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Looking over that page, there's a critical error materially affecting his supply estimate.

Rob Lister gives global annual energy consumption as 140 TWh.

The true number is 211,782 TWh, for 2011, from IEA (expressed as 18,210 Mtoe -- million tons of oil equivalent)

http://www.iea.org/Sankey/index.html

That's 1512x higher than Lister's value. Dividing his 64,000 year supply by 1512, we get 42 years supply of thorium.

I see a problem.



That's only proven reserves, though. Thorium right now is in basically no demand. Given the extremely high energy density of the fuel, A LOT of ores will become economically extractable.

It might not be 64ky, but >1ky seems to be very realistic.

Edit: See also the Wikipedia section on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Reserve_estimates




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