Thorium sure is spiffy!

Reading more and more about peak oil and EROEI (during my study breaks), I've become more and more pessimistic about our civilization's chances of surviving the coming mega-energy-crunch. There's just really no alternatives to oil out there. Coal is the closest thing, despite its horrible environmental impact, and even then it'll probably be 10 short years before we face peak coal. Solar is sustainable, but the infrastructure requires a huge amount of energy to build, so we won't be able to scale it up to meet our needs anytime soon. Wind and tidal power are very efficient, but can only be effectively used in a few places. Nuclear is too inefficient, and uranium is running out anyway.

Economists like to assume that the power of human ingenuity is limitless - that technology will always point the way forward, will always bail us out. But that's just not true. If that were true, Western civilization wouldn't have mostly collapsed from 400 AD to 1400 AD. In fact, the collapse in the middle of the first millennium AD was worldwide...what's to say it won't happen again? Is it that now, since we've discovered the magic principle of capitalism and the free market, we'll always get technological solutions to every problem? Sorry, kids - the Romans knew what a market was...and when's the last time you met a Roman?

So if technology doesn't bail us out, we're just plain screwed when the oil runs out. Europe will be the least screwed, America marginally screwed (bye-bye cars), Asia somewhat more screwed, and Africa will be utterly f***ed.

So I'm looking around for a spiffy new technology that will save us. Fusion looks like it's going nowhere fast, and what else is there? There aren't any more fossil fuels in the ground. And keep in mind, any new energy technology would have to produce energy at least equivalent to the 83 million barrels of oil per day that we currently use to power our society.

The one interesting possibility that I've managed to find is thorium nuclear power. Thorium has many advantages over uranium, namely:
* it's much more plentiful (enough to meet our current energy needs for centuries)
* it's more concentrated and thus cheaper to mine
* it produces very little waste
* it can actually use nuclear waste as fuel (!)
* it can't possibly lead to a reactor meltdown
* it can't be used to make nuclear weapons

This sounds extremely promising. Which means it could all be hype; keep in mind, thorium nuclear technology is fairly new. And building the reactors to replace our fossil fuel infrastructure with thorium infrastructure would be mind-bogglingly astronomically expensive.

But what other chance has our civilization got? If science doesn't bail us out, it's curtains within our lifetime.