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Jeez, Paul, you just don't stop with all the things you write that, due to my own failings to be sure, require me to read and try to think about.

I'm not so sanguine (now that's a strange word to come to have this use) about "renewables", principally solar, viz. reality of utility (yes, I like bad puns) in U.S. Oops, nevermind; I just looked at this:

http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/solarenergy.aspx

I read it through but only quickly checked a few of the sources; I get the impression this is legit. Good; let's do it. If gov could do Hoover and Grand Coulee, it could easily do this - except for the aspirin Congress. Penny wise, pound foolish, bottom-line Friday, who's buying the votes; bidness as usual. (And no, I don't need the sanctimoniously self-proclaimed expertly literate yahoos critiquing my language choice and use; I've heard at least six high-flying execs speak it this way. Well, two were high flying, anyway, they had their own jets. Kids these days need to read more, get out more. Get off my lawn.)

I've passed through Death Valley, it could use some shade. It's also much cheaper than SPSS. The Sahara and others have some spare real estate as well, I believe. I'll leave it to the crunchers to work things out, but I'm guessing all of Africa could get a big boost in available electricity. Float bonds, live a little, have some faith in future, pay for the grandkids college. It's not just money, it's doing something useful with it and the payoff in real terms is relatively quick, the eventual payout is enormous.

Prisons, manufactured wars, enforced poverty, are the mechanisms of people who like to hurt other people whatever their guise and rationale du jour. Ask any madame - the weirder and more sadistic patrons are invariably at the peak of the power game. (see also de Ropp, The Master Game) Our world is mostly run by sociopaths, a fine bunch of charismatic idiots. The more that things get worse the better they like it - it reinforces their self-sense of superiority while filling their wallets and renders the peons powerless to change anything. (I also have in mind, I think it was "The Arms Merchants" or somesuch, read it about twenty years back; also a fine book on the Krupps figured in there somewhen.) I suppose the counter might be that only the madly bad run things because nobody else wants to; but then, no one else gets the chance, and when someone tries they're killed off right quickly. I recently read a historical analysis of Athens. Ouch. Yet a small voice inside keeps insisting there's gotta be a way....

A friend once suggested that for sanity's sake an easy way to look at things is that we're in a school, a testing ground, and an experiment all in one; that 'do what you can, don't stand too proud lest a hammer, and enjoy as able, persevere as needed' is the way to go. That's a fine choice of a non-choice, really, yet it may be just the thing. Doesn't set quite right, tho.

Ah, Lovins et all, thank you. Some of these folks really did their homework, unlike so many of their detractors. I came across C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite about the same time, so some things began to make more sense about how things were the way they were. (I am un-sophisticated in all this stuff; I read the occasional bit, sometimes hit the stacks for some very dry and tedious source and background, try to keep some of it in mind.)

Isolated habitats are well and good but meaningless if they haven't at least sufficient infrastructure to not only survive but sustain and grow - I posit some growth needed to overcome in some meaningful time (centuries OK, millenia meaningless) whatever the global calamities. Isolated pockets surviving at some level of prosper is fine existentially, until red giant phase, but does little if one has hopes for any larger possible meaning for our species. In that regard I still get a warm-and-fuzzy from Fuller's musing that perhaps the purpose of i

A 100 mile by 100 mile solar power plant would provide the power needed by all of the United States. Once constructed, it would need no continual refueling by mining or drilling materials such as coal, oil, or fissionable material. It would generate nearly no waste products. The source of power would never run out as long as the Earth is habitable. I don't think it would have a noticeable impact on the weather; if you can find some research that suggests it might I would be interested in seeing it. The real problems are the cost it would take to construct the plant, and the problems of storing and distributing the power once collected. The benefit to the system is the amazing low amount of resources it would consume compared to other methods of generating power.

Quite true. A 100 mile by 100 mile solar power plant would provide all the electricity that the United States needs. It would have the added benefit of never running out, as fossil fuels and fissile nuclear fuels do. Even fusion power wouldn't last long if it required deuterium, tritium, or helium instead of regular one-proton hydrogen.

Energy storage is indeed the biggest issue. However, note that gasoline is one of the most efficient forms of energy storage around. So, how about synthesizing the gasoline (and diesel) via thermal depolymerization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization) of agricultural waste, garbage, sewer sludge, etc., using a nuclear power plant for the process heat (i.e. cogeneration)? Eventually we can use a fourth generation nuclear reactor that can burn the U235 and actinides in "spent" fuel from current reactors, and solve several problems at once (http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/nucleargen4.aspx).

Yes... plans...

What we need is a genetically engineered plant! One that matures and spreads quickly. One that absorbs an inordinately large amount of C02 and perhaps stores it within itself like some sort of fat breath! It would need to have a relativly odd sort of reproduction; one that would require human intervention (like a bee and its flower, but without a self-pollination method or an asexual reproduction method.) Requiring human intervention would help prevent uncontrolled spread, but like everything else written above would be a complex and difficult development process decades in the making.

...maybe we should invest in those C02 scrubber towers instead. What if we could string them between city buildings or up the sides of skyscrapers? Like through an artificial canyon, winds would drawn the carbon through the scrubbers.

Solar power might not solve all your problems but with the proper care and storage of generated electricity (such as a fuel cell), it can provide clean and useful energy even in northern NH.

If you refer to this solar-potential map of the US, you will see that due to the less abundant sunshine you just have to use a larger area.

http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/solarenergy.html

Last time I checked, you have plenty of land up in northern NH, you don't need to limit yourself to your roof.

How plentiful is Uranium for nuclear power? Will we find ourselves in the same dire straits tomorrow seeking vanishing uranium deposits? What is the situation?

Yes nuclear power is clean but the radioactive fuel is not a renewable resource. No more than oil and other petrochemicals.
Build a mighty infrastructure to power the world with the atom, end up with tons of radioactive waste with five digit half lives and once all the uranium and plutonium are used up what will mankind use next?
Go ahead and argue that Earth's crust has a limitless supply, considering humanity's lifespan, but there's going to be a point where mining uranium will be more expensive than generating electricity with nuclear power plants causing another energy crisis.
Finally are humans using nuclear energy to its fullest potential? Humans are using it to boil water rather than actually tapping the atom for its energy.

This is my uncle Ron's web site:

http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/

C//

• actually building a project that large - never been done before
• distributing the power to areas that aren't so sunny
• capital cost
• maintenance cost
• night

Yes, uranium too. No, you don't "burn" it, but there's less left than most people imagine. I think I remember we have enough for 40 years, provided we don't increase our demand.
Who keeps spreading the rumor that our uranium supply will only last in the order of decades?!?! Start spreading the truth!

"In summary, the actual recoverable uranium supply is likely to be enough to last several hundred (up to 1000) years, even using standard reactors. With breeders, it is essentially infinite. Hundreds of thousands of years is certainly enough time to develop fusion power, or renewable sources that can meet all our power needs."

http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/uranium. html

Algae farming actually has the potential of replacing all diesel and gasoline usage in the US using only a tiny fraction of the land area available. There are several cost/benefit analyses of this on the 'net, such as this one. Estimates of algae-biodiesel yield range from 10,000 to 20,000 US gal/acre/year. Soy-diesel has a lower yield, but has some other economically beneficial by-products. Biodiesel is the most promising energy technology I have seen to date. Compare biodiesel to ethanol -- the producers of ethanol find it more economical to burn fossil fuels in ethanol production than the ethanol -- DOH! With the current price of dinofuel around $3/gal, biodiesel is also suddenly cost-competitive, and for about $3000, you can buy a home biodiesel production facility that can manufacture 40 gallons/week at a cost of about 50 cents per gallon plus whatever you have to pay for the oil, and about 2 hours/week in ongoing labor.

According to this site, we may have up to 1000 years worth of uranium. Now, this article clearly has an agenda to push, but that figure does not include recycling the uranium. According to the original article, uranium retains 95% of its energy and can be recycled. Thus, even if we assume that 1000 years is an exaggeration, once we factor in the benefits of recycling, a millenium doesn't seem so outrageous.

It all depends on how far we're willing to go.

Thing is, we aren't really prospecting for radioactives very hard. Oil's very profitable, so we're looking for it pretty hard.

Like any mineral resource, to include oil and such, there's several points for when you talk about how much is available. The two factors are the cost of extracting, and the difficulty of prospecting.

I'll use oil as an example. When you see figures for 'oil reserves' and remaining oil, it's generally the amount available at a certain price point. This is because it costs money and resources to extract. Certain fields almost spit it out, and then you have things like oil shale, where you have to really work at it. So it might cost $2 a barrel to extract from a Saudi Oil field, while it costs $60 a barrel to extract from Canada's oil shale fields. Thus, when they talk about the world's oil reserves, they generally don't include the shale fields.

Then you have prospecting. Nobody really looks very hard when Oil's at $10 a barrel, but when it's at $60 people tend to look very hard for additional sources.

As a third point, as the resource increases in value, technology for extracting the resource is developed. The very shale methods were developed around WWII due to the need for resources because fighting made many areas unsuitable. More recent innovations is being able to bend while drilling wells, thus being able to reach more fields economically.

As far as uranium and plutonium goes, we've discovered enough of it that we don't have to worry about it for the short term, due to a relativly intense search after WWII.

As price increases, more mines become economical, and prospecting increases. Uranium is relativly difficult to find compared to coal and oil.

Per This site using known sources they figure that we could last for almost a thousand years using conventional reactors. If we go to more fuel efficient reactors such as breeders, this can be extended into the tens and hundreds of thousands of years.

It's just that you might have to accept $500/kg uranium rather than $40/kg as it was as of the survey. This would translat to a few more cents per kw/hour of electricity. Fuel for a nuclear plant is actually one of the smallest expenses. Labor is the largest. Going with breeder reactors would, of course reduce the fuel cost.

For that matter, we're looking into reprocessing the waste from our current reactors again. The older stuff has had enough time to cool down to make this alot easier.

Coal can be (and is being) used to fire ethanol plants.

True, but I'd be very surprised if it weren't more efficient to produce synthetic oil directly from coal, rather than burn the coal to fuel the farming and distilling operations needed to produce ethanol.