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http://ludb.clui.org/ex/i/TX3155/

Google "Superconducting Super Collider address". Third result.

I have a hard time guessing if you're trolling or not. I'm assuming you are, but on the remote chance that your question really is sincere:
The volumes involved are mind numbing. If sea levels rose even one foot, there'd be 10^14 cubic meters of water to handle.

I couldn't find a reference on the world's largest water tower, but the US largest (and those Americans do seem to like building big stuff) can hold "half a million gallons". So, if we built towers as big as that one, we'd still need about 5*10^10 of them - that would be about ten times as many as we have people in the world.

Are you beginning to see the problem?

Notice that he is comparing to wind. Nuclear is still far better as far as carbon goes than coal or other common power sources.

Nuclear must emit more carbon and air pollution than wind due to the construction of the plant and the mining/processing of the uranium since the actual operation of the plant does not emit anything.

If all of the power used to do the construction and mining came from nuclear/wind also that problem would be solved. So the more wind turbines /nukes we build to replace the coal powered plants the less of a problem this is.

I am a big fan of wind power (being from Tehachapi, CA USA Here we can find a wind power calculator filled in with some typical values.

A modern state of the art giant wind turbine can produce 500kw on a good day. It needs about a third of an acre. Fill in 2200000 for the "input value". Leave the area at .38 acres and size of turbine at 500kw. The result says we need 4,400 wind turbines and 1672 acres to replace the nuclear power plant. But that is *just* the actual footprint of the base of the wind turbine. You need space between them. I'd say you can probably multiple that number by at least 12 for a realistic setup. Now we are talking 20,064 acres.

Note that those 20,064 acres need to be in good windy areas like mountain passes (such as they are in Tehachapi). That alone is rather tall order. Then consider that you will need a number of these setups in different areas because it won't always be windy.

We have 15,000 wind turbines in CA on tens if not hundreds of thousands of acres of land. And it still only produces 1% of our power.

I think the right answer is going to be both. Put wind turbines where we can as they are doing in CA (Tehachapi, Palm Springs, Altamont) and other areas. Build out nuclear plants to handle the rest of the load. And because nuclear reactors take so long to build you have to get started now. You can't wait until an energy crisis due to the lead time. And, of course, recycle the nuclear fuel (feeder-breeder, thorium reactors, etc.) so that we produce much less waste. If it is radioactive it still has plenty of energy in it. Don't bury it. That is a huge waste of resources. React it.

What power plant are you waiting on to be invented exactly?

There are already
Abandoned Solar Power Plants in the U.S.

Solar power plants have and do exist all over the world, as do wind power plants. What Carter wanted was absolutely possible, it was the next Administration and Congress that scuttled the real chances of its success.

Nuclear creates waste during its powering process, solar and wind only create waste during initial construction and panel replacement. Nuclear is not green at all, in fact, the pollution from it is so concentrated it makes the locations where spent rods are disposed of uninhabitable.

Supplementing existing sources of energy is an absolute must to counter the increasing needs of such an 'electrically' connected society. This two year 'study' is just more stalling to put the onus on another Administration and Congress instead of actually getting something done. That and likely its the energy companies linked with the Administration don't want to switch off their massive profit spigot until we the people force it.

Cheers.

I will just dump a mess of links from an old E-mail I did on this some time ago. It's all good stuff, Solar two in Mojave was also molten salt based. I knew someone who bought it after it failed and got to explore it before it was partly dismantled.

---------

Solar two was a flat mirror array.

Search google image search with
            "solar two" Mojave

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=yermo,+ca&ie=UTF8&ll=34.871919,-116.83416&spn=0.005915,0.010042&t=h&z=17&om=1

Take the link above and zoom out, just below and to the right is a Parabolic glass mirrors plant

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Two

http://www.powerfromthesun.net/Chapter10/Chapter10new.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Solar_Two_2003.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Solar_Two_Heliostat.jpg

http://theothersolar.com/?m=200702

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1101-10.htm

http://www.global-greenhouse-warming.com/solar-central-power-towers.html

http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/edu/dees/U4735/projections/pitman/solar.elec.jpg

http://fixedreference.org/2006-Wikipedia-CD-Selection/wp/s/Solar_power.htm
(search for "Solar two")

http://www.reia-nm.org/HTML_Docs/Solar_Thermal_Electrical.html

http://greatgreengadgets.com/gadgets/category/solar/

http://www.answers.com/topic/solar-thermal-energy

http://blogs.business2.com/greenwombat/2006/week44/index.html

Excellent page on many technologies - Sorry it's in Spanish.
      http://g3nergy.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html
      Search for "Australia to Build 154 MW Solar Energy Plant"
      This one is identical in design to the one in the Mojave Dessert here.

http://ludb.clui.org/ex/i/CA4965/ Abandoned Solar Power Plant

Beyond that, no one wants wind farms in their back yard

I want a wind farm in my back yard, but it wouldn't fit. I'd still be satisfied with just one windmill, but my wife doesn't like the idea and the neighbors would probably sue. I could move to a couple of acres where I could put up a windmill or two, but that would mean I probably couldn't bicycle in to work in any reasonable amount of time anymore and so I'd end up burning more gasoline.

and are vast arrays of solar panels really the best land utilization method out there?

Depends on where the land is and what it's currently being used for (I live about 50miles from that solar plant). I'd love to get solar on my roof, but it's still very expensive, and from what I've heard, production of solar cells isn't exactly environmentally friendly.

It's actually the best way to get rid of unwanted radioactive waste.

I am not sure that the people and animals living around the Golden Gate area for the next few thousand years would agree.

http://www.sfweekly.com/2001-05-09/news/fallout/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farallon_Islands
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3720/is_20 0207/ai_n9128555/pg_2
http://ludb.clui.org/ex/i/CA3160/
http://walrus.wr.usgs.gov/farallon/radwaste.html

As a slap in the face to environmentalists, Bush designated the nuclear waste dump as a marine sanctuary, ensuring that there was highly restrictive blanket of laws http://farallones.noaa.gov/manage/regulations.html regarding access to and use of the waters in and around the nuclear waste in order to prevent people from researching how badly all the radioactive materials are leaking and contaminating the water, sea bed and sea life in the area while at the same time pretending to do something pro-environment - the joke is on us. http://farallones.noaa.gov/manage/sac.html

Alpha VMS was great then and it's only gotten better.

Yeah, until they killed the greatest processor family that ever lived.
And then as for VMS, HP has put a stake through its heart, shot it with a silver bullet, tied a rock to it and threw it in a lake, put Polonium in its cosmo, tied it to the railroad tracks, covered it in chum and threw it overboard at the Farallon Islands http://ludb.clui.org/ex/i/CA3160/ http://www.prbo.org/cms/index.php?mid=171, labelled it as a terrorist, told the DEA it had sold them an 1/8 of pot, forced it to be a test pilot for the V-22 Osprey, dumped it down "the hatch", made it spend 2004 xmas vacation in Thailand, gave it large quantities of Tylenol and vodka and still they could not kill it.

Only by feeding it to the zombie they were keeping alive at great cost to themselves and the world of computing, could they finally kill it: Feed it to the Itanic

Here is some propaganda from HP: http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:8EmG0Zj2VmcJ:h 71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/integrity/faqs2.html&hl= en&lr=&strip=1
Funny thing is that all of their "devil's advocate" questions are more true today than the HP well worded and "backed up" responses.

HP & Compaq: Killing the path to future that DEC had marked out in order to keep us awash in mediocre x86 and Itanic crap.

Let's take a look at the career of last year's big pump-and-dump spammer:

"Computer Virus Broker Arrested for Selling Armies of Infected Computers to Hackers and Spammers

"Pump-and-dump spam domains go silent after botnet closure"

Spammers register pump-and-dump spam domains for use in spam runs. These domains are commonly discarded after a few days. The tactic is commonplace but the the arrest of alleged botmaster Jeanson James Ancheta, 20, of Downey, California, on 3 November has been accompanied by a radical shift in the landscape. "Up to recently, the graphs were all fairly smooth, with the stats showing that 12 days was about the maximum lifetime for this type of domain, while 30 per cent only lasted a day or under, and 10 per cent only lasted three hours or under," Shipp said. "This kind of activity just disappeared completely from the radar on 2 November."

Following up:

"Botnet Creator Pleads Guilty, Faces 25 Years"

Federal Bureau of Prisons Inmate Locator

• Name: JEANSON JAMES ANCHETA
• Inmate number: 32392-112
• Age: 21
• Race: Asian
• Sex: M
• Projected release date: 12-25-2009
• Location: CALIFORNIA CITY CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION

California City Prison: "This medium security desert prison opened in 2000, and is a stunning sight, either by day when its monolithic forms stand out on the desert pavement like ancient Egyptian architecture, or by night when floodlights bathe the gleaming facility in an orange glow which can be seen from as much as 30 miles away."

Next spammer, please.

I suggests browsing the database of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. Under "Browse by Category", choose "Cultural Sites" and check out all the wierd and abandoned stuff throughout the US.

I suggests browsing the database of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. Under "Browse by Category", choose "Cultural Sites" and check out all the wierd and abandoned stuff throughout the US.

I grew up in Los Alamos, NM, and am used to being in the shadow of the Lab. It is very much a "company town." As you would expect, LANL gets all of the cool toys and when it gets better toys, a lot of the stuff goes out to salvage. One of the town's more "colorful" residents, Ed Grothus, has been going to the Lab's salvage sales for decades and collecting anything he can get his hands on. He has *warehouses* full, and has collected the best bits into a "showroom" (read: a converted ex-supermarket that is stacked floor to ceiling with mounds of oscilliscopes, heaps of cable, PDP-11's, crates of microscopes, piles of office chairs, racks of test equipment, slides of test detonations, etc.) that he calls the Black Hole.

It is *quite* something to see and enough to make any geek drool. *THIS* is the place to hold _Junkyard Wars_.
I found this article on it. [NOTE: Author claims Black Hole was around since '69. Not true. The building was a "Shop & Go" (?? been a few years) until sometime after I graduated. I don't think he was open to the public (he did sell privately to movie makers and the like) until the supermarket was "converted".]

I wish I had some of my photos of the place on-line to show y'all.

There is a documentary out there that Ed sat me down to watch last time I was there called "Atomic Ed and the Black Hole" that gives you some pretty good glimpses into some of the stuff he has there. I have heard from friends that the film is in a few film festivals around the country.

Los Alamos Sales Company Inc. : +1 (505) 662 7438.

In addition to supposed lost Russian nuclear material, actual lost US nuclear weapons and accidents are equally worrisome and more common than anybody realizes, with over a dozen VERY major incidents detailed here. There's even a monument to the 1957 Broken Arrow incident in New Mexico. If you've got $20 to blow, you can even get a nostalgic guided tour of all these Broken Arrow events narrated by Batman himself, Adam West.

Lost US nuclear weapons and accidents are a lot more common than anybody realizes, with over a dozen VERY major incidents detailed here. There's even a monument to the 1957 Broken Arrow incident in New Mexico. If you've got $20 to blow, you can even get a nostalgic guided tour of all these Broken Arrow events narrated by Batman himself, Adam West. Just for grins, the official US Government document for how a nuclear weapons loss is to be handled may be read here.