Slashdot Mirror

> still far safer, cleaner, more efficient and better than coal, gas, wind, solar etc etc.

This got voted -1, but statistically, nuclear actually does cause the lowest number of deaths per MWh energy produced.

http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2...

There really is nothing safer than nuclear, and the facts back this up. Still, when did /. moderation ever have anything to do with reality?

1) This is a non-event, about on par with the non-events in nuclear power that mdsolar regularly submits (which for some baffling reason gets approved). The reflected sunlight set a few wire bundles on fire, and the fire damaged some piping. That's it. Ars Technica has about the only non-dramatized coverage of it I've read. I suppose you could view the hype as counterbalancing mdsolar's anti-nuclear hype, but I'd just rather not have hype of any kind on /.

2) The danger of solar comes mostly during installation and maintenance. Working on the roof (where most PV panels are installed) is the most dangerous construction job out there. And the always-generating nature of PV panels makes them an electrocution hazard. Not really an issue here since Ivanpah is a solar thermal plant.

3) After fuels that you burn and Banqiao, solar is the most dangerous energy source once you normalize for amount of electricity generated. About 10x deadlier than nuclear power,

https://www.google.com/search?...

WTH is a LOCA attack?

The facts speak louder than any of these envirowackos, even including the deaths from the nuclear bombs, nuclear is still safer than ANY other power source we have.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/...

But let us all hide under the table in fear of the big bogeyman that is nuclear, we can't have cheap power because someone might cry in fear over the nuclear plants.

If we can make energy cheaper by an order of magnitude compared to how it is today, that opens the door for some great things.

And the comments below this article provide some insightful ideas about exactly that scenario.

The firehose voting is not enough. There are too few people voting on firehose article, making it more open to abuse by those with multiple sockpuppet accounts. There should be a way to downvote articles on the front page, and a karma-like score pre-applied to those people's firehose submissions.

Why this submissions is flamebait anti-nuclear energy FUD:
- 5 mSv is background radiation and is a ridiculously low threshold
- 50 mSv is the standard in places like the US
- of those 174 workers exposed to the highest radiation dose, we can expect that one will get cancer -- pretty damn good for what's supposed to be one of the worst nuclear disasters!
- in comparison, how many people got killed by the total lifetime (production to decommission) per energy generated by mdsolar's preferred methods? here's where nuclear stands in comparison: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...
Of course, those that have been here for a while already knew this submission was going to be utter bullshit the moment we saw who posted it.

a huge number of oil-transporting trains. That's right, in typical crony-capitalist mode, the billion-dollar-men who back Obama have gotten amazingly wealthier from their investment while Obama's ignorant voters are unaware that the wealth gap between rich and poor has never been greater than under Obama.

Stupid college kids think Obama is "saving the planet" while he is actually making all his friends insanely rich, some from "investments" in "green" companies that were only made profitable by Obama's government-driven market distortions and others from faux-eco moves like this pipeline ban.

Remember "Solyndra"? Those Obama supporters made a pile of money by investing a bunch of money in an unprofitable solar company, then giving Obama some campaign dollars, then getting a big pile of government loans after he was elected, and cashing-out - leaving the non-viable corporate shell to go bankrupt and the taxpayer with the debts.

Next Big Future also has a good writeup:

Nuclear: 0.04 deaths per TWH
Hydro: 0.10 (Euro standard)
Wind: 0.15
Rooftop solar: 0.44 (mostly people falling off of roofs installing them)
Natural gas: 4
Coal, US: 15 (China is 278)

It's a horribly complex technology that it's adherents fucked up badly by not carefully and consistently holding to the highest of engineering standards (like naval reactors). They cheaped out and they are paying the price.

Yup, it's fucked up so badly that it kills fewer people per MWh generated than any other power source, including solar, wind, and hydro. Shame on us for creating the safest form of power generation in the history of mankind.

You can't compare to a vacuum. You can't look at fatalities or injuries caused by a nuclear accident, compare to some hypothetical universe where that nuclear power plant (and only that nuclear power plant) didn't exist, and criticize nuclear power for killing those people. A valid comparison must use opportunity cost. Everything has some danger, some risk of death.. If the nuclear plant hadn't been there, some other type of plant would've had to be there to generate the same amount of electricity. That's the alternative case you have to compare against, not a vacuum. How many deaths would that alternate power plant have caused?

When you crunch the statistics that way, you find that had the nuclear plant been replaced by any other type of power plant, statistically you would've killed more people. Even wind, solar, and hydro are more dangerous. Or put in relative terms, replacing coal, gas, hydro, wind, and solar plants with nuclear plants saves lives.

The "externals" can't be accurately counted or evaluated. And they don't show up on accounting sheets.

It depends. How accurate do you demand it be?
deaths per TWH by energy source
Health effects

And they show up in accounting sheets - just not those of the originator. They show up in the accounting sheets of healthcare organizations. Life Insurance organizations. Building maintenance(back when acid rain was even dissolving them). Etc...

The term "externals" is what you say when you want something to be more expensive but can't actually cite any of it with any clarity.

No, it's more like I don't want to write a book. I can, using completely open sources, peg an average 'per mWh' external expense to coal. It might not be accurate down to the mill(1/10 of one cent), but I can do it. It's true that you can't really attribute any given death to a specific plant, much less a specific unit of power. But you can certainly do so in the aggregate. If it was any less diffuse people would be able to successfully sue for their illnesses.

It might be somewhat 'unfair', but it does mean that you can 'get it in the ballpark' with regards to internalizing the cost by doing something like charging for the pollution. The USA currently mostly does it by the EPA and fines, but I support a more straight-forward system.

Your type has been saying the same thing for decades, centuries: inflation will explode! The Swiss franc will become the world's reserve currency! Except the dollar's stronger now, even after the Fed created trillions upon trillions out of thin air. And the Swiss are charging negative interest rates precisely because they don't want to be the reserve currency. When you become the world's reserve currency you lose control over the money supply. The Fed for example can't control the supply of Eurodollars.

The world's capital supplies are getting very close to a quadrillion US dollars. The Fed can create enough money to pay off the US debt, and it will be such a minute fraction of the total money supply that it won't cause a blip on inflation.

In conclusion, you don't know jack about what you're talking about, and your ilk have been predicting imminent doom and gloom for the US dollar because of the national debt since the very first US administration. It's like Chicken Little screaming about the sky falling. No one's paying attention anymore.

Did they look at Direct Use of Pressurized Water Reactor Spent Fuel in CANDU? You can pretty much grind up the "spent" fuel from a LWR, pack it into new pellets, then burn it again with a heavy-water moderator. Those reactors can also burn un-enriched uranium or thorium.

I thoroughly enjoyed your response-sequence to DrYak and dave420 (420+environmentalist, what are the chances!). To be honest, though, I have my background biases as well that helped motivate my response above: I'm a fan of nuclear power (which, by the way, causes far less human deaths per terrawatt-hour generated than wind turbines); and also, as an avid hiker, I have great aesthetic objection to wind turbines.

I don't know how "clean" these are, considering they generate more human deaths per terrawatt-hour generated than nuclear does: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...

The Ivanpah plant kills lots of birds, with endangered species among them, by literally cooking them while in flight. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... Nuclear doesn't have this problem. Also, note that nuclear also causes the least number of human deaths per terrawatt-hour generated of any power plant technology: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...

Link

The point of that xkcd comic is that cancer drugs need to be safe as well as effective. A patient whose cancer cells are all dead is not better off if he is dead also.

I read the recipe for the salve and it does not appear to be something that would kill a patient. In fact, you could eat the medicine and it wouldn't hurt you; it's onions or leeks, garlic, wine, bile salts, and some small amount of copper. According to TFA the lab where they tested this smelled like garlic and people thought they were cooking food in the lab.

I'd be willing to have this stuff put on my skin.

P.S. I'm excited by the new technology being called "nanobots". (I think "nanobots" might be overselling what it is, but they didn't ask me.) A nanoscale cylinder is made that can hinge open; some drug is placed inside; and two latches hold it shut. The latches are designed to open only in the presence of a specific protein, such as a specific cancer cell type. Thus we have a nanoscale "robot" that can do exactly two things: it can open when it bumps into a specific cell type, and it can close again when it's away from the specific cell type.

This is exciting because it decouples the two problems of treating cancer: you need to kill the cancer cells and not hurt the patient. With this, you could use a very effective anti-cancer medicine that is as dangerous as a handgun bullet, but make sure that only a nanodose is delivered, and only to the cancer cells (I guess with high but not perfect accuracy).

http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/03/ido-bachelet-dna-nanobots-summary-with.html

I tried to find out more about the human trial, but couldn't find anything beyond the video linked in the above article. If these nanobots really do get tested on a human and he really has his life saved by them, I expect significant news coverage. The claim is that the guy would be dead by summer with conventional treatment, so if it's real we won't have to wait more than a few months to read more about it.

...what is very little recognized worldwide, is that nuclear energy gets a free lunch at the expense of the taxpayers, as regards risk insurance.

How many other industries have more than $12B in insurance before the government will step in?

I mean, there's no other industry that could cause that much damage in a single incident, is there?

It is the most damned uninsured thing in developed countries and when one of these plants goes bust, you know what happens, ref. Fukusima.

Yeah, we're up to 2 busted nuclear plants in the whole world. All of them were old as hell plants, newer plants survived just fine, and realistically speaking we're being paranoid about the radiation.

If nuclear industry wishes to operate on-par terms with other forms of green technologies, please, bring the actuarial scientists in, to do all the math!

They have. It has even fewer deaths per TWh, including Chernobyl and Fukushima, than solar & wind

I think the recent trend to try and move away from nuclear is a reactionary thing, due to what happened in Fukushima - so, in a way it's understandable. However, you rightly point out that it's an irrational move, because coal kills many more people than nuclear. It's just not as quick and spectacular. The only two big nuclear disasters we had (Chernobyl and Fukushima) were because of pretty fundamental design flaws - in the Japanese case, compare Fukushima with Okinawa; it all came down to looking at past recorded tsunami wave heights in the area and building an appropriate-height wall (the engineer who pushed for that in Okinawa is a hero).

Actual numbers are here (and many other places): coal = 15-100 deaths per TWh, nuclear = 0.04 deaths per TWh (lower even than hydro, wind, or solar).

As much as I don't like to say it (I'm from New Zealand, which is famously anti-nuclear), nuclear is probably the best option (by almost every metric) we have until we can get large-scale solar going - which is probably still decades away. What we should be doing though is looking at safer nuclear, like pebble bed reactors, using fast breeders not light water reactors (less waste*), and probably thorium (thorium molten-salt reactors could be one of the safest and cleanest options available) - and replacing and upgrading old, dangerous reactors (but no one wants to build new ones, so we have to keep the old unsafe ones going...)

I do wonder though: how much is people being irrational, and how much is people being uninformed? The media makes a big deal about nuclear power risks, but I would hazard that most people wouldn't have a clue about the actual numbers. How much different would public opinion be if everyone knew the truth? (I know, not much different... sigh).

* Yeah, I know, breeders are more weaponisable too...

The £90 figure compares favorably with the £92.50 price for power from the planned Hinkley nuclear station, especially as the lagoon is designed to last 120 years -- at a much lower risk than nuclear.

Nuclear is the safest power generation technology we've invented. Nearly an order of magnitude safer than solar, 2-4x safer than wind and hydro. If they're claiming to have come up with a technology which has "much lower risk," count me skeptical until they've proved it. Too often the people claiming such things look only at exotic outlier events like big accidents, while ignoring the more mundane events like maintenance accidents. The thing is, nuclear is so safe that per unit of energy generated, casualties from maintenance accidents from other power sources outnumber casualties from exotic nuclear accidents. And it's such a concentrated power source under such high scrutiny by regulators that nuclear maintenance accidents are also lower per unit of energy generated.

Literally every nuclear plant in construction throughout the entire world is way overbudget, even the ones in China.

You're right... but China aims to change that. China is cool with the delays in AP1000 construction... why? Because Westinghouse is refining the pump design.

China is much more than a happy customer experiencing some delays in delivery and construction. They have a plan in place to build the CAP1400, their own proprietary version of the Westinghouse AP1000.

If you're a flag-waving American who believes that we're still in the race to help develop and industrialize the world, this August 2014 slide show from China's SNPTC (State Nuclear Power Technology Corporation) is worth a look. "China has basically established the 3rd generation nuclear power industrial system, built up the complete equipment supplied chain, completed the standard design of localized AP1000, and prepared for mass construction of the localized AP1000."

And that is merely to ensure its entry into the market as a supplier of AP1000-compatible reactors in the short term. Their CAP1400 project promises to build on the AP1000 concept while scaling up the output by half (to 1530MWe). They are also suggesting an actual four-year construction cycle.

So if Westinghouse (majority owner: Toshiba) wishes to delay construction today in order to improve the design of coolant pumps --- I'm sure China is amenable. They will note the improvements and incorporate them.

While the United States feeds Africa for a day and attempts to impose unworkable energy solutions, Japan and China will build its coal plants today and become its infrastructure partners. Then with the same steadfast determination with which the USA built out railroads, the Chinese will lay high speed rail, energize itself and New Africa with grids and mature PWR nuclear energy tomorrow. And on the third day, Thorium reactors using liquid fuel. Ultimately a quadrillion dollars of infrastructure... financed and built without the US dollar, perhaps.

So if China supplies nuclear reactors to the world --- and ultimately also the United States for a hefty price, when natural gas declines and we shake ourselves awake from this renewables nightmare, what a pity. We could have done it first and we could have done it better.
___
"Oh dear! We're late!" Down the nuclear rabbit hole we go.

Wind causes almost 4x more deaths per terrawatt generated than nuclear. http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...

Even excluding Bangqiao, there are still 2.5x more deaths caused by hydro than nuclear: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...

Mod parent down for being a misanthrope. Hydro kills multiple times the people that nuclear does per amount of energy generated: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...

Hydro has much higher human death rate per terawatt generated than nuclear. http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...

It's about as contested as the validity of the Theory of Evolution and the effectiveness of childhood vaccines in that there are people who claim it not to be true in spite of massive amount of empirical evidence.

First, is nuclear power safer than other methods of power generation? Yes, by orders of magnitude.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...

Second, Chernobyl (which is included in the evidence presented above). Chernobyl was a reactor that served two purposes for the Soviets. First, it was used to experiment on the capabilities and the limitations of the RBMK-1000 reactor series (this is what caused the disaster there). Second, it was used to produce weaponized materials for nuclear weapons for the Soviet military. As it produced power and that power needed to go somewhere, it was connected to the grid and added supply to nearby communities. Now I could get into the fact that the RBMK-1000 was one of the only reactor designs ever constructed that used a high positive void coefficient and that since that disaster, every single nuclear reactor in the world has been either designed or modified to not do that. I could get into the fact that the disaster that happened there (runaway reaction) isn't possible anywhere else without breaking the laws of physics due to the design of the plants (regardless of any safety features - it's a physical limitation of the design itself). But I think you should do your own research on those things.

Suffice it to say that Chernobyl is included in the numbers proving that nuclear power is the safest form of power production ever utilized by mankind and that it's arguable that it shouldn't be (which would only improve the numbers above for nuclear). Whichever way you stand on that point of contention (whether or not an experimental military facility operating a reactor design known to be unstable and dangerous in such a way that it was regularly pushed to its design tolerances should be included in a list of civilian nuclear power plant accidents), nuclear still comes out way ahead in the basic math. It's merely a matter of how many orders of magnitude its safety record exceeds that of other power production methods.

There's nothing unclear about over half a century of safety record that demonstrates an exceedingly safe technology. There's nothing unclear about the fact that if you care about human life, nuclear is the only option and that if you care about the environment, nuclear is the only good option that can handle base load. You can contest whether gravity exists all day long, but if you jump off a desk, you're going to fall to the floor every time.

Reality is that which is still there regardless of how much you wish it weren't so.

> It seems more and more investors are losing faith in the very possibility of producing energy with fusion.

[citation needed]

This recent survey of alternate fusion projects says otherwise: http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/...

Renewables kill more people per amount of energy generated than nuclear: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/... You'd have to be a misanthrope to invest in that over nuclear.

For all the talk of the dangers of nuclear, it has still caused less deaths per amount of energy generated than any other method that has been used to practically generate electricity: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/... If you're not ignorant of these facts, then the only remaining reasons to oppose nuclear are either political (Naomi Klein-style anti-capitalist), or you're simply a misanthrope.

The whole issue of waste has been beaten to death. Reprocessing and breeder reactors leave only a little waste that can't be used for energy, and waste transmutation is a proven concept that further reduces any dangerous waste. With these processes, the actual nuclear waste left over is a tiny amount, and glassification trivially takes care of that.

Nuclear kills the least number of humans per amount of energy generated compared to any other energy source used for power generation, including wind/solar/hydro: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...

Hydro kills far more people per amount of energy generated than nuclear: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...

Solar kills a lot more people per amount of energy generated than nuclear does: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...

Turns out they do have some sort of prototype, just not the complete one they plan to refine with 1-year iterations.

Here are some details about their technology.

Actually pretty interesting numbers

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...

We don't have to wait 10 years for Lockheed to make the fusion reactor work. Fission rockets are plenty powerful, enough to rule the solar system.

Plus there's always the chance that Lockheed fusion turns out to be a dead end and we're left with nothing.

Behold, the gaseous core nuclear thermal rocket, Liberty ship

3,060 ISP
1,000 ton payload to LEO

But since it's eeevil nuclear power (and fission at that), it will never get built in the US. But hopefully in the future China or some other country not under the thumb of enviro-liberals will step up and build it.

Forbes didn't do any research they merely took the figures from this bunk: http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/...

The estimates for deaths from Chernobyl range from 4,000 to 500,000 guess which figure 'nextbigfuture' picked.

He also ignores all uranium mining deaths.

He also makes an absurd arbitrary assumption that 30% of all construction deaths from falling from heights are due to solar!!!!!

That page isn't a paper, it isn't peer reviewed, it's a blog and it's 6 years old (before Fukushima)

Per unit of power generated, wind and solar are much more dangerous than nuclear even if you factor in the meltdowns. What's going on is the same reason some people are afraid of flying. When a plane crashes it gets reported all over the world, with hours of coverage and video and pictures.. Meanwhile, most car crashes go unreported (did you know wind turbines killed more people in 2011 than Fukushima?). Thus creating the misperception that cars are safer, even though statistically planes are far safer.

No, there are exactly zero big catastrophes going on right now. If you want to find catastrophes you need look no further than the actual tsunami that caused Fukushima - which resulted in tens of thousands of deaths (compared to zero from the failing reactors).

I live in Sweden, one of the countries that was actually affected by Chernobyl fallout. We had to make sure we didn't eat mushrooms for a short while - and that was it.

The "Big Lie" is that there have been nuclear catastrophes. A statement not supported by data: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...

"Dirty" is a very loose term without a rigorous definition, so you can make it be pretty much anything you like. For example, both wind and solar PV have a pretty serious environmental impact just from a raw materials mining perspective, only you don't see it, because most of it happens in places populated by people of a different skin color. Regardless, compared to fossil fuels (mostly coal), it's impact is pretty reserved, so I'm willing to give it a pass. Nuclear is similar, unless something goes really wrong, and even then the impacted areas are mostly deserted of people, not nature (which quite happily trades that niche in exchange for being pushed out of their natural habitats by people).

As for lethality, that is actually an understood and quantifiable factor and indeed nuclear comes out on top and that's even assuming the worst-case deaths from Chernobyl (4000 excess deaths over the next 25 years, 50 confirmed so far) and the linear-no-threshold model of radiation exposure risks. How can renewables be worse? Quite simply because wind and solar are extremely diffuse power sources, so they require lots of manpower to install. This typically takes place at elevated places and a non-trivial amount of people fall to their deaths.

The scientific illiteracy comes in when they propose "safer" alternatives, which based on the scientific evidence available are actually more dangerous. A great summary of the death rates from various power sources it here:

    http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
So scientifically speaking, we should apply your argument to every other form of power generation which is more dangerous.

But what about failure X?: If you bring up Chernobyl (speculatively 4-25 thoursand dead), then I can bring up Banqiao Dam (171-250 thousand dead). The reality is that just like with driving-versus-flying, people are giving too much weight to rare spectacular failures and not enough to the lesser but much more common failures. This is also a failure to apply science and proper statistics to risk assessment.

Are you fucking kidding me?
"Nuclear is a stopgap" and "not poisoning the world for future generations"?

You know how many people have died over the past 60-odd years from radiation poisoning? Direct deaths, including incidents like assassinations and laboratory accidents? 10,000, maybe? Nope. 5000? Nigga we ain't even close yet. 1000? Keep going. 500? Hahaha, get real buddy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Over 60 years of nuclear power and widespread use of radioactive material and there are less than 400 (estimate 200-300) deaths from direct radiation exposure. You can bump it up to ~10,000-20,000 when you include estimates on cancer related deaths. But you know what? If we're going to count cancer related deaths for nuclear, then how about we count pollution related deaths for coal, oil and gas?

Think you can guess? Maybe 100,000 per year?
Try 7 million: http://www.who.int/mediacentre...

Even if you went batshit crazy with estimating nuclear's impact - with crazy greenpeace numbers like a million deaths that they pull out of their collective asses. You still come NOWHERE NEAR coal, oil or gas. In fact, by metrics like amount of power produced per death, Nuclear is the safest we have available. Nothing else beats it, including Solar, Wind and Hydro.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...
http://motherboard.vice.com/en...

Enough with your bullshit FUD. There is nothing wrong with, and there has never been anything wrong with Nuclear. All the facts are stacked against you and all you've brought against it are lies and bullshit fearmongering to convince people who are ignorant of what the nuclear statistics actually look like. I'm fucking sick and tired of you anti-nuclear liars. All you do is help ensure we keep guzzling oil, coal and gas. I don't think the oil industries could've gotten better shills if they paid for them.

Actually, coal is the worst by far. Nuclear is the best. Solar is more dangerous than Nuclear, but not even by an OOM.
Forbes article, deaths per Trillion kWh
Coal, Global: 170k, Coal, China: 280k, Coal, US: 15k
Solar: 440
Nuclear, Global average: 90
Deaths per TWh by energy source(note:1k times less electricity than above)
Coal, electricity, world average: 60. 100 if it's for everything.
Oil 36
Solar .44
Wind .15
Hydro .10(not including Banqiao, including it raises it to 1.4 because the once incident killed 171k. And we thought rare accidents were dangerous with Nuclear? They have nothing on Dams).
Nuclear: .04

What are you talking about? Deaths per Terawatt in Nuclear is the best by far. It's several times better than the next best option on that metric (wind energy)!

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...

Nuclear is cleaner than coal barring an accident. Coal is guaranteed to kill and hurt people. With Nuclear you at least have a chance of everyone being healthy.

I beg to differ: nuclear is cleaner than coal even if you include accidents. The calculations on that page are admittedly from early 2011, but it accounts for 4,000 deaths from Chernobyl. I could add up a bunch more from Wikipedia, but screw that, lets just throw in Hiroshima and Nagasaki into the mix - about 250,000 deaths. And then let's round that to an even one million for the heck of it.

The death rate is still lower than coal by an order of magnitude. Nuclear is cleaner than coal even if you include 4x the deaths of atomic acts of war.

That whole piece is fascinating, especially for insights such as

Coal and fossil fuel deaths usually do not include deaths caused during transportation. The more trucking and rail transport is used then the more deaths there are. The transportation deaths are a larger component of the deaths in the USA than direct industry deaths. Moving 1.2 billion tons of coal takes up 40% of the freight rail traffic and a few percent of the trucking in the USA.

and

Those who talk about PV solar power (millions of roofs) need to consider roof worker safety. About 1000 construction fatalities per year in the US alone. 33% from working at heights. Falls are the leading cause of fatalities in the construction industry. An average of 362 fatal falls occurred each year from 1995 to 1999, with the trend on the increase.

If someone reading this knows Tim, please give him my regards.

Also, if he wants to talk about the whole world going off fossil fuels to a cheap form of solar, be happy to do so. If it can't make dollar a gallon gasoline, then the idea isn't ready for prime time.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/...

Talk I gave at Google.

http://youtu.be/qCiw99yRBo8

A laser 33 times larger than the propulsion laser I propose.

http://www.deepspace.ucsb.edu/...

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

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/...

Rooftop solar is several times more dangerous than nuclear power and wind power. It is still much, much safer than coal and oil, because those have a lot of air pollution deaths.

To be accurate, the search in Gran Sasso is a search for WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), which are one microphysical explanation for dark matter. I personally do not like the common conflation of dark matter (for which there is abundant evidence) with WIMPs (for which there is no evidence at all).

A lot of the interest in WIMPs comes from particle physics, due to the "WIMP miracle" (that hypothetical particles at the electro-weak scale, i.e., ~ 100 GeV, apparently have the right mass to explain dark matter) and the hypothesized connection between WIMPs and supersymmetry (i.e., that the WIMP could be a supersymmetric neutralino). After much experimental work, the WIMP miracle is almost dead experimentally, and the supposed connection to supersymmetry is not doing so well either.

However (not that you would know from reading most articles on the subject), there are a number of other viable theories for dark matter. These include axions, primordial black holes (maybe), and macroscopic quark nuggets, which would have important practical implications should they be detected.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/12/senior-fusion-researchers-give-major.html

In a major endorsement of the fusion energy research and development program of start-up Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (LPP), a committee of senior fusion researchers, led by a former head of the US fusion program, has concluded that the innovative effort deserves “a much higher level of investment based on their considerable progress to date.” The report concludes that “In the committee’s view [LPP’s] approach to fusion power is worthy of a considerable expansion of effort.”

Talk to Ford - you might be able to sell 'em just on the fact that supporting "Focus Fusion" is free advertising for two of their models...

http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/12/senior-fusion-researchers-give-major.html In a major endorsement of the fusion energy research and development program of start-up Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (LPP), a committee of senior fusion researchers, led by a former head of the US fusion program, has concluded that the innovative effort deserves “a much higher level of investment based on their considerable progress to date.” The report concludes that “In the committee’s view [LPP’s] approach to fusion power is worthy of a considerable expansion of effort.”

And more in 10 other Asian countries. This is a twofer: Let's loose money by not making loans on a nearly fool proof business model and let those countries become ignore the U.S more for their new friends who will do what they want and we don't!

http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/10/will-china-build-hundreds-of-new-coal.html

The Bloomberg link is broken. Here's a another, with misleading headline:

http://about.bnef.com/press-releases/chinas-power-sector-heads-towards-a-cleaner-future/

There might be a way to spend a few tens of billions and end the use of fossil fuel by making a certain kind of renewable energy less expensive than fossil fuels. We could burn several times the current consumption of oil and not create any problems if it was carbon neutral synthetic made from really inexpensive electric power.

Dollar a gallon gasoline can be made from 1-2 cent electric power. Ground solar looks like it will bottom out around 8-10 cents per kWh. Space based solar power could get down to 1/5th of that because it gets 5 times as much sunlight in GEO. That's *IF* we can get the transport cost to GEO down to $100/kg. That's about a hundred to one reduction, but looks like it could happen. Details, including some spiffy artwork, here: http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/09/propulsion-lasers-for-large-scale.html

You are presuming that the supply of lithium ion batteries is somehow limited like the ability to extract oil from the ground. On the contrary, the raw materials are abundant and the technology to produce the cells is fairly straight forward. The price per unit of storage is likely to *continue* downward, with greater production demand resulting in increased manufacturing capacity and (likely) efficiencies. A quick look at google turned up this from early last year: http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/02/battery-news-roundup.html showing the downward trend.

The difference with batteries is also that, once expended, the materials used to create the cells do not need to be mined. Much like recycled aluminum is far cheaper than that produced from ore. Oil, otoh, is not really in any state to be "remanufactured" easily after being used in an ICE.