With at least a million metric tonnes of proven thorium reserves, that’s 8,000,000 TWh electricity delivered. With global electricity use at 15,000 TWh this puts the proven reserves at well over 500 years of supply. It gets better when you realize that thorium is really cheap; a gram would only cost several cents at today’s spot price. Several cents for 8000 kWh (much more than my yearly use) is a really good bargain for fuel costs. Even a ten-fold increase in thorium prices wouldn’t be noticed in the electricity bill by most… but it would make much more thorium economically recoverable.

The real trick will be how to make a lot of thorium reactors quickly and cheaply, but it seems worth a shot.

The real paradox about Jevons’ paradox, is that it has never been conclusively proven in a quantitative way. The causality is highly questionable, as there are many factors at play and the simple paradox that Jevon thought of doesn’t have much explanotory power in the real world. For example, it omits population growth (Jevon lived a LONG time ago), as a primary impactor on resource use. And yet Jevon’s paradox is often used as some argument against efficiency to promote some hidden agenda by propagandists. Usually, this concerns either nuclear propagadists or doomers that want to go “back to nature” or something.

Similarly with the use of technology – LED table lights are much safer than candles.

I agree, great posts Tyler!

Now on the issue of LED table ambiance lighting. First, as Paul C. mentioned, this is a market making application, where the price is more elastic than in general lighting applications. Second, and perhaps more relevant to your post, the competition is actually candle lighting, not electrical lighting in this particular scenario (just think about restaurants, etc. as a prime market for table ambiance light). As such, I believe that LED table lights (embedded in coasters, corks or otherwise) are very beneficial for the environment as they are much cleaner than burning candles. Note that there are rechargeable versions of such devices (I have one of these) which handles the buy-and-throw-away issue.

I personnally tend to disagree with the hypothesis that energy efficiency drives up energy consumption. Maybe a bit, but not more than to offset the benefits of energy efficiency (I agree with Scatter’s post, and would also add home energy efficiency: I have had my home insulated, it’s now a bit more comfortable in winter, but the primary impact was a drastic reduction in energy consumption).

Anyway, great discussion.

If you dig through the computer science and engineering research, you will find lots of work being done on the efficiency of small electronics and much of it is aimed at finding newer, broader applications where the status quo produces electronics that are too inefficient to currently provide solutions…. and so they are not used.

Also, think about the prospect of everything we buy containing an RFID tag. Or the massive new market that cheaper cars will produce: gasoline is not expensive to buy, but for many people in developing countries, the cost of the cars that consume it is a barrier to significant consumption of that fuel.