I ran across this blog post on future energy concerns — Less heat, more light: solving the energy crisis, and while much of it seems solid and there are some very good points in it, there are some things that are very, very wrong. And there’s this whole problem with conclusions drawn from invalid premises — you can’t claim they are valid, even if they happen to be correct; you can’t be sure if the correctness is accidental.

Basically, a discussion of how much energy will we be demanding in the future and where will we be getting it. World-wide we use about 14 TW of power (terawatts, or 10^12 watts) — for an idea of scale, that’s like having fourteen one-terawatt light bulbs — and if one assume a 2% annual increase in use, that will double by 2050.

The first issue I have is that the “let’s get more efficient” isn’t first — if the new real demand isn’t actually going to be 14 TW, then let’s use the real number as our target. So the conclusions about nuclear

A two gigawatt plant needs to be built every month from here to 2050. That will get us all of one (1!) terawatt out of the fourteen needed.

is a little off if fourteen TW isn’t actually needed. Also, the conclusions about how much uranium we have available to us

There’s lots more U in sea water, but if you think we should try the environmental disaster of mining seawater — to get 1TW of radioactive energy — you probably got that idea via the fillings in your teeth.

well, sorry, but snark isn’t science. Since we’re basically talking about filtration (technically adsorption on a polymer), the “disaster” part isn’t leaping out at me.

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