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According to the people actually out studying the spread of pine beetles, climate change is a major factor in allowing the beetle to expand their range. http://cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/pubwarehouse/pdfs/26601.pdf

Of course as usual you only give part of the story. Cold weather is the primary control on the Western Pine Beetle and as we no longer get the kind of winters that kill off large numbers of beetles their numbers have reached epidemic proportions. It's not part of the natural cycle when a...

yum....

It's is eventually uranium being consumed in nuclear reactors with LFTRs. Th-232 after neutron bombardment- converted to Th-233- decaying to Pa-233- decaying to U-233. The U-233 is placed in solution in a molten salt and burned to completion in an MSR to produce more power and much less waste...

No, I think there's a huge amount of resources that go into making sure the petrochemical industry thrives worldwide. How is it reasonable to assume that an energy source that has about 4 million times the energy content of coal by weight isn't a viable and very positive alternative to what...

Maybe when you figure out it's a discussion not a contest we can have an actual discussion. This is what you originally posted: There isn't a massive REE deposit next to the oil sands, there is no such thing as massive rare earth's deposits. And thorium also occurs in relatively small...

How? REEs are in low concentrations in the oil sands as a result of secondary deposit and leaching from other primary formations. You don't need oil sands or shales to mine REEs and thorium which is my point. They can be more efficiently and profitably mined from their primary deposits, which...

REEs will end up in low concentrations in sedimentary rock as the igneous rock they were originally deposited in erodes and is deposited. In the case of oil sands, the challenge is to process the relatively low concentrations economically. With a REE deposit in igneous rock they can be mined...

You were associating REEs deposits with the oil sands, it's two different processes that produce two very different kinds of deposits. While there are REEs there, they originally formed as part of igneous deposits. There are all sorts of materials in the tar sands, you don't need that kind of...

REEs are found commonly with: Oil sand and oil shales are formed by the deposit of eroded materials in rivers, lakes and oceans over a period of time and can include biological material that over long periods of time turns into petro-chemicals. A magma body may intrude into a shale or tar...

REEs are deposited as part of igneous rock formation, not sedimentary, the two are very different. I'm not sure why Petros is trying to connect them with the oil sands, but it has nothing to do with reality. As opposed to claiming that rare earths are formed by sedimentary deposit as with...

http://geology.com/usgs/ree-geology/ Shales are sedimentary rocks, REEs are associated with igneous rocks. Rare earths are concentrated and deposited as part of igneous rock formation, not sedimentary.

That's funny, the last time I looked this was another post about cartoon character breasts. Principle REEs deposits result as a weathering of igneous rocks, they aren't the result of biological material undergoing transformation into petrochemicals as a result of heat and pressure working on...

Any association with oil sands deposits is coincidental, the formation process is completely different and the mining of REEs still only requires removing a fraction of the covering forest and overburden compared to oil sands development. One ton of thorium will power a 1,000 MWe nuclear power...

There are degrees of relevance, that's the whole point of the peer review system and scientific method. We've come a long way in the last 50 years and still have a long way to go to fuller understanding, that doesn't mean that we don't have powerful methods for understanding complex concepts...

Petros is a master at turning the discussion of complex scientific issues into surreal examinations of completely unrelated topics. My recent favorite was his trying to turn a discussion of climate change into one about Disney character tits...

There are environmental concerns with rare earth mining as there is with all forms of the industry. It wouldn't involve the removal of hundreds of sq. miles of forest or the removal of entire mountain tops as is done with oil sands mining and coal mining respectively. Millions of tons of...

No, but there should be in a few years, in China the son of a former premier is heading their thorium MSR program and has about $350 million in funding. It should be the first one up and running for experimental purposes. After that it will probably be another five years before a full-up...

Here's a CBC piece on Thorium. CBC News In Depth: Science The reactors this story talks about are still PWRs I think which are much less capable than MSRs. We have enough thorium in reserve in Canada to provide energy for hundreds and perhaps even thousands of years if utilized properly.

If you're posting your comments here you're debating. And as I explained the reason that thorium based MSRs weren't developed had nothing to do with their physical characteristics which are plainly superior to PWRs, LMFBRs and most other nuclear reactor types with the possible exception of the...