Friday, September 28, 2012
"New nuclear fuel source would power human race until 5000AD"
At "theRegister.com", Lewis Page reports on new techniques for extracting uranium from the ocean and the potential benefits:
"Secondly, the prospect of being able to extract billions of tons of uranium from the sea means that humanity has access to enough fuel to meet all its energy needs - all of them, not just present day electricity demand but also the other 90 per cent currently supplied in thermal form - for thousands of years. One US government statement issued this week says that oceanic uranium could last 6,500 years: but a more conservative estimate assuming use of recycling (as offered by Professor J C Mackay of Cambridge) is say three millennia with all humans using as much energy as a present-day European does. So we've gone with that for our headline."