Large Scale 24/7 Solar Power Plant To Be Built in Nevada

RayTomes writes "The Obama administration has provided a loan guarantee of $737 million to construct the first large-scale solar power plant that stores energy and provides electricity 24 hours a day, 7 days a week." This solar power project, a heliostat rather than a photovoltaic system, with a molten salt system to store power as heat for times when the sun isn't shining, will be constructed in Nevada and, says the article, is expected to create "600 construction jobs and 45 permanent positions."

Comments

Re:Haven't we learned anything?

[biryokumaru]

• 1 - Shipping and mining of feedstock - I presume you mean fuel... I really don't see how this is a problem at all, it creates a lot of industry and drives new technologies. It's a good thing all around. There's no way a sane person can see this as a drawback.
• 2 - Long term cost with storage of waste - You've clearly never heard of breeder reactors, or the negative radioactive waste drawbacks of things like coal. Combine the already-lower radioactive waste of nuclear with breeders, and you've got an extremely planet and people-friendly power source.
• 3 - Proliferation - Ya, we're clearly stopping openly-hostile, fundamentalist Iran from building nuclear power plants. That's totally happening. If you call Stuxnet on this, you're crazier than Ahmadinejad.
• 4 - Worldwide fuel limits - I also went to college. In fact, I went to college for power engineering, and that number is utter nonsense. It's more like 3,000 years with current consumption, assuming we don't use breeders. With new technologies like Indian thorium breeders we have more like 250,000 years, assuming we only use uranium and thorium, and assuming we're still stuck on this rock. That gives us only 20 years more to hold out until we solve the fusion break-even problem.
• 5 - Solar and wind production in the US - At the APPA conference in Nashville this spring, one of the foremost investors in "renewable" energy in the country outright stated that they would have put absolutely nothing into solar/wind/geothermal if they didn't receive federal grants for it. It'd've simply've been a waste of time and money. Federal support is the only reason we have anything like this project.
• 6 - If you're not an idiot, you should stop trying so hard to look like one.