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DOE Shines $14M on Solar Energy Research
coondoggie writes "Eleven university solar research projects aimed at developing advanced solar photovoltaic (PV) technology manufacturing processes and products got a $14 million boost today from the Dept. of Energy. Photovoltaic-based solar cells convert sunlight directly into electricity, and are made of semiconductor materials similar to those used in computer chips. When sunlight is absorbed by these materials, the solar energy knocks electrons loose from their atoms, allowing the electrons to flow through the material to produce electricity."
Who modded this down? This is a genuine aid to small short-term variations. See beacon power. I am not sure that such technologies could cope with day/night fluctuations though, for these long period variations probably pump storage hydroelectric may be better. They are probably complementary technologies, as it takes a pump-storage plant about a minute to reach full load from stand-still, or 15 seconds from "hot standby", where the turbines are kept spinning under zero load.
Check out Integral Fast Reactors. They are passively safe (they can't go into meltdown, even if the entire system fails, because the reaction slows down as the temperature increases), they use several orders of magnitude less fuel, and work perfectly well getting fuel as un-enriched uranium or thorium or even depleted uranium and normal nuclear waste (which means that they easily have more than 3000 times as much fuel available as the light water reactors that are currently most common), and they produce orders of magnitude less nuclear waste (on the order of 200 times less) which also has a half life in the range of 200 years (instead of thousands of years). Oh, and did I mention that waste is treated on site, rather than being shipped to some distant storage facility? They are still considered experimental because the only one to operate in the US was canceled because of pressure by John Kerry (thanks a lot) after operating for 30 of the planned 35 years. The only reason that IFRs weren't considered competitive with light water reactors is because waste disposal is essentially free for utilities. (The cost of operations outweighs the improvement in fuel efficiency, but not the real cost of waste disposal.)
We should be building some of those, not more of the current (ancient) reactor designs.
This is SO educational! -- Kintaro Oe
$14 million is barely over an hour of the cost of the US occupation of Iraq: senate.gov
Why do people seem to keep assuming a "one size fits all" solution when these subjects come up? If we individually moderate our consumption (yes I understand that's not very likely to happen) and we incorporate several forms of renewable technology we will reduce our dependence on non-renewables drastically. Each house in the US could be retrofitted with a reasonable solar array for something like $50k. That won't solve all the owner's power needs, but it will put a large dent in them.
Combine that with geothermal heat pumps that drive a radiant heating system (preferably built into the floors for maximum efficiency) and some wind power (a few small wind generators won't do too much damage to the local environment but can help a little bit) and some heat recovery methods built into the plumbing of the house and most people will reduce power consumption by as much as a third or even half since most of our energy usage actually comes from heating a house or water for our personal comfort.
Solar doesn't have to be the "silver bullet" that so many opponents use as a reason not to fund it. It just has to be part of the solution.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."