Nuclear Power Plants or Windmills, for commercial transportation power

[Crayfish57]

Nuclear is the clear best option for a bridge technology. We already know how to do it, and there's a crap ton of fuel available in the earth's crust. With the proper effort, we could power the world with nothing but nukes.

But, even that will eventually fail. It may take many thousands of years, but fuel will run out. We should use nuclear power to keep society up and running while we move to solar-powered microwave transmission - solar collectors orbiting the sun at the Earth's Lagrangian points which beam the energy back to the surface in the form of microwaves. The technology is almost there; we just have to iron out a few details. And once we do that, it's basically free energy for a couple billion years.

You are worrying about things that will fail in thousands of years? Good lord, lets worry about that and spend money on it now . Like IGAFC about that? I'm concerned about grocery prices now while we have a president that has no clue about it and sh*ts his pants while visiting the Pope and you are collecting solar power in space and beaming it back to earth?

 

[Bulk VanderHuge]

You are worrying about things that will fail in thousands of years? Good lord, lets worry about that and spend money on it now . Like IGAFC about that? I'm concerned about grocery prices now while we have a president that has no clue about it and sh*ts his pants while visiting the Pope and you are collecting solar power in space and beaming it back to earth?

Shorter cray: "Let's not waste any time/money/effort on scientists with science degrees doing sciencey things, working on a clean, infinite power source that could benefit all future generations, because I read that Biden shit his pants at the Vatican on one of my stupid wingnut social media troughs."

(Well, not really shorter, but it does more clearly illustrate his fevered "thinking" process.)

 

[TheOriginalHappyGoat]

You are worrying about things that will fail in thousands of years? Good lord, lets worry about that and spend money on it now . Like IGAFC about that? I'm concerned about grocery prices now while we have a president that has no clue about it and sh*ts his pants while visiting the Pope and you are collecting solar power in space and beaming it back to earth?

I'm sorry you are incapable of focusing on anything other than your obsessive dislike of Biden, but some of us can actually think about other things.

 

[TomEric4756]

Any stomach for add'l hydroelectric power? I understand there are environmental impacts but they cannot be worse than the continued use of fossil fuels (yes, I know you would need to use some fossil fuels to build and maintain the hydroelectric plant).

Also, the continued development of better solar panels and battery technology will probably, ultimately, solve a lot of smaller electrical need in both residential and commercial applications. It will get cheaper over time (as it has been doing for years).

The snail darter shut down a TVA project decades ago. It was completed, but hydro electric projects aren’t slam dunks. https://www.tennessean.com/story/op...ee-species-became-state-celebrity/8310892002/ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/climate/environmentalists-hydropower-dams.html

Western Droughts threaten power generation
https://www.powermag.com/hydropower-levels-under-careful-watch-as-drought-ravages-the-west/

Some Western Dams are to be removed to improve the Salmon runs … fish ladders don’t fully solve the problem.
https://www.economist.com/united-st...rth-west-hydroelectric-dams-are-being-removed

 

[TomEric4756]

There was a post (apparently deleted) about space based power generation such as discussion in
https://illumin.usc.edu/space-based-solar-power-a-new-path-towards-sustainable-clean-energy/

Any system that beams TerraWatts of microwaves to the surface of the earth, is a potential weapon of mass destruction. Let’s decline to trust the future to safety systems that are remotely monitored and require a space launch to repair.

 

[Earlierthanlater]

The snail darter shut down a TVA project decades ago. It was completed, but hydro electric projects aren’t slam dunks. https://www.tennessean.com/story/op...ee-species-became-state-celebrity/8310892002/ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/climate/environmentalists-hydropower-dams.html

Western Droughts threaten power generation
https://www.powermag.com/hydropower-levels-under-careful-watch-as-drought-ravages-the-west/

Some Western Dams are to be removed to improve the Salmon runs … fish ladders don’t fully solve the problem.
https://www.economist.com/united-st...rth-west-hydroelectric-dams-are-being-removed

Personal experience. I relocated to Bangor, Maine for employment in the early nineties. I bought a collection of properties and privileges from a person that was dropping out and moving to Las Vegas. Part of the parcel was the home phone number of an executive of Bangor Hydro. The seller passed it over and said this will be handy in the winter. Sure enough, nearly every winter holiday, the power died in our area. The Penobscott River was not flowing due to ice-ups, tree jams, paper mill usage…etc. Bangor hydro could not handle this power load shifts when the industrial users dropped out ( they would use their own internal energy production systems for 100% of their needs) causing the system to go to an underload, under producing situation. Some facilities had arrangements to pump their over production of electricity back into the grid …but that exacerbated the problem. The power companies could not cover the cost of the third party
providers. And so would call the number of this person and advised him I was out of power and my holidays were f’d. He suggested I should buy a gas /diesel generator for such ”occasions”. And if you didn’t have the wood firing chops for heating your home, you needed to buy trucked in propane at very high prices per therm or use the even higher price hydro/electric power to heat your home. Any point source power production/usage is going to perform poorly against the mass consumption/product uo model. So fixing the power supply/usage at the ends of the energy supply will help the upchain supply and users problems.
And so most of the industries in the NE chose for self reliant power supply vs. grid supplied. Probably has changed since my day.
And wood burning for home heating is a killer for the environment.

 

[CO. Hoosier]

The well-heeled green energy mob‘s handiwork will freeze your butt when the polar vortex comes. The chart shows the source of vital electricity during the recent cold snap in the upper Midwest. The feds can pass all the laws, rules, and regulations they want about green energy, but they can’t repeal the laws of physics. When temps drop and the clouds come, we got two choices, hydrocarbons or nukes. The greenies want to eliminate both.

 

[TomEric4756]

The solar flatline is classic, for northern latitudes in the US, including Indiana. When you let the turbines go cold it can take a long the to prime the heat back into the turbines … just to start generating electricity again.