation, was to protect the market, not the stock, of fish. So there's a minimum market size for every species, a quota for landed fish above  the minimum,  and  all the "by catch" goes to waste or fertiliser. Contrast that with the Norwegian rule: you have to sell everything you catch, and there's a limit on total catch. Consequently Norwegian waters are just as productive as they ever were, and the rest of the North Sea is a desert. 

[weleini]

How can economies continue to grow, given a finite supply of resources?

In addition to the recovery of scarce resources, managers also will have to apply other approaches to mitigate the occurrence of natural resource scarcity in their supply chains .  Building strategies that apply logistics, avoidance, allocation, and reclamation techniques are the focus of recent research at the University of Tennessee. Preliminary findings from this research have lead to a set of practical recommendations to help supply chain managers prepare for and counter natural resources scarcity. 

[syhprum]

The short answer is that they cannot.