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Accelerators can break down plutonium so that is a zeroth order approach. We can expect an overshoot in solar panel production and excess energy available after fossil fuels and nuclear power are eliminated. Already nanosolar has an energy payback time of under eight months. http://www.nanosolar.com/company/about-us so repaying the nuclear energy debt should not be too difficult.

No need to convince me about solar and other alternatives, they're the only logical and practical energy selection for the next 50 -100 years. To me wind power with it's modular and rapid technology development cycle makes a superior return to nuclear. Solar thermal looks like the industrial level option to replace coal.

At issue though is also the decommissioning of the reactors which is a highly energy intensive operation to do safely. I'm fairly certain accelerators would be too. Do you have any links I could examine with more information. I'd like to compare the energetic expenditure of the Accelerator to an infrastructure plan and storage.

The last point is a political issue. The Nuclear cowboys (pro-nuclear, nuclear fanbois) need to have a common rallying point with anti nuclear that they can support otherwise I fear we will never see any progress on this issue.

It's still quite valuable material, and I sense they would lobby against that fiercely because the current generation of Nuclear cowboys treat radionuclides like baby poo 'unfortunate if it leaks into the environment, but no big deal'. Clearly they do not understand the mutagenic properties of the material and how hazardous it is to life systems.

Solar, wind, tidal and geo-thermal are the future and where I see more investment happening because they make money, nuclear costs money.

The energy returned on energy invested is pretty low for nuclear power even ignoring the waste clean up. Using centrifuges in the fuel processing can help, but with only about 75 years of uranium left, the whole slug of gas diffusion processed materials from weapons production makes the overall process low quality in energy terms.

I'd be surprised if there is 75 years supply left, certainly not in soft ore extraction - perhaps hard ore extraction but that eats into the energy return equation even more. Unless there is a serious advancement in materials technology I think we are unlikely to see any significant advance in reactor technology that makes it economical.

The deployment of AP1000s is no more than a hack. Thermal containment ratios are lower than previous generation reactors and the changes made to the systems, whilst simplifying the reactor, are made to make a reactor installation cheaper. Meanwhile oil companies are plundering the tax incentives for building reactors for there own fudicial reasoning.

The discussions of Nuclear I conduct is because I don't believe future generation need to have any more costs imposed on them than we already have. I am more interested in the business prospect of solar power now and how I can make that available, now. I personally think that creating a solid solar and wind power technology base is the best answer to ending the nuclear industry in its current form. I'd be very interested in contacting you outside the realm of /. if that is acceptable to you.

The energy returned on energy invested is pretty low for nuclear power even ignoring the waste clean up. Using centrifuges in the fuel processing can help, but with only about 75 years of uranium left, the whole slug of gas diffusion processed materials from weapons production makes the overall process low quality in energy terms.

Accelerators can break down plutonium so that is a zeroth order approach. We can expect an overshoot in solar panel production and excess energy available after fossil fuels and nuclear power are eliminated. Already nanosolar has an energy payback time of under eight months. http://www.nanosolar.com/company/about-us so repaying the nuclear energy debt should not be too difficult.

And not alone: Nanosolar is doing something similar.

"When fossil fuels are exhausted, there may be a mass die-off event within the human species, due to the massive reduction in possible food production and transportation. "

Baloney. Who is feeding this to you? Why? Who profits from your fear?

We have centuries of coal (but it is polluting). Thorium can power our civilization for thousands of years. We have an effectively infinite supply of solar energy. People are working on zero-emissions manufacturing. We can grind up rock to make fertilizer. And so on.

References off the top of my head:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/surface-area-required-to-power-the-whole-world-with-solar-power-wind.php
http://nanosolar.com/nanosolar-technology-overview
http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/993314-thorium-reactor-talk-at-ted/
http://www.nist.gov/el/msid/dpg/slim.cfm
http://www.remineralize.org/

We may even have cold fusion thanks to one of the many people you perhaps wish was never born as he took up to many resources?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer

Who has infested your mind to what end with so much negativism so that you are less likely to have kids? Who is making money off of that? Are there much uglier imperatives at work in the people who tell you this? Example:
"The Greening of Hate"
http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2005/09/106-greening-of-hate.html

Did the world end when we went through "Peak Whale Oil" a century or so ago? You're still here, right?

Now, we may still blow ourselves up fighting over mis-perceived scarcity. But that is a different problem.

Resources do not exist before the human imagination looks at the universe and turns things into resources. Otherwise, say, we would not have aluminum, produced because some imaginative people figured out how. We would not have solar panels without people figuring out how to make them. And so on.

Here is a quick comparison of the beliefs of say, William R. Catton (who wrote "Overshoot") and Julian L. Simon (who wrote "The Ultimate Resource").

Catton:
* People are the problem
* People consume resources
* People take up space leading to overcrowding
* There is a fixed amount of material resources on the Earth

Thus he predicts (with some glee?) a big die-off.

Simon:
* People are the solution
* People produce resources
* People create spaces worth being in
* The human imagination creates new resources

Now, there is truth to what both of these authors say. But ultimately, you can decide for yourself which path leaning more to one or the other is more likely to produce a future more worth living in, given the truth about solar power, thorium power, grinding up rock, and so on.

Our electricity and natural gas consumption might even go down if we switched to electric cars, by the way:
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
"To extract one gallon of gasoline (or equivalent distillate): 9.66 kWh (maybe not all in the form of electricity*)
To refine that gallon: 2.73 kWh additional energy (maybe not all in the form of electricity*)
Total: 12.39 kWh per gallon.
*Roughly one-third of the energy content of a gallon of gasoline produced from California wells is input from natural gas. Less than 2/3's is net energy (probably a lot less!).
So I can get 24 miles in my ICE on a gallon of gasoline, or I can get 41 miles (at 30

Are you referring to Nanosolar the company? I thought you were referring to solar cells with nantennas.

But it is not down to coal or nuclear.
    http://www.nanosolar.com/power-plants/technology-advantages
    http://www.maglevwindturbine.com/

And maybe even:
    http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2011/05/swedish-skeptics-confirm-nuclear-process-in-tiny-4-7-kw-reactor

And there are other alternatives.

Conventional nuclear and "fossil" fuels only have semed cheaper becuase we have ignored their externalities in the marketplace (like health impacts, enviromental impacts, security costs, and risks); from 1982 about the USA, but probably applies to Germany as well (as big centralized money can corrupt politics anywhere):
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
"According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy.[1] In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current. [2]"

That said, thorium reactors if you want ear-conventional nuclear, seems the way to go. They were not developed by the West precisely beause they are safer and you can't easily make bombs from them compared to uranium and plutonium reactors. China and India are now forging ahead with them.

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2011/05/swedish-skeptics-confirm-nuclear-process-in-tiny-4-7-kw-reactor
http://www.nanosolar.com/power-plants/technology-advantages

The Earth gets something like 10000X times more energy every day than we use that day in our civlization.
    http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/surface-area-required-to-power-the-whole-world-with-solar-power-wind.php

So what is the problem you are so worried about? There is room for quadrillions of people living in space habitats in the solar system, too. Why be such a doomster? Renewable energy is now close to the price of fossil fuels, but without the environmental costs (where fossil fuel companies privatize short-term profits and socialize long-term costs). We mainly have social problems, not technical ones. See also:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource

Have you really studied the technical possiblities for making the world work for everyone, and further, making the solar system work for quadrillions of people? We do have some big problems, but we have billions of people to help solve them. It's problematical to on the one hand say humans are a geological force and then on the other to deny that such a powerful force could be used to some benefit if we had the social will to do so. Thin film solar, wind generators, moving away from meat consumption, grinding up rocks for fertilizer, and maybe even cold fusion, are all parts of the solutions.
http://remineralize.org/
http://www.nanosolar.com/company/blog#177
http://pesn.com/2011/01/17/9501746_Focardi-Rossi_10_kW_cold_fusion_prepping_for_market/

It is people who have used their creativity to come up with those sorts of ideas...

"Again, I'm all for more nuke plants. It's cleaner' than coal, and going heavily into solar + wind is a pipe dream."

Citation needed on solar and wind?

Counterpoints:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
    http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/press_room/C68/2010_datarelease9
    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
    http://www.google.com/#q=no+furnace
    http://www.nanosolar.com/company/blog/beck-energy-and-nanosolar-complete-solar-power-plant
    http://www.chesapeakeclimate.org/blog/?p=1037
    http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127

At current levels of exponential growth, renewable energy will supply all our power in twenty years. Why should this exponetial growth stop before then? Short of something way better?

So, citation needed for your point.

However, sure, small modern nukes may be safer, but how risky will the centralized reprocessing plants be in an earthquake?

Again, we have some minor bit of progress in materials science being touted as a big breakthrough. They haven't fabricated anything but a hexagonal membrane, which has been done before. They're not even able to make a small prototype device. From that, it's a huge jump to "Imagine a house with windows made of this kind of material, which, combined with a solar roof, would cut its electricity costs significantly. This is pretty exciting.". There are lots of other solar cell technologies which are much further along and still don't yield useful products. Nanosolar, a hype-based solar panel company, comes to mind. The enthusiasm for thin-film solar has decreased since ordinary solar cells became cheaper, and thin-film cells got stuck at half the efficiency of regular ones. This is turning into a manufacturing problem, not a technology one. "We grow every year with double revenue and almost double capacity. At end of the year, we will have 1.8 gigawatts of capacity and will have grown from 4,000 employees at the beginning of this year to more than 11,000." - Fang Pen, JA Solar, Shanghai.

Conductive plastic isn't a big deal. Conductive plastics are commercially available. The foam in which ICs are packed is conductive.

This is Los Alamos and Brookhaven, the old atomic labs, struggling to avoid more downsizing.

http://www.nanosolar.com/

When you consider manufacturing nanotechnology, what is required? Nanotechnology is already used today to make very efficient energy nanopanels to produce the energy needed for these plants.

Then, with the end product of manufacturing(one of many examples: nanorobots designed to extract carbon from our atmosphere filled with it) and voila: you have the resource(carbon) and energy needed to power the manufacturing. The energy is created by panels, and used to manufacture more panels/nanobots, and also create nanopanels on nanobots to allow the nanobots to operate and break bonds such as carbon and oxygen.

These plants are already very efficient, and breakthroughs like this are catapulting us into a new age of technology.

The reduction in material use is very important for silicon. Nanosolar is at the point where its solar cells are a smaller cost component in solar panels than the glass in the panels. http://www.nanosolar.com/sites/default/files/NanosolarCellWhitePaper.pdf To compete, silicon needs to do the same. In some ways, thin film amorphous silicon does this, but the low efficiency means that you need more glass to generate the same amount of power. Crystalline silicon with low material requirements and higher efficiency than Nanosolar's material will likely deliver a lower price point than Nanosolar or First Solar's thin film technology because the cost driver will be MW/ton of glass rather than the cost of the PV material, the cost region that the thin film producers are exploring already.

Nanosolar gets my vote for cool material and manufacturing process.

Thin film is physically pretty forgiving. But electricity is electricity. It's a lot less forgiving. Doesn't matter what material you're using for your PV.

How you wire these things together (series and parallel), as well as shading effects has a huge effect. You don't do it correctly, you can have *no* power. Worse, you can have shorting, arcs, and fires. And you still need an inverter and power controller somewhere in there.

It's cool in that you can mesh the things with a more traditional (although anachronistic) architectural style. But that was never even in the top 5 issues with home based PV.

A better use of tax money would be for the government to give it back to the people they took it from in the first place. Why should I be forced to "invest" (if you can even call it that given the track record of government spending) my hard-earned money in battery research through taxes? Has anyone else ever noticed that very often these sorts of "investments" are the very same ones that the private sector won't touch with a ten foot pole?

The private sector tends to ignore anything that won't yield a short term profit. It certainly ignores anything where the benefits are for the public instead of making the company rich. So now and then, it takes some tax money to get things underway that would happen too little too late otherwise.

Take renewable energy for instance. I happen to agree with the people who claim that global Peak Oil cannot be far off anymore. So we need something else, and we better have a lot of it when the next oil crisis arrives. Think summer 2008 again or worse.

In that case, Germany and to a lesser degree Spain have taken the lead by subsidizing various renewable energies, thus creating a market and making investments lucrative. As a result, the technology is a lot more mature than it would be without subsidies. Some companies even claim being close to the point where their PV cells can compete without the subsidies. In particular http://www.firstsolar.com/ and http://www.nanosolar.com/. Both are US companies so the money will not stay in Germany. But I still think it is a good idea, even being one of those Germans who pay for it.

BTW and slightly off topic:
A real and much greater waste of money recently happened with the bank bailout. For THAT, I'm really pissed with our current government.

Sorry. Those numbers do NOT include energy costs of producing solar cells.

Nor do the costs of farming include of building all of that farm machinery and fuel refineries/storage tanks

Let me know when your panel exceeds 768KWh of output

*Huh*? What are you doing linking to the cost of a hot water panel? If you want to talk photovoltaics, payback times for silicon cells are generally in the 1-3 year range (ranging from amorphous thin film to polycrystaline), and non-silicon thin films are a matter of months (Nanosolar's is under a month).

A fairly simple estimation would favor the panel. It would be a very fine 3' x 5' solar panel that could produce that amount of energy in 25 years. Likely it wouldn't produce that much energy in 35 years.

Again, *huh*? Even if that was the number for photovoltaics -- which it's not (it's for a 2 square meter solar water heating panel) -- that's anything but the numbers you give. 3'x5' is 1.4 square meters. In perfect conditions on the surface, the sun bombards a panel with about 1,000 Wh/m^2. Perfect conditions don't exist 24/7. Because of night, angles, clouds, etc, a non-heliostat panel in a fairly good location will get about a 15% capacity factor, while one on a heliostat, about 25%. Particularly good locations can do better, but never mind that. Let's go with only 15%. Polycrystaline silicon panels are now about 20% efficient, and thin films over 10%. Let's go with 10%. 24 hours * 365.24 hours/day * 0.15 capacity factor * 0.10 efficiency * 1kW/m^2 * 1.4 m^2 = 184kWh/year.

for last 5 years same shit gets posted over and over again - Cheap solar panals
5 years later - in some cases panels went up in price

Whine whine whine. It's been going on for much longer than 5 years. When I was in 5th grade, I did a report on PV electricity, and I read numerous reports that PV panels could be much cheaper soon.

Truth is, all those funky predictions were right. Solar power HAS been dropping very steadily and very predictably all along in its own version of Moore's law - PV prices drop about 6% per year per watt, cutting in half every 10.5 years. It's not dropping like a stone, but it's very predictable and very steady.

What's been going on the last 5 years? Simple: supply and demand. For many reasons, people have become wary of using fossil fuels and are willing to invest more into solar, causing a sudden, worldwide deficiency in production capacity. Low-cost production companies like Nano-Solar are ramping up production literally as fast as they are physically able.

For example, Nano-Solar has, for all intents and purposes, unlimited funding, and has already sold out several years worth of production, even that which is not actually happening yet. They are buying huge rafts of warehouse space in the Bay Area, in what used to be automotive manufacturing areas.

So the laws of supply and demand are working their magic, even though the response isn't instant. Your children will bask in a society powered by cheap solar electricity that you are funding right now, just as you benefit from the electrical power infrastructure built by your parents.

Surprise, there are already companies that are producing thin-film solar panels for less than $1/watt.

The problem is that demand is so high for these inexpensive cells that at least for Nanosolar, you can't even buy them unless you are buying tons and tons of them. That leaves First Solar and those panels get significantly marked up because of the lack of competition at the low end of the market.

That said, wholesale prices of traditional silicon panels are around $3/watt and as an end user you can get them for slightly above that if you shop around.

But once the system is installed you're looking at a minimum of $6/watt currently. So while the panels are still the most expensive part of the system, pretty soon the other components (inverter, mounting hardware, wiring, labor) will exceed the cost of the panels.

We're getting very close to the point where solar systems make financial sense for just about everyone. It already makes sense for any high electricity users who pay a premium for electricity. We'll probably see solar system pricing continue to drop over the next couple years as manufacturing capacity continues to come online.

Well, the basic concept of using nanoscale structures to improve solar cells is well known, so I'd assume that using diatoms to self-assemble such a thing would be a step in the process of turning "wow neat this works in the lab" into "solar cells, X dollars 99 per meter".

Unfortunately I don't have such a choice now, I rent an apartment.

Do the research, if you can make it make financial sense(remember, it'd be a deductible expense!), talk with your landlord. They might do it.

I have done some research. Hopefully in a few years I'll own the apartment building. My sister owns it now but when the mortgage is paid down enough so I can qualify for one the plan is that she will sell it to me and I'll take over the mortgage. Once I do own it I'll have an energy audit done, then save money to have an architect redesign the building.

in the sense of a 'carbon tax', nuclear power is lumped in right along with wind, solar, tidal, etc...

Except nuclear power isn't carbon free, the construction emits a lot of carbon. How? Nuclear power plants require vast amounts of concrete and steel. Both require a lot of energy to make, concrete is made from cement and cement is made from heating lime to 1450C in a kiln. A lot of heat is also required to make steel. More than likely that energy comes from a fossil fuel. Then there's uranium mining. These along with other things are called the nuclear cycle.

Oh, and when have I expressed anything but disdain for coal power?

When did I say you didn't?

I'm trying to remember, did you ever post a link showing just how much nuclear power is subsidized? Bonus points if it shows coal or nuclear above wind/solar per kwh.

Yes I have. "Hooked on Subsidies: Why conservatives should join the left's campaign against nuclear power" is one. CATO, a Freemarket Institute, also has articles that say something about coal subsidies.

• Coal-to-liquids: "It's a Syn
• Clean Coal: "McCain, Obama, and Clean Coal"
• Rural Subsidies

And it doesn't matter if the company making the solar panel doesn't get the subsidy if every customer who buys their product gets one.

You're right it's still a subsidy however the people have a choice as to who they buy from. When a subsidy is given to nuclear power people don't have that choice.

BTW, your first solar and nanosolar links go to the same spot.

Oops I cut and pasted wrong, NanoSolar.

Nanosolar gets government subsidies

Maybe I spoke too soon. Looking at that page you provide a link to though it doesn't say how much or what type of subsidy Nanosolar gets. The second link says Germany gave the company a subsidy for it's German plant. The "Spectrum" article " First Solar: Quest for the $1 Watt" says the subsidies are feed-in tariffs. Because it's not the government giving the money though I don't consider them subsidies. Perhaps "rebate" would be a better word.

Falcon

But there have been so many stories of "break through" improvements that I don't really care until a profoundly more efficient product is made.

Some years back, I read an article in an old magazine (I think it was a 1960's Popular Science) about a new method of blowing glass resulting in "near unbreakable" bottles. It went on excitedly for page, after page, talking about the new era of safety that this kind of glass could behest - glass that doesn't easily break - you could drop your soda or medicine bottle and it wouldn't shatter!

Intrigued, I spent an entire afternoon at the local University library trying to figure out exactly what happened to this miraculous technology! I even did some searching (AltaVista) on the then new-fangled Internet. The truth rather surprised me...

This "breakthrough" technology that had gone invisible was part of my everyday life, including the bottle of Diet Coke I was then slurping from! It had become so common that virtually nobody produced the old-fashioned fragile bottles and glass anymore!

That's why it works to have coffee tables with glass counter tops. That's why restaurants can get away with the sterile, easily cleaned, hard-to-scratch glass overlays on their tables. Next time you are at a corner market and see the glass countertop with the items for sale inside, think about that article in the ancient Popular Science article.

Once breakthroughs actually become available, they don't seem like breakthroughs - they quickly just become part of the landscape, and people don't notice them, anymore. This is why the "Intelligent Design" idiots can get out of their incredibly complex, affordable, high-tech SUVs and then announce that Science has it all wrong. Once it's routine, it no longer seems like such a big deal.

Proof? Affordable, thin-film photovoltaics is still largely considered a "breakthrough" technology. But there's a company doing it now, today, affordably. Alas, while they are growing as fast as they are able, all their production capacity is already sold to germany. I'd suggest you read up on it.

High tech is introduced slowly. At first, the high engineering cost can only be paid in niche markets where the return on investment is fat. But as the original engineering cost gets paid back, and as the technology itself is matured and tested, the cost of implementation drops rapidly, so that it applies to more and more and more niches. By the time it's available for common Joes like you and me, it doesn't seem like such a big deal, and we are left wondering "where are the breakthroughs?" from our satellite/GPS navigated, MP3 playing, fuel-injected, ABS-brakes protecting, vulcanized rubber-tired, air-conditioned, hybrid gas/electric, high-tech wonder machine.

Where are the breakthroughs? Look at the beer bottle in your trashcan.

Never say never.

Please see image at this page

For a breakdown of efficiencies.

Of course, being Nanosolar, they will have a solar slant, but their thin-film technology is supposed to be light on manufacturing costs. Given that you can go solar direct to drive or battery, why would you want to go through he process of using it to split H and O apart? (And then recombine it?)

I am no fan of Al gore, but I am a fan of Solar
for numerous reasons.

Nanosolar and similar technologies could gear up to
cheap mass production, and eventually reach efficiency
as high as the Stirling engine dishes at some point.

http://www.nanosolar.com/products.htm

For now the Stirling dishes are the most power per sq. ft.

The nanotech thin film solar material is the cheapest.

In mass production they are predicting $1/watt for panels.

Nansolar
BrightSource Energy
Lots more where those came from. Welcome to the revolution.

I'm glad to see you quote Nanosolar. That is the company to watch. A few years back most solar R&D went into 2 camps - one camp tried to advance the underlying solar technology and mostly failed. Another camp went the route of just trying to fine-tune manufacturing (to reduce cost for mass production). That's where Nanosolar comes in. The technology behind Nanosolar in terms of energy creation is old news - but the fine tuning in the manufacturing process (super cheap "plain air" facilities) is what is so stellar about the company. Their thin-film solar panel stock is currently sold out until 2009 since several large municipal solar power generation plants bought their stock already.

I didn't read it as the pv panels were the sink but rather the synchronous power inverters were at fault. And there are companies like nanosolar that are getting 1 Kw per Kg of solar material, IIRC their technology doesn't require the "panels" to track the sun and they're working toward $1/watt pretty quickly.

But then there's thermal energy derived from the sun and there are nearly limitless possibilities there since the development of that carbon nanotube material that absorbs 99.8% of all light that hits it. I imagine that in many parts of the country that could be converted to heat water, create steam and drive turbines, or the new stirling engine technology if it's getting along, or even just store it underground for later use. Then one could combine that technology with the brilliant idea where they essentially put the solar-thermal collector in a vacuum so that the heat couldn't boil back off of the collector and it instead got passed quickly away to an insulated tank. It was viable over 10 months out of the year and even worked on cloudy days. I'm sure it was posted here a while back.

Fascinating.

When you replace process "A" with process "B", and achieve a 10x fold reduction in cost, you've increased efficiency.

So, open source software development is literally 10x cheaper than closed source software development; and that also goes for maintenance, procurement, service, yadda yadda. Sounds like "Total Cost of Ownership" to me.

No one would ever, ever argue that a new way of producing solar cells at an order of magnitude cost savings would be a bad thing; so why is it bad in the IT world. Look at it this way, if most of these customers are budget constrained, cutting their costs significantly means they'll purchase more IT products/services. Sure, some of the money will be saved and go into profit or other budget priorities, but this is the very definition of efficiency in a capitalist economy. All it really means is what I've been saying for a long time, that Open Source is an effective tool to reduce the monopoly profits which are generated by holding prominent software copyrights. And, as everyone already knows, monopoly profits are economic inefficiency.

Bravo, FLOSS community. We know we are on the path to victory when our interest are aligned with capitalism, and all we have to do now is make sure that no government intervenes on the behalf of yesteryear's White Elephants.

http://www.nanosolar.com/ They produce very low cost solar electric cells that could be placed on roofs. Currently they are just under $1/kw and expect their prices to drop as they improve their methods. They are building a plant that should be able to churn out 400+ Mw of capacity a year which will triple the US production capacity of solar panels. Again, I wasn't trying to hate on nuclear. I love it.

When I first heard about nanotechnology, all I saw was people creating pretty shapes with it. Now after only a few short years we have NanoSolar and stuff like this muscle... I really start to wonder what could be around the corner.

1. Make solar energy affordable - Done
2. Provide energy from fusion - This is something I don't know anything about.
3. Develop carbon sequestration methods - More information
4. Manage the nitrogen cycle - More information. I feel like on a basic, local level this can already be accomplished easily. On an advanced/global level though... Manage it? In the next 100 years maybe we can gather some data points so we can UNDERSTAND it. Until then, any attempts to "manage" it would be foolish
5. Provide access to clean water - Tried and true method and 1, 2, 3 Orgs doing it.
6. Restore and improve urban infrastructure - And run on-time and build more parks - but who will fund it?
7. Advance health informatics - This "engineering goal" is too general to discuss. It's like, make it easier to get useful data on our health. Duh!
8. Engineer better medicines - I think "Engineer better robots" would be a more worthwhile engineering goal... but that's just me.
9. Reverse-engineer the brain - Teaching it, and studying it
10. Prevent nuclear terror - This is a political bombshell that I won't go near, but from what I see the strategy is (a) deterrence, and (b) threaten anybody with a nuclear project.
11. Secure cyberspace - Ha!
12. Enhance virtual reality - In a practical way or just enough so that my brain can be tricked into thinking that an incredibly hot women is going down on me?
13. Advance personalized learning - Not sure what this is...
14. Engineer the tools for scientific discovery - Another overly general one, but I'd like to think "discovery" is a misspelling of "exploration". Lately I've been thinking that our satellites are similar to the Triremes of Greece times (which are bound to stay close to our shores), the Apollo/Space Shuttle is like Viking ships (which couldn't (or weren't) be used to setup a new settlement), and then this would be the equivalent of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria (except they will be called Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Lincoln).

I am going to be fair... this is really a list of things that can be completed in the next 25 years. These are not "100 year" goals. They are simply to generalized, for the most part. A real engineer knows that goals should be Specific, Measurable, and ARTistic. These goals don't qualify.

Use the new cheap printable solar cells, and for almost infinite
battery life use super capacitors instead.

The super cap would cost more, but they have like a million cycle life.

Assuming 1 cycle per day, It could last in theory, 3,000 yrs.

Nanosolar which is invested in by google:

http://www.nanosolar.com/history.htm

UltraCapacitors at present:

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

High Altitude Balloons for Relayers:

http://www.21stcenturyairships.com/HighAlt

The 65,000 ft. variety is still in development but would
accelerate with some external research stimuli.

Teledesic once planned to cover the world in Low Earth Orbit ( LEO )
satellites, but it fell apart and millions were wasted.

A more practical solution is a remote control balloon that
can be flown via simple cheap remote control like RC planes
with just a mild booster to get it up over 10 miles high.

It could be landed for repairs, upgrades, etc etc.

Geosync satellites are expensive, and due to their distance out
add in latency to the data, 13 miles vs. 22,000 miles does make a difference.

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

Also at 65,000 ft. there is no wind, so once you make it up there
you just hang out in one spot.

It is nice and cold up there so the electronics can be stored in
a insulated container, and cool air can cycle thru as needed,
or perhaps passive cooling would be fine if done right.

Nuclear fanatics seem to forget the process it takes from digging up something that is one of the rarest elements on our planet and then disposing of such elements when we are done.

They're paying $800 per watt, when a company is now shipping solar panels that cost under $1/watt, AND have a single, expensive point of failure? What is the point of beaming solar energy down from space, to a tropical island?

Ground-based solar including panels and batteries could be built local to each home or village, at a fraction of the cost of this over-engineered idea.

Pretty nice list of personal investors to begin with!
A little bit of funding from Mr. Sergey Brin, http://www.nanosolar.com/investors.htm (Google).

GoogleSolar.com planned?

Once their production capacity outstrips their manufacturing obligations. As per their website, which I've been following (slowly) over the past couple years, you *could* get one right now off ebay -- their #2 print. However, it's being sold as a collectible item, a piece of history, with the proceeds going to charity. So, needless to say, the price is rather steep ;)

This is huge news. Punch $0.99 a watt into the calculator, and even good chunks of Alaska become economical for installations.

I love what happens, though, when you plug in Nanosolar's new $0.99/watt cells into the calculator. :) They make it economically viable even in much of Alaska. Too bad all of their capacity is currently being eaten up on contract with big PV farm manufacturers. But I'm sure they're going to be scaling up as fast as they can.

I'll address just part -- There's no alternate energy grid because building a second, redundant power grid would be about the most ironic wasteful use of resources imaginable. Instead, power gets fed into one big grid from "clean" and "dirty" sources. Power distribution companies (the ones with their name on your electricity bill) buy power from other companies, both clean and dirty. The way to get clean energy into your home isn't to buy directly from the producer--almost nobody does that--but to buy through the distributor. The distributor owns the copper, there's no reason to build a second set of copper.

I can't tell you why nanosolar isn't selling to the public yet, but it sure sounds like they've been selling to large projects in the US. And, to be clear, Google has not invested in Nanosolar. The Google founders have invested their own personal money in the company. There's a big difference. Reading their press makes it sound like manufacturing is just ramping up with the new manufacturing facility opening in November (last entry). Contrary to popular belief, it takes time to build manufacturing facilities -- if they opened the plant in November then it's understandable that on December 2 they might not be ready yet.

I have no doubt that Exxon-Mobil has little interest in alternate energy. The good news is that they don't have to; Nanosolar is perfectly happy to take up the slack, and the local power distributor is perfectly happy to distribute power from whatever source it comes from.

Why can't we all use solar? Because the sun is dark at night and batteries are expensive. It's not clear that, even if the actual panels cost 1/10th the amount it costs to run a generator that the resulting power will be 1/10th the cost. First, the claims of Nanosolar are likely inflated puffery; no Version 1.0 product in tech ever works as well as claimed. Second, we still need the old power grid for night time and cloudy days (or to build expensive batteries or hydro-electric storage facilities). Third, we still have problems with maintenance, and need to rent a large amount of land to put the things on. Those costs can drive the price up significantly. I'm sure it'll make a difference, but it's not going to slash prices on energy by 90% overnight--if it could then Nanosolar (in this for the profit) would just raise prices on the solar panels until the price was just pennies below traditional energy.

I have no idea why Baltimore sucks, but it sounds like a regulatory battle that has nothing to do with the vast multi-national oil companies headquartered in Baltimore. Mainly because there aren't any. Baltimore should get on it and fix the poorly-written law, or the local distributor should explain why it isn't able to effectively utilize the reverse current (does it come at the wrong time or day or in an unpredictable fashion?). Fully agreed that the problem there should be fixed.

I'll address just part -- There's no alternate energy grid because building a second, redundant power grid would be about the most ironic wasteful use of resources imaginable. Instead, power gets fed into one big grid from "clean" and "dirty" sources. Power distribution companies (the ones with their name on your electricity bill) buy power from other companies, both clean and dirty. The way to get clean energy into your home isn't to buy directly from the producer--almost nobody does that--but to buy through the distributor. The distributor owns the copper, there's no reason to build a second set of copper.

I can't tell you why nanosolar isn't selling to the public yet, but it sure sounds like they've been selling to large projects in the US. And, to be clear, Google has not invested in Nanosolar. The Google founders have invested their own personal money in the company. There's a big difference. Reading their press makes it sound like manufacturing is just ramping up with the new manufacturing facility opening in November (last entry). Contrary to popular belief, it takes time to build manufacturing facilities -- if they opened the plant in November then it's understandable that on December 2 they might not be ready yet.

I have no doubt that Exxon-Mobil has little interest in alternate energy. The good news is that they don't have to; Nanosolar is perfectly happy to take up the slack, and the local power distributor is perfectly happy to distribute power from whatever source it comes from.

Why can't we all use solar? Because the sun is dark at night and batteries are expensive. It's not clear that, even if the actual panels cost 1/10th the amount it costs to run a generator that the resulting power will be 1/10th the cost. First, the claims of Nanosolar are likely inflated puffery; no Version 1.0 product in tech ever works as well as claimed. Second, we still need the old power grid for night time and cloudy days (or to build expensive batteries or hydro-electric storage facilities). Third, we still have problems with maintenance, and need to rent a large amount of land to put the things on. Those costs can drive the price up significantly. I'm sure it'll make a difference, but it's not going to slash prices on energy by 90% overnight--if it could then Nanosolar (in this for the profit) would just raise prices on the solar panels until the price was just pennies below traditional energy.

I have no idea why Baltimore sucks, but it sounds like a regulatory battle that has nothing to do with the vast multi-national oil companies headquartered in Baltimore. Mainly because there aren't any. Baltimore should get on it and fix the poorly-written law, or the local distributor should explain why it isn't able to effectively utilize the reverse current (does it come at the wrong time or day or in an unpredictable fashion?). Fully agreed that the problem there should be fixed.

The Google guys recently invested a bunch of money in a little company called "nanosolar" - http://www.nanosolar.com/

Interesting that they're now announcing that they're entering this space.

Google invested heavily in a company called NanoSolar back on 2002. Since then, Google, along with some of the top investors, have given Nanosolar millions and millions of dollars to produce printable roll-out solar cells that uses a conductive foil instead of silicon, making the cells much cheaper and easier to make. For information on Nanosolar's history, you can go here.

Google invested heavily in a company called NanoSolar back on 2002. Since then, Google, along with some of the top investors, have given Nanosolar millions and millions of dollars to produce printable roll-out solar cells that uses a conductive foil instead of silicon, making the cells much cheaper and easier to make. For information on Nanosolar's history, you can go here.

One company Google has invested in is Nanosolar, whose solar tech Popular Science named Top Innovation of the Year 2007. They are already delivering 30 cents per watt and can't build factories fast enough to meet demand.

The AC has a point though that slashdot does not do a lot of followup. For example this 2005 article: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/2 8/1224245 has not really had a follow up to say that they have products on the market now: http://www.nanosolar.com/products.htm, or that this 2004 article: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/2 2/1534212 about solar shingles is also seeing application in new housing now. Looking back, there are articles on ideas that have not panned out so far, especially in organic solar technology. But, that does not mean that they won't.
--
Get solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

To put it briefly, the better you think you are at something, the worse you likely are at it.

And this reveals an interesting shortcoming in humanity - our unique inability to guage knowledge/skills outside our personal experience. We really have no effective way to estimate the amount information in areas outside our personal past experience. So in your thought experiment, we imagine seeing the crab nebula up close, as a brighter, sharper, higher-resolution picture of the crab nebula we already know. But since we aren't actually there, we have no idea what we'd actually see there with this newfound resolution, what new, interesting, or exciting developments may exist that we simply can't see. So what we imagine is a higher-detailed picture of the same-old same-old, failing to account for information currently missing. And thus, we utterly fail to picture what is REALLY there, and so your thought experiment consistently fails to deliver what it pretends to - an estimation of what the actual value of an "instant-travel spaceship" could actually be.

Further complicating matters is that we don't have spaceships that can instantly take us anywhere in the universe, and according to the laws of physics as we know them, it's likely that other intelligent beings don't either. Maybe they have travelled lifetimes and they just haven't run across us yet.

Never underestimate the power of the technology singularity. We are advancing faster every year, and the rate at which our advancement advances also climbs year after year. We are fast developing exo-biological intelligence, and the pattern of our civilization will very soon zip right past the limitations of biological growth.

Plants and trees convert sunlight to usable energy at a very poor efficiency - somewhere around 2%. Solar panels today work at upwards of 18%, and there's no reason to see that trend falter as production costs continue to drop while demand continues to climb. We are in the middle of a watershed event that is just as dramatic and just as devastating as the conversion to photosynthesis and oxygen about 3 billion years ago.

So be patient, my fellow humans, it may take a few million (or even billion) more years. After all, it's more than just a trip down the road to the chem

Well, that's only part of the story. The original capture loses very little energy...

1) If and only if the photon is of the proper energy. In general, during solar energy conversion of all kinds, you require a certain amount of energy to kick an electron out of the pigment. Less than that energy, and nothing happens. More than that energy, and the excess is wasted.

2) This only applies to the original photon capture. The total process of turning solar energy to sugars in plants is about 35%. Due to losses for biochemistry, the overall system is very inefficient -- usually just 1-2% in most crop plants, and a fraction of a percent in non-crop plants. Sugarcane is exceptionally high at 8%, still well below most silicon cells.

Now, dye-based cells *are* in development. The key for them is not that they're very efficient (they tend to be very inefficient), but that they should be very cheap to produce (no silicon refining needed). Of course, a few companies (such as Nanosolar) are working on commercializing high-efficiency dye-based cells. I read nanosolar's main patent at one point; basically, the efficiency problem with most organic solar cells is an uneven distribution of electron donors and receivers that leads to most of the electrons being wasted. In Nanosolar's case, they build a crystalline scaffolding that the dye gets embedded into at regular intervals, then dissolve the scaffolding.

The choice on cost (so far) looks to be between 50 square meters and maybe 100 square meters. Nanosolar will likely come in cheaper (per unit power installed) than standard silicon but it may not have the efficiency so you either need more roof or you need yard space that you don't want to use in another way. Because it takes work to install, the materials would likely have to be nearly free to make your $2000 price point, unless you want to do the installation yourself.

On the other hand, if you are not borrowing, you can usually match what you pay your utility in most parts of the country using silicon over the life of the system and the system will likely fit on your roof. It is a close calculation and in some cases utility rates are high enough that even borrowing can break even or save you a little. Usually you can't beat what you'd end up with if you invested the money elsewhere, say on efficiency. If the up front cost is a problem you can rent a solar power system instead. In this case, you match your utility and fix your rate for up to 25 years. This can lead to savings over time if utility rates go up. This also leaves your equity available for other uses.

You can explore this option at http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

These guys already have that technology and are about to start production. http://www.nanosolar.com/

http://www.nanosolar.com/