Thorium fission and Polywell Fusion

Energy production - including electricity generation, transportation, and heating is based on following sources in order of importance:
◦ oil and gas
◦ coal
◦ U235 based nuclear fission
◦ hydro-electric
◦ other renewables

The following graph illustrates their relative importance, based on 2005 data. Its naive projections are demand based, disregarding actual supply availability. Regarding oil, the projections are off already now, as its production has not increased since 2005.

For each of these sources, the point where demand exceeds supply is estimated - this is called peak point. A peak energy source is either replaced by an other one, or total industrial output falls, resulting in permanent recession.

Oil and gas are by far the most important and hardest to replace energy sources today. From heating to transportation to fertilizer production, so much depends directly on their availability. A prediction of future supplies can be made from the history of oil field discoveries, as shown on the following graph.

It is clear from the graph that despite sophistication of discovery tools the age of large and frequent discoveries is in the past - even the recent sub-sea field off the Brazilian coast does not change this fact. While there is scientific debate about the amount of oil in the Earth's deep crust, the amount of remaining oil within production reach has been steadily declining even though it can be now brought up from over 3 km depth. At the current rate, 4 times more oil is being produced than what is being newly discovered. This implies that the point of peak must close, in fact recent data implies that global oil production has peaked during 2005!


How do we know that this is not just a temporary setback? While it cannot be known for sure, it is a strong evidence that total output did not increase during mid-2005 to mid-2007 period of strong economic growth. Deliberate holding back of production is also unlikely, as OPEC has a poor record of enforcing its own production quotas.
What aggravates future production further is that remaining oil is in more and more difficult places and is often of worse quality, decreasing energy return on energy investment ratio for oil production:
◦ before 1950s it was 100 to 1
◦ during 1970s it was 30 to 1
◦ since 2000 it is 10 to 1
Recent pull-back of oil prices does not make the point of supply deficiency much further away: as shown in the previous chapter, any demand reductions are very temporary due to the nature of economic system. Taking the most optimistic scenario of demand reduction replay like in late 1970s / early 1980s, demand would be back to mid 2008 levels in less than 30 years, and will be impossible to satisfy by then. The pessimistic scenario is outlined in an interview with Matt Simmons (MS) by Bud Conrad (BC):

BC: Let's discuss that for clarification. We know that flow rates are what we measure to understand whether we're at peak or not. In M. King Hubbert's work, peak oil is calculated using the total resource base, but your point is that we may still have oil that we're just not able to produce in an economic way.
MS: If it's in the ground and you can barely get it out, it's as irrelevant as me looking out over Penobscot Bay and saying "There's a vast amount of hydrates about a thousand miles from here, a thousand feet underwater." Well, so what? That's not useful energy.
BC: If it takes more energy to dig up that last barrel of oil than it produces, then there's no sense in trying.
MS: And another important concept is that if you're lucky enough to find a highly pressurized field and it turns out to be condensate, which is sometimes called natural motor gasoline, you can literally bypass the refinery -- because it's been baked in the ground -- and put it right in your car. It doesn't run perfectly, but it runs. With the heavy oil out of Canada, you have to expend energy to make it ooze out of the ground, and once it's oozed out of the ground, you still have totally unusable oil.
BC: You still have to go through a fairly hefty process...
MS: ...of upgrading, and then finally diluting it with high-quality oil before it can flow. So one is total junk oil, and the other is the Rolls Royce of petroleum.
BC: The world needs to understand that we've been using up the Rolls Royces first because they're more available. The harder-to-find and harder-to-refine stuff is what's left. I think that's misunderstood.
MS: Oh, it's totally misunderstood. Sour, heavy oil is really not worth very much.
BC: We're probably in more serious a situation than most people would realize, and it's no better with natural gas. Switching gears for a moment, do you think the rise of LNG will be enough to keep up with declines in natural gas discovery and subsequently in natural gas production?
MS: Well, first of all, the problem with LNG is that if we try to develop a spot market out of LNG, the odds of it ending in bankruptcy are about 90%.
BC: Who goes bankrupt?
MS: All the players. The cost to produce and distribute LNG is so high that to make LNG work in any sort of financial reality, you would need a 25- or 30-year guaranteed supply. And then you can amortize it over 25 or 30 years. If you're going on a spot supply, you've got to write it off over 10 years and then you'll need $40 per million BTU to make the economics work. The other thing is that about 35% of the hydrocarbon value gets chewed up in the process of cryogenically freezing natural gas, transporting it, and then re-gassing it.
BC: In your opinion then, LNG is not an economically viable solution. We won't do it.
MS: We shouldn't do it. But it turns out that high-quality natural gas - sweet, high-quality natural gas - is just like sweet oil. It's basically in decline.
BC: And therefore also harder to find, despite our original hope of about a decade ago. Clean energy was going to fix everything through natural gas for electricity and everything else.
MS: Yes, and using natural gas for electricity turned out to be an unbelievably stupid decision. Using electricity for heat was equally stupid. Natural gas should be refined to one use and one use only, and that's creating instantaneous and high-efficiency heat.

There are some publications and journal articles assuring readers that new and huge oil reserves are just around the corner, so no need to worry about false alarms of peaking oil. Most frequent examples are Canadian tar sands or 'enhanced oil recovery' techniques, which get more percentage of underground reserves into barrels. Upon closer inspection, the logic of how these great reserves delay the moment of peaking oil extraction peels away like layers of onion.
Let's investigate the case of 'enhanced oil recovery', which looks most promising on the face of it. Currently 20% - 40% of the reservoir's original oil can be extracted, using so-called primary and secondary recovery. The expectation is that with 'enhanced oil recovery' techniques, which generally involves injecting of pressurized CO2 gas into the oil field to make oil come up, around 30% - 60% of the original oil could be recovered. So if we got to around peak extraction rate in 100 years, how many more years do we gain by a 50% increase of extractable reserves till peak extraction rate? The correct answer is of course not 50 years, as recent production rates have been much higher than rates of early 20th century; so the theoretical feasibility is 20 - 25 years extra time. A further disappointment is the realization that one third of this additional oil must be burned right away to produce the required quantity of CO2, to pressurize it underground, and to drive the process recirculating the CO2 that comes back with the additional oil. This means pushing out the date of peak oil only by 14-16 years in the best case. Upon closer analysis, one needs to compare flow rates of original extraction versus flow rates enabled additional capacity, and also consider the speed at which technology for additional capacity can be deployed. Such analysis has been done by Dr Robert Hirsch. The first clue is to look at historic example of geographic regions which are already past their peak extraction rate. Taking the example of USA oil production, it is observed that neither price increases or technology advances have succeeded reversing the relentless decline of production rate past its peak rate:

The set of possible mitigation tools for world oil production peak are the following: efficient vehicles, gas-to-liquids (GTL), Heavy oil and tar sands, coal liquefaction, enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Their impact in terms of million barrels per day of additional production is estimated to develop as follows:

To be noted about this estimation is that enhanced oil recovery only provides a minor contribution; so much for the presumption that it could possibly delay the timing of peak oil production. The biggest contribution comes from production of heavy oils, which look good by the number of barrels but not good in terms of energy content, and from tar sands, which are by the way environmentally destructive to reprocess. The second biggest contributor is coal liquefaction; as the analysis further down will show, this methods is viable for around 15 years only because of coal production will also peak subsequently. The interesting question concerns the combined impact of these mitigation tools; are they sufficient to delay peaking oil production. In the analysis of Dr Hirsch the answer is no if they are applied at the time of peak; any substantial delaying requires a global crash program of all these tools applied at least 10 years prior to peak of traditional oil production. The dashed line of following charts shows demand evolution, while solid line shows evolution of traditional production:

The inescapable conclusion is that oil peak cannot be mitigated if it indeed took place in 2005. Delaying would be equally difficult even if peak proves to happen only by 2020: the credit crisis and subsequent collapse in oil prices has removed the prospect of investing in mitigation techniques and even stopped most oil exploration investments. Furthermore, coal liquefaction and gas-to-liquids technique will be not possible after 2020 for the shortfall of coal and natural gas production - about half of envisioned mitigation capacity just would not be present.

Some journals nevertheless cheer up readers with mitigation tools straight out of science fiction - presented as proven methods. Here is one such example from July 2005 edition of Business Week journal:

The latest idea is called MEOR, for microbial enhanced oil recovery. Various labs around the world are engineering special bugs that generate CO2 biologically, along with detergent-like chemicals that help flush oil out of rocks. The microbes can be cultivated underground or in well-side vats. Because they grow explosively, the Energy Dept., which is funding several research projects, says MEOR technology may be the most cost-effective of all tertiary processes.
MEOR is already used in Venezuela, China, Indonesia, and the U.S. to treat deposits of heavy oil -- a molasses-thick form of oil. Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory hope to develop new armies of bioengineered bugs that can infiltrate underground rocks and turn the gunky stuff into the sweet-flowing crude that erupts like the gushers in Hollywood movies.

MEOR has proven to be a disappointment at the sites where it has been tested and will remain a Hollywood fantasy. Perhaps it should have occurred to involved people that above-ground oil depositories which were used as lighting lamp oil during antique and medieaval times would have never existed if microbial recovery worked; bacteria would have eaten these reserves in first place. The idea however cannot be theoretically excluded - it's just a slim chance to succeed where Nature's evolution failed.

Back from Hollywood to reality, 80% - 90% of all oil infrastructure equipment is operating beyond its originally intended lifetime. Replacing any substantial part of this infrastructure would mean not only production downtime, but would also divert large amounts of energy for steel production - we are talking about massive steel structures. It can be stated with high certainty that the era of tensions over remaining dividing remaining oil resources is at the door. How well is Europe going to fare in a scramble to secure oil supplies? Not very well at all, as the following figure suggests. There are no significant reserves in Europe. About 50% world oil reserves are in areas militarily occupied by USA (yellow color) and 7% is in Russia (green color). Because of their overwhelming military power, these two countries hold the ace for securing their share of resources from other areas. Without sufficient replacement energy source, they would extract a heavy price from Europeans in exchange for access to some remaining oil and gas supplies - establishing a system of domination before running out themselves of supplies.


Coal is generally regarded to be a vast remaining energy resource, that can be used to compensate for declining oil production rates and service increasing energy demand. This would materialize in the form of more coal-fired power plants and oil from coal conversion. Despite such general understanding, there is not any firm resource data supporting such conclusion. The Energy Watch Group's 2007 report states the unreliability of coal remaining coal estimates as their most important conclusion:

This paper attempts to give a comprehensive view of global coal resources and past and current coal production based on a critical analysis of available statistics. This analysis is then used to provide an outlook on the possible coal production in the coming decades. The result of the analysis is that there is probably much less coal left to be burnt than most people think.
The first and foremost conclusion from this investigation is that data quality of coal reserves and resources is poor, both on global and national levels. But there is no objective way to determine how reliable the available data actually are. The timeline analyses of data performed here suggest that on a global level the statistics overestimate the reserves and the resources. In the global sum both reserves and resources have been downgraded over the past two decades, in some cases drastically.
For some countries such as Vietnam proven reserves have not been updated for up to 40 years. The data for China were last updated in 1992... According to past experience, it is very likely that the available statistics are biased on the high side and therefore projections based on these data will give an upper boundary of the possible future development.

For estimating peak production, it is more reliable to extrapolate data of historic production rates than to base projections on reserve estimates. Prof. David Rutledge has used this method on national production rates, and found good correlation between extrapolating production rates and ultimate extraction levels. Here is his production rate extrapolation for total coal production:

Ultimately mined amount of coal is estimated at 60% of current reserve estimates - much in line with past reserve overestimation rates on national levels. Reaching peak coal production rates happens when cumulative production reaches somewhere between 50% and 70% of ultimate amount fit - implying a peak production rate in terms of coal mass between 2020 and 2030. The stability of ultimate production estimate implies also a high certainty of the estimated peak time; by 2030 about 70% of all coal will be mined, that is ever going to be produced! As with the case of oil, closest and highest quality coal field have been mined first, meaning less energy content per mass for remaining coal reserves and also transportation-related energy loss. Replacing missing oil and gas capacity from coal will not be possible when resource scarcity hits.

Considering the operation of current U235 based nuclear power plants, remaining resources provide a temporary relief at best. Working with the optimistic estimate of remaining U235 resources, Prof. Jeffrey Freidberg estimates that U235 based power plants offer up to 20 years relief from energy scarcity if total demand is satisfied from this technology:

An assessment of economically realistic U235 mining rates estimates a scarcity of U235 supply after 2030. This date of U235 demand exceeding available supplies depends strongly on the amount of oil, gas, and coal energy replaced by nuclear fission.

Considering the substantial capital investment and energy requirement to build nuclear power plants, it is not useful to embark on a massive expansion of U235 based nuclear power plants anymore. Nuclear fission reactors are generally designed for 60-years operation - as above figure shows, newly built reactors will eventually run out of U235 fuel. Essentially, the only reason why Uranium shortage has not yet become apparent is the drastic slowing of new nuclear reactor constructions in Europe and USA since mid-1980s.

There is fortunately one remaining nuclear fission option, which has been proposed by physicist Eugene Wigner as early as the 1950s, but has been swept aside by military priorities favoring U235-based reactor design: the Thorium based nuclear fission reactor design. Being kept out of the information loop in the age global news, the general public has very little knowledge of taken design choices that have shaped the nuclear industry so far. Here is how advocates of Thorium based fission reactors summarize this option, quoted from www.energyfromthorium.com :

Whenever the construction of a nuclear reactor is delayed because of a false hope in "renewable" energies that never materialize, a coal or natural gas plant has to be built instead, polluting the air we breathe and driving global warming faster and faster. But even conventional nuclear reactors produce waste, and because they use only a tiny fraction of the energy in uranium, that resource is also being depleted.
Enter Thorium. Half a century ago, a different kind of nuclear reactor was invented, one that burns Thorium - an inexhaustible supply of fuel, and much cheaper than the enriched-uranium fuel used by current reactors. It can even use the nuclear waste from other reactors as fuel! The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, or LFTR for short, operates at low pressures, so it could never explode and its liquid-fuel design makes it physically impossible to overheat.
Unfortunately, it was the Cold War - energy was still cheap, global warming was just a theory, and the LFTR wasn't good for making weapons-grade plutonium, so it was abandoned. Now, a growing group of scientists and engineers are working to bring the LFTR back to life - to free us from filthy coal and turn stockpiles of nuclear waste into the clean, cheap energy we need.

A working prototype of the Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor has been even built in the USA during 1960s as a research project. The theory of such reactor's operation has been worked out: there are no scientific challenges, only engineering challenges associated with commercialization of a new energy source. Thorium is abundant enough on the Earth for providing reliable energy in the foreseeable future to any economic growth scenario! Moreover, thorium fueled fission reactors can also run on U238 fuel; there are vast stockpiles of such fuel because 99% of mined uranium is U238 isotope. The next chapter is dedicated to describing such reactor design.

Hydro-electric power is generally the most attractive among renewable energy sources, combining high power density and constant availability. Some lucky regions will continue to rely on this power source. Its current share of about 15% power contribution cannot be grown in the future, and is expected to shrink significantly for the combination of following reasons:
◦ growing electric power needs by growing economy
◦ growing electric power needs as transportation gradually moves over electric power after peak oil
◦ some poorly designed hydroelectric projects loose output power fairly quickly because of siltation
An example of siltation effect is documented by McCully:

Sedimentation due to build up of river carried material behind the dam (especially in glacial rivers) can quickly reduce the dams lifetime, and significantly effect the amount of power produced. Sedimentation in the Sanmexia dam in China reduced energy generation from 1,200MW to only 250MW after only 3 years. Annual average hydro plants in the USA produce only 46% of expected generation according to industry.

Altogether, hydro-electric power could contribute around 10% of future power need in the optimistic scenario.

Among other renewable energy sources, wind energy is the largest contributor, with around 1% of contribution. The energy that it produces is currently more expensive than fossil-based alternatives because of high maintenance costs and relatively short lifetime of wind turbines - about 15 years - this difference could level out in the future as traditional energy sources peak. In comparison with the nuclear fission option, while there are claims of similar operating expenses, such claims are suspicious for mechanical reasons. Simply put, the power density per turbine is low, and the required maintenance of a vast array of units with moving parts is necessarily costly. A recent article in Der Spiegel magazine illustrates this point:

After the industry's recent boom years, wind power providers and experts are now concerned. The facilities may not be as reliable and durable as producers claim. Indeed, with thousands of mishaps, breakdowns and accidents having been reported in recent years, the difficulties seem to be mounting. Gearboxes hiding inside the casings perched on top of the towering masts have short shelf lives, often crapping out before even five years is up. In some cases, fractures form along the rotors, or even in the foundation, after only limited operation. Short circuits or overheated propellers have been known to cause fires. All this despite manufacturers' promises that the turbines would last at least 20 years.

Wind power today is artificially kept alive through public subsidies. It certainly has a long-term role as energy source if operating costs prove to be low enough in comparison to nuclear fission option - this role however should be viewed in proper context. When recipients of public funding recycle some supporting grants into a self-gratifying PR campaign, which miscommunicates this context, one has a reason for suspicion:

Solar energy is a negligible contributor at the moment, but its share is should increase in the future. Solar thermal plants, where mirrors concentrate sunlight and thereby heat a circulating fluid seem a more attractive alternative than direct photo-voltaic conversion. The main reason is that with photovoltaic power generation it takes 3-4 years to generate back the energy invested in the first place for production of photo-voltaic panels - with solar thermal plants the payback time is about half year. Solar thermal plants are furthermore more resilient against short-term disruptions, such as a cloud passing by. Solar energy has enough capacity to make up for some shortage of traditional energy sources when resource scarcity hits.

While in theory it is possible that most of world energy production is based on solar and wind energy - it remains just that; a theoretical possibility. Relying mostly on these sources would face following challenges in the European context:
◦ The issue of land use - hindering solar energy to greater degree than wind energy. While full reliance on solar energy takes only a few percentage of a country's land area, reservation of such quantities of land faces endless controversies and challenges in absence of dictatorial measures.
◦ Part of the electric grid would need to be rebuilt too, as solar and wind plants are not at the suitable places for the grid, but rather the grid connects places where it is feasible to build these plants.
◦ The intermittent nature of sunny days and windy hours means that capacity must over-provisioned. The biggest challenge is that the number of continuously cloudy days is unpredictable, and can sometimes last for weeks - more often so in some countries than others. Taking into account the number of sunny days per year, the varying daily intensity peaking at noon, and energy consumption during dark hours one easily arrives at 5 times over-provisioning. But wait, the energy needs to be first stored and then converted back to electricity. Current thoughts on storing reserve energy involve either gravitational water pumping or hydrogen production. Because of the remorseless laws of thermodynamics, both conversion into reserve energy and re-conversion into electricity means energy losses: optimistically just around 50% of total. This means that when relying mainly on solar power, 10 MW of solar capacity must be brought online for each replaced or added MW!

The last point above is the most severe, it means not only high infrastructure costs, but also unfavorable payback times on energy invested into manufacturing and building the power plants - even with solar thermal solution. Energy payback time on the order 5 years is not an affordable luxury when traditional energy sources peak.
Advocates of wind and solar say this is not a fair example because solar and wind can complement each other. Let's see whether wind energy results in more favorable ratios. Wind turbines run around 30% capacity even at most favorable locations, but the more general number is 25% at suitable locations. The rest of the time wind is too high or too low. The result is 4 times capacity over-provisioning relative to a stable energy source, without accounting storage conversion losses. As expected lifetime of wind turbines can be about 15 years IF current design and quality issues are remedied, one has to factor in energy cost of replacement parts. The full steel structure of a wind turbine costs half a year of nominal energy wind energy output to produce, in terms of energy costs. Assuming that only half of the steel needs replacement upon lifetime expiration, and factoring in 25% availability, about 2 years of energy production is spent on manufacturing replacement parts. That is more than 10% of expected lifetime. Factoring in replacement energy costs and the optimistic assumption of 50% energy loss at storage conversion and re-conversion, the conclusion is that over 9 MW of wind capacity must be brought online for each replaced or added MW. This is very similar result to solar energy consideration. The energy payback time on initial power capacity construction is on the order of 5 years as well. No matter how one slices and dices reliance on combination of wind and solar energy, the result is around 9 to 10 times required nominal capacity increase and around 5 years energy payback time on initial construction.

An ardent supporter of wind and solar energy would say: 'But wind is often blowing when sun is not shining, and sun is shining when wind is not blowing. With some smart combination of wind and solar energy it should be possible to come up with not much more than 2 times capacity over-provisioning and only rarely use stored energy from a reservoir here and there'. The problem with such reasoning is not only the possibility of cloudy and windless weather, but mainly the varying amount of produced energy output, which cannot be fed directly into a stable grid. It is instructive to look at the graph of temporal variations in wind energy output near Vancouver - in ideal location for wind energy.
Temporal variations of solar power output depend on the weather scenario:

To suggest that some linear combination of above graphs results in constant output is nonsense. That of course does not stop some journals from making such claims - without supporting details of course. Balancing between solar plants does not work - cloudy weather may extend over large regions, and also the sun sets at same time over all plants. Regarding balancing of wind output power among a number of farms, what is the probability that multiple random graphs of above nature balance to a reliable constant? It is very-very close to zero. The extent to which variable wind power output can be utilized in power grids have been analysed by several researchers. In his 'Techno-economic Optimization of Integrating Wind Power into Constrained Electric Networks' research work, Jessi Maddaloni concludes that wind power can be utilized at 10% total power contribution at best; output capacity would need to be strongly capped at higher output rate to retain grid stability. The graph on the right illustrates this result for the electric grid of Vancouver, which was the subject of this study.

Mathematical modelling of power generation options for Vancouver area has been done by Pablo C. Benítez et al, arriving at similar conclusions. Their findings are summarized as follows:

We developed a mathematical optimization model to assess the impacts of introducing intermittent renewable energy sources into an electrical grid. ... This information is crucial for any system operator wishing to evaluate the efficiency of the electricity market. Our model also integrates power generation with energy storage. This provides a planning tool for the system operator that could help the operator maximize the benefits of storage facilities, reduce price spikes and offset the intermittence of wind power. Finally, the model is sufficiently flexible so that different types of generators or energy storage devices can easily be added and sensitivity analyses performed. The application to Vancouver Island indicates that wind power cannot provide a dependable increase in generating capacity or reduce the need for undersea [power importing] cables.

One may wonder how is it possible then that some media reports show massive investment into wind power by private investors as 'proof' that wind power is the right choice, assuring there is no need to look further than watching where 'smart money' is moving into. An example of one such newspaper report:

In 2007, decentralized renewables worldwide attracted $71 billion in private capital. Nuclear got zero. Why? Economics.

Economics indeed; such reports generally omit that these projects have hidden externality costs, that resolve the apparent paradox:
◦ Taxpayer subsidies, that accompany such investment
◦ Cost of other reactors kept at reduced or idling capacity to make up variations of wind output
◦ Increased grid operating costs, associated with managing of variable input
◦ Finally, cost per kW capacity comparisons usually omit interesting circumstance. Most notably, when comparing wind energy costs to nuclear energy costs, journalists often forget to mention that they are comparing 15 years lifetime plants to 60 years lifetime plants of other fuel sources, that they are comparing factory-design (wind power) to custom-design (current nuclear projects), that they are comparing partially available capacity to 24/7 capacity, and that they are comparing a technology designed primarily for military objectives (current nuclear) to a technology designed purely for power generation (wind). The outcome of such comparison is totally arbitrary, and provides desinformation instead of insight.

Lastly, there is the idea of building thermal solar installations around North Africa, and supply Europe through high-voltage direct current (HVDC) lines. The following diagrams show the envisioned electricity grid, and best-case transmission losses with thyristor based line commutated converter type HVDC transmission (LCC HVDC):

With this concept, it could be theoretically possible to achieve only 4-5 times capacity over-provisioning, resulting from following factors:
◦ 1.5 times over-provisioning due to daily output variations and occasional rains / sandstorms
◦ 30% transport and AC conversion losses
◦ 2 times over-provisioning for stored energy conversion and re-conversion
However political realities make such projects suitable only for countries with large desert areas, like USA or China. The biggest obstacle is not the required international effort for construction of HVDC grid infrastructure; it is political. European countries will aim for a local or regional solution; in the wake of Russian gas supply interruptions in 2006 and 2009, no country is desiring to swap one type of energy dependence for an other external dependence. The conclusion is that Europe could not do better than 9-10 times capacity over-provisioning, if it were to rely mostly on combination of wind and solar energy.

Therefore the long term role of solar and wind energy is the role of additional energy source, supplementing a stable main source of energy without capacity over-provisioning. Together, they could contribute around 20% of the energy need in optimistic scenario. Ideally, the main source of energy that they supplement can be dynamically run at higher or lower capacity, in order to accommodate for the varying output of these renewables.

There are some other claims to renewable energy sources. These fall into three categories:
◦ Negligible in terms of potential energy capacity or applicable only at local scale in special locations. Wave tidal energy is an example of such case.
◦ Prohibitively expensive as long as any other energy option exists. Solar power from orbiting giant satellites is an illustrative example.
◦ A pure con, designed to profit from public funding. This category can be identified through the 'bootstrap challenge': can such design be demonstrated in a way that uses only produced energy output to run related operations and transportation, and also to build required plant and machinery? How long would it take to get back the energy invested into building capacity up in the first place? Above picture speaks better than thousand words on this category.

In conclusion, peaking means that within less than 20 years it will be impossible to satisfy energy demand from traditional resources - no matter what combination of oil, gas, coal, and U235 based nuclear fission is attempted. Europe is going to be particularly disadvantaged in the post-peak period against countries with substantial fossil reserves or desert areas. The only currently available technology option for gradual replacement of declining resources and for further growth of energy intensity is the following choice:
◦ Up to 30% of energy demand from renewable resources, meaning hydro-power at 10% and solar / wind power at 20%.
◦ At least 70% of energy demand must come from Thorium-based nuclear fission.
Fortunately these two sources of energy complement each other well in the sense that output capacity from the Thorium-based liquid core reactor design can be dynamically adjusted, compensating for variations solar and wind energy output, so that the electric grid is stabilized.

As described in the previous chapter, the most likely scenario associated with peaks of traditional energy capacity is denial of long-term planning all the way to actual energy scarcity symptoms, and then a mad rush for some quick fix, as if required information has not been available all the way.
The author is nevertheless hopeful that post-peak energy problems would be avoided through informed citizen activism. The next chapter therefore introduces the Thorium-based nuclear fission reactor design, and the subsequent chapters look at nuclear fusion energy, as a prospective alternative energy source in the future.