Who Killed the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR)?

[GliderGuider]

84. I base my opinion on the situation around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Last edited Fri Dec 30, 2011, 08:26 PM - Edit history (1)

Here are the factors:

World population was about a billion, for a deltaP of 0.15.

The level of human activity was much lower because it was not leveraged by technology (specifically internal combustion engines), though the impact of each action was probably much greater.

The activity impact was higher both because the forms of energy being used had greater environmental impact per BTU (esp. deforestation and horse-shit), and because the technologies were inefficient both in energy use and waste production. My impression is that the average activity impact may have been several times higher than today.

So I've settled on an deltaAL of 0.5 and a deltaAI of 4.0.

That gives a deltaPI of 0.15*0.5*4.0 = 0.3 or about a third as much as today.

However we also know that the ecological impact of this situation was already significant and worsening. Evidence for this is Middle East desertification, the deforestation of of Europe, the pollution of rivers near cities and the extinction of notable species such as buffalo and passenger pigeons.

Combining those two threads of thought leads me to the conclusion that a truly sustainable deltaPI is much less than 0.3. For lack of any more precise method of estimation I've settled on a value of half that, 0.15. While that may still be too high, it's closer to being truly sustainable over the long term (i.e. over thousands of years) than our current situation.

Of course this is all guesstimation, and is coloured by my personal inner state and residual beliefs. The estimation method is crude, the definitions of sustainability are open to question, and the future impact of today's activity is unpredictable. Nevertheless, this is how I've arrived at my conclusion that we need to reduce human impact on the planet by 85%.

We won't, of course, but it's nice to know what it would take to rectify our imbalance with the planet's natural systems and other inhabitants.