Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates On Energy
Sam the Nemesis
submitted an interview in Wired with Bill Gates on the future
of energy. Gates sees nuclear as the only
feasible option for base load generation. His views on the current
direction of energy funding are particularly distressing: "But the
economics are so, so far from making sense. And yet that's where
subsidies are going now. We're putting 90 percent of the subsidies in
deployment — this is true in Europe and the United States
— not in R&D. And so unfortunately you get technologies
that, no matter how much of them you buy, there's no path to being
economical. You need fundamental breakthroughs, which come more out of
basic
research."
Say waht you will about MS but to me it appears old Bill is mostly right on this one. Things like solar and will will eventually become economical, but not in the immediate future. This is mostly due to the rising cost of fossil fuels, but there are some economies of scale. More basic research is needed but renewables will become economical on their own eventually.
Time to offend someone
The down side to nuclear is the waste where does it go? and Safety as all it takes is one MR burns cutting costs to make a big mess.
"640 kwh should be enough for anyone"
Isn't this what Bjørn Lomborg has been saying for years?
After the last discussion on energy options, I had since learned that many of the most desired alternative sources fail to be viable in the truest sense. Wind farms cost too much. They are expensive to maintain -- even more expensive than nuclear power plants. Solar just isn't there yet either though I feel that with more R&D, that will change... money spent on deployment of solar at the moment is wasted I think.
Perhaps only geothermal has the potential to replace nuclear as a longer-term solution but I have my doubts on that too. At the moment, it is only available to specific regions and those are also potentially unstable areas meaning that the same areas where geothermal is of use in the US also have active magma circulation relatively close to the surface. (If deeper drilling techniques were available, perhaps that problem could be overcome.) Once again, more R&D needed to make it viable everywhere.
1. You should into look at how Bill Gates has spent the last decade and then ask yourself your own question.
2. Even if you felt that way before the article, did he actually come off as a man who didn't know what he was talking about?
Of course not.
However, it's probably the only thing he's ever given an opinion on that I happen to agree with. I just find it funny that it's a comment about something far removed from IT where we actually see eye-to-eye.
Yes, strange things happen when we put aside our prejudices.
One of the links is to Donald Sadoway's research group at MIT. His group works on the very topics that will make or break the shift to better energy sources and greater efficiency.
He's also a wonderful teacher who's put up a course at MIT open course ware. It's Solid State Chemistry 3.091 and it utterly rocks. If you want to understand how chemistry impacts energy efficiency and the properties of materials, this is the course for you. And, it's in a format that is great for self teaching.
3.091 course link
I know it's a shameless plug, but give me a break. I work in a chemistry department that does a lot of work on improved energy related materials and methods.
Because he's one of the world's premier professional philanthropists with lobbyists and a research staff who's been involved with political and humanitarian advocacy full-time for ten years now?
Internet Explorer sucks and all, but Bill Gates is a very accomplished and intelligent man with a lot of influence. His opinions matter a great deal.
Nuclear is a waste of time, too complicated & too costly. Thorium is where it's at baby.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LeM-Dyuk6g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl5DiTPw3dk
He's a technology geek, with lots of money. Has a charity foundation that's trying to find ways to help the other 80% of this earths population.
The #1 thing to help those people is to get them ENERGY.
So he invests in groups, companies, people to find solutions. That's what foundations do.
And as someone else mentioned, did you read the interview? I has very good points and insights even if some of them have been obvious to the geek /. crowd.
2. Even if you felt that way before the article, did he actually come off as a man who didn't know what he was talking about?
Had you asked me that in the waning days of the 20th Century, I would have said exactly that.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
We're putting 90 percent of the subsidies in deployment — this is true in Europe and the United States — not in R&D.
And as a result the manufacturers get income which they can invest in R&D. Sounds better to me than blindly throwing money at them and hoping that one day they may produce something useful. It seems to work fine with both wind turbines and solar panels, both of whose costs have come down significantly over the last 10 years and whose performance also has increased drastically. Trickle-up economics at its finest. And moreover a large market with quite a lot of small players, rather than a few multinationals raking in all of the cash.
Of course, with nuclear power there's the problem that you have to invest billions in research, wait for 10 years for the technology to mature, then another 10 years for the pilot projects to get built (not because people are inept or companies corrupt, but because the technology is so complex and the safety requirements are so high), and once it gets accepted then you need 40 years or more before you get a new significant market for the next technology node because it takes a long time for the initial investments to get recouped. And all the time you need all kinds of governmental support to keep the financial side of the picture bearable (insurance, research subsidies, administration of waste processing/disposal, security, ...).
And once the costs have been recouped, companies obviously want to keep the existing plants running for as long as possible since that's free cash, while dismantling gobbles up a lot of money.
Bill Gates is smart and has a whole lot of field-specific knowledge about PCs. He's not well educated outside his field.
Let's let the let the guys with the PhDs in science, math, and engineering figure out energy policy.
I dare say that Gates has picked up a lot since he dropped out of college. A lot of people as intelligent as him keep on learning and, with his philanthropic work, you can bet he's broadened his knowledge of many subject areas. I'm more willing to listen to him over a politician like Al Gore, or any number of celebrities that only became famous because of their looks. At the very least, I believe he is smart enough to not speak out about something that he hasn't educated himself in.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Let's let the let the guys with the PhDs in science, math, and engineering figure out energy policy.
Clearly you have no experience with how Democracies work....
Right, because no-one can ever learn anything on their own. Without that piece of paper from a university with a piece of paper saying they are allowed to give out pieces of paper saying "dis gui noes stuf" you don't know anything.
But then, I guess everybody wants to rule the world, don't they?
What's the total life-cycle cost comparison though?
With solar I see the following:
up front:
Mining raw material for the panels, batteries, and electrical converters
manufacturing the components in a low-security factory
transporting the components on standard truck
installing the panels and conversion equipment to an existing structure or building frames to install on bare earth
down the road:
cleaning the panels
maintaining the circuitry
replacing batteries
having an electrician or homeowner possibly replace individual components over time if things fail
end of life:
remove panels from frames
remove frames from structure or earth
remove switching equipment and batteries
send panels, frames, and switching equipment to recycler
send batteries to mild hazardous waste disposal for disassembly or recycling
Potential problems:
solar panels smashed en masse in a hail storm - solar is offline until panels are replaced and structure is back on grid power. If owner has insurance, that is used to pay for the replacement.
Batteries leak, owner stops storing power for overnight use and goes back on to the grid, and replaces batteries and cleans up acid spill
Absolute Worst Case- solar system causes a fire and the small structure burns.
Contrast to nuclear:
Startup:
Spend billions to build obtain land, fight local opposition, and build the plant.
spend millions to obtain ROW to install power transmission lines
Refine nuclear fuel in a high security factory
transport fuel in an expensive manner via truck convoy
employ dozens, if not hundreds of engineers and technicians to fuel, power up, and baby sit the reactor
down the road:
continue to employ dozens, if not hundreds of engineers and technicians to baby sit the reactor
spend millions to refuel reactor as necessary
spend millions to store spent nuclear fuel in the proper fashion, forcing it to stay cool until it's no longer generating its own heat
maintain security at the facility
end of life:
spend billions to decommission and clean up plant site
find solution for storage of spent fuel?
possible problems:
contaminated water spills posing an environmental hazard requiring expensive cleanup
mismanagement of the reactor leading to core meltdown and environmental contamination (worst case similar to Chernobyl, but without the graphite moderator)
natural disaster leading to core meltdown and environmental contamination (Fukushima)
attractive target for terrorism
I'm for solar subsidy, especially once solar panel efficiency exceeds 40%, which they're almost to on the newest panel designs, especially for structures that can receive solar panels without spoiling the appearance of the structure. Commercial and residential structures with flat roofs, retrofitting houses with the backyard side on the south (as to no put the panels on the roof on the front of the house, for appearance), and building new structures with solar in mind from the planning stages all appeal to me. Give subsidy for Photovoltaics with battery storage, grid-tie-in, and intentional islanding (leaving the structure powered by the PV or batteries but separating from the grid when the grid itself loses power) and suddenly every home becomes a mini power plant. It might even cost more per unit of energy than bulk production like at large power facilities, but it also reduces or eliminates a need for more wiring infrastructure, adds failover, and in places like the southern portion of the country, provides power when it's needed most, during the sunniest days when the air conditioning is cranked down and when power grids tend to fail due to a lack of capacity. A big enough solar installation at a house can power the whole house and can sell back to the grid easily.
If people are worried about safety, have cities implement an inspection regimen at installation, significant modification, and every ten years or so. Nothing really expensive, just something to make sure that everything is hooked up properly and safely.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
No way. Let Rick Perry, the GOP and the Evangelical right decide it at "The Response" prayer meeting and campaign fund raiser this August 6th. All that ivory tower elitist knowledge only gets in the way. This PSA brought to you by the great state of Texas, yee haw!
The #1 thing to help those people is to get them ENERGY.
Yeah lets plonk some nuclear reactors down in Africa...
No what's needed first are stable political environments.
Deleted
Politicians do not get enough kickbacks (I mean "campaign contributions") from the Basic Research crowd. Until this fundamental deficiency is addressed, the lack of public funding for basic research will not improve.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
That's waaaay too late.
Twenty years may be too late to get from R&D to product, but it's 20 years sooner than if you never make the effort. if you want to make progress towards your goal, you have to start towards that goal.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
Bill Gates in unquestionably smart. Hes also rich. While related, they are not the same thing.
Good-bye
Cool so we can throw out Greenpeace and the Sierra clubs input and listen to the majority of nuclear engineers that say nuclear is safe! Great I am good with that.
And it was your idea.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
If you put Bill Gates, Vinod Khosla, and Sergey Brin & Larry Page in a room together it would be a massive love fest; From statements each has made independently it appears they are in close agreement on the subject energy. Bill Gates states the issue well. Compare to interviews with Khosla on the subject of his investment strategy and the google.org REC initiative.
People who gained wealth and fame by bringing improved technologies to market instinctively apply the same approach to energy. That is the Silicon Valley approach. In contrast, the energy policy emanating from Washington D.C. is a combination of vote buying using cash handouts to favored constituencies, e.g. corn ethanol subsidies, and using government coercion to extort cash payments from the public directly into the hands of the politicians, e.g. Al Gore's carbon offsets business.
Genuinely greener technologies do not require government handouts. In fact, it is the opposite, they are cash cows for private investors. That is because efficiency is inherently and simultaneously more green and more profitable than inefficiency. The higher the ratio of outputs the more you get for less. That means spending less money on inputs and impacting the environment less by consuming fewer inputs in production per unit of output.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Frightening, coming from the guy who brought us Windows.
Have gnu, will travel.
How is there not a single post on the actual nuclear technology he is researching and advocating for! C'mon nerds!
Traveling wave reactors (google them) are projected to run without refueling for 60 years on what is 'waste' now and then become the storage facility for the next ~500 years until it fades into background rad. Oh, and they're made to be put in the ground like missile silos. Think of them as nuclear candles. Without having to refuel by hand and taking people out of the equation as much as possible the chances for error get reduced significantly. They also have large negative energy coefficients so a loss of coolant does not lead to a meltdown.
After researching as much as possible into TWRs I'd say the current stage of developement is trying to get the exact alloy of uranium, burnable poisons (look these up too, they're sweet), etc just right to create a long lived sustained reaction. I'd imagine that such work is really heavy on the super computer time.
I hope that these researchers have access to lots of money and super computer time. If only there was some tech billionaire funding them...
He has lots of insight on the subject. Which was: the economics of business models.
He's a very accomplished businessman with a record of stealing his way to the top, then buying or squashing the competition to stay there. And the company that brought you pain while it raked in billions through (oft-forced) sales of an unstable, unsecure os is now bullying Android phone manufacturers with legal tomfoolery. If Bill or MS happen to do something to benefit humanity we can recognize that. But the character of this man and his still-abusive empire shouldn't be white-washed when he happens to share a reasonable opinion. Perhaps rather than trying his hand at solving energy and social problems, he should use his money to undo the problems he created in technology.
Nuclear energy, the short version.
Pro: there's plenty of uranium and thorium.
Con: every 20 years or so you have to evacuate an area 50km across on short notice.
2 is irrelevant, many people sound like they know what they are talking about when they are talking nonsense.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It comes down to a couple of simple questions. Firstly do you support a level of civilization that we currently have? That means all the things we use every day which requires energy. If you do, then you need lots of energy. If you don't then feel free to go back to the stone age and die from the next polio outbreak, cholera outbreak or famine. It really is that simple.
I ask you to do a couple of searches for:
1) How many people died as a result of Chernobyl?
2) How many people died as a result of Fukushima?
3) How many people died as a result of Coal mining?
4) How much radiation is released as a result of burning Coal?
Remember Chernobyl and Fukushima were not nearly as well designed as modern reactors. Unfortunately, we are forced to keep running these older designs because:
A) The public still wants to continue to live in a civilization with a standard of living similar to before while population increases, B) The public didn't want new nuclear plants built. Which would have allowed older plants to be retired.
C) The fuel rods at Fukushima should have been shipped to a long term storage facility scheduled for the U.S. but it was never built.
D) Chernobyl is a special case. Read the detailed report. The operators did the equivalent of taking a pressure cooker on a stove and filling it up with loads of water and then shoving it onto the exhaust of a jet engine.
So it's really that simple. Solar and Wind are all well and good, but they will not support the current level of civilization we enjoy. They may someday, and the use of them is not bad, but they simply wont cut it right now without deploying a huge number of them all over the place.
So if you want to keep your current standard of living, you need reliable base-load energy, and that energy needs to come from somewhere. Nuclear provides lots of energy and if you do the research you will find has actually - even accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima included killed and harmed less people than fossil fuels. You may soon find more people die falling from wind turbines than Nuclear has killed.
So choose what you want. You may decide that you do want to live in a technological civilization that needs energy, but you don't want nuclear. Just don't be surprised if when you take a cold hard look at the numbers, you discover you actually made things worse by building huge wind farms and solar plants, and that your level of civilization collapses somewhat due to the costs.
He has give a lot of opinions I agree with, but his implementation and attempt to control them that I dislike.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So to sum up this thread, and how Slashdot is broken in general. "Bill Gates is right!" "I agree." "You're right and I agree with you." "Everybody above is right and I agree with them." Even though the Bonneville Power administration was running 100% with renewables already (without even using microhydro, solar thermal, or tidal), and is making money at it, it's important to notice that Slashdot's mod system says this can't be done.
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
It's a good indicator of what someone had to go through giving a base set of knowledge. We have nothing to lead us to believe Gates knows what he is talking about. I suspect he does, but I base that on how his layman opinion is aligned with practical facts.
I don't want to rule the world, but I do want to set some baseline rules.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
SPSS -> cyclotron -> antimatter -> ??? -> profit^W energy!
As a side-effect, you get a real big-boy space program and a fueling infrastructure for starships.
Yeah, you're right, why invest in building the future when we can just hand our taxes to the bankers and military contractors.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Why are you disposing of most of that waste? That is still perfectly good fuel for a slightly different reactor... If you use and reuse the fuel it becomes significantly less dangerous. You don't have to use just Uranium/Plutonium to power a reactor you know...
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
But only if the question is: "What energy technology is only ten years away, and has been for the last thirty years?"
[Insert pithy quote here]
The part of his comment that I think is most significant is his comment on energy strategy, at least in the US. Our long-term strategic energy policy makes no sense; government subsidies are going to the wrong technologies and partisan politics inhibit any real solutions. You may disagree on which tech is the right one - but everyone should agree with Gates that we have no viable current plans for the long-term energy needs of this country.
Excuse me, but gates is on crack.
http://www.awea.org/learnabout/industry_stats/index.cfm
There is no basic research needed, because wind power + storage (via compressed air, hydrogen production, and ammonia synthesis, and maybe even batteries) can easily provide the base load power requirements for the entire US. If you notice from those statistics, we putting in 5-10 GW of wind turbines a year in the US. Nuclear and Coal are the big IBM mainframes, and Wind Turbines are the small personal computers. Rooftop solar might be the equivalent of cell phones, but it's got quite a ways to go yet.
I will believe he is serious about nuclear power when he will put his fortune behind underwriting nuclear contamination insurance policies.
T. Boone "Swiftboater bank account" Pickens was pushing a...ahem...revolutionary new energy solution for this country that just so happened to rely on his vast natural gas holdings. I take any commentary from a vested representative with a grain of salt.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
That is the most important thing.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
While its true that nuclear power is the only immediately scalable power source we have that can fill in for coal and gas powered electrical generation at anything like the current scale, there are a number of problems this doesn't even begin to solve.
One of the biggest is transportation technology and battery technology. The energy crisis coming from oil depletion over the next few decades would be little more than an inconvenience if the world's transportation systems were run on electricity instead of petroleum. Right now, batteries still don't have enough energy density at a price point that makes them worth using. At the moment, we're dependent on oil for so much that even our coal and nuclear plants couldn't operate without it (Remember Fukashima's Diesel back-up generators?). Similarly, coal and nuclear fuel travel on oil, are mined using petroleum based machines, transported on diesel oil trains, and so on.
So, in a nutshell, the problem is one of over dependence on ONE kind of fuel (i.e. oil) at the expense of all others for ONE service (i.e. transportation).
Changing this configuration is distinctly non-trivial, and frankly, we as a civilization dependent on money, cheap and available oil, and a just-in-time supply chain may be out of time to fix it. At least not quickly enough to avoid having a goodish number of the world's inhabitants die of starvation.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I have to laugh whenever people react with 'solar/etc is not economic at this time'.
Is nuclear free?
It's freaking expensive. Plants cost billions. Mining costs tons.
What's worse, they cannot be insured. Who foots the bill when accidents happens? The tax payer. Ask Japan how much money they 'saved' with Fukushima.
When you add it up, nuclear is WAY more expensive.
Further, spending on alternatives is an INVESTMENT. Spending on nuclear is a future burden, which will be decommissioned in the best case, and a toxic wasteland in the worst.
Would love to see some intellectual honesty in this discussion.
I think he has a lot more field-specific knowledge about business, and particularly technology business, than he has about PCs, though not through formal education.
He also has some field specific knowledge about public policy for much the same reason, though not as much as about any of those other areas.
A Ph.D. in science, math, or engineering qualifies you as an expert in any area of policy about as much as a Ph.D. in Public Policy and/or Administration qualifies you as an expert in science, math, or engineering.
Though, again, academic credentials aren't the only source or indicator of expertise.
Didn't Germany just recently plan to close down all their nuclear reactors after what happened at Fukushima?
Is 1563649 a prime number?
You're right that "those numbers are supposed to be big and scary, but they add up to less than a tenth of a percent of the national landmass". That's because the limiting factor isn't really the land.
When we're back to talking about absolute numbers (612,355,359.6 sqr meters x 3 is the figure thrown out earlier in the discussion), that as an eye-poppingly large order to cover with solar power generators.
Our needs are more subtle than the constant chanting of "base load" would suggest. Most of new generation (natural gas) is for peak demand and sit unused most of the time. Utility scale energy storage for both renewable and peak demand is advancing very quickly including compressed air and pumped hydro. Google has a detailed report on how in the mid-term renewables will beat all other fuels for the simple reason the fuel is free. (note efficiency typically costs $5/MWH while coal costs $29/MWH). Google is putting their wallet where there mouth is and has/is investing almost $1B into solar. Investing in nuclear power plants and research is not now and will never be cost effective.
Is there no natural gas infrastructure in the UK? In the States (or at least the places that I have lived), people mostly heat with gas. It's still fossil fuel, of course, but it's a lot more efficient and cheaper than burning the same fuel to generate electricity and then using an electric heater. Our peak energy consumption is during summer, when the air conditioners run.
There are plenty of people terrified of nuclear power executives, cutting corners on design, maintence, staffing, and most especially corrosion prevention and a scientifically valid and permanent EOL date.
There's research being done right now on experimental nuclear reactors, it's not like we have to start from scratch. I write software for one of those (alone!). The problem is that we are underfunded (as always) and don't have any plans for going big: it's just research. With the will (and the dough) I'm certain an industrial version could be built within 20 years. Disclaimer: I only speak for myself, not my research group.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Bill knows even less about energy than computers.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Everything he said about energy is spot-on. Although reasonable people may disagree, nuclear is the closest thing we have to an economical non-fossil source of energy. But the cost of safety is high, and the cost of failure is even higher.
Ironically, Bill is the reason why people are skeptical about the safety of process automation software when in fact properly designed software will react more swiftly and reliably than humans. Any time there is a publicly disclosed problem with a nuke plant, the late night comedians respond with batch of Microsoft jokes.
I don't think he's proposing nuclear as a solution for Africa. It doesn't really make much sense, anyway, since they have lots of untapped hydro, which would be both safer and cheaper.
That said, stable political environments don't come out of thin air - they require a certain standard of living, and having cheap energy available is a big step towards that goal.
Eventually, (and granted it may be a very long time) we will run out of all of them. In the end we must get sufficient energy from the sun (or figure out how to make our own using fusion) or we are screwed. It may take a hundred or even a thousand more years, but eventually every drop of oil, gas, coal, & every fissionable piece of uranium will be spent. Given our ever increasing population/appetite for energy it may be sooner than anyone plans. So I think it might be wise to start really figuring out how to extract energy from the sun be it direct conversion, wind, hydro, ?. So if you are right, we are already overusing what mother earth/sun can give us.
So you are buying oil futures then? You know better than the people in the oil business that their prices are going to go up, don't you?
If you are right, the obvious thing for the oil guys to do is leave their cheap oil in the ground and then sell it for 30x as much in 10 years, realizing a 3000% profit for doing nothing. I guess they must not want to make a profit. Or you are wrong.
Gates is right about the importance of nuclear, but our current technology sucks. Even the latest commercial designs leave much to be desired in terms of safety, flexibility, scalability, and efficiency.
Gates is behind the Traveling Wave Reactor, but a lot of research would be necessary to get that idea working, and we need something sooner and more scalable.
Thorium in a Molten Salt Reactor (Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor- LFTR) should be our energy technology of choice. It has already been proven to be feasible (a prototype was built back in the 60s), and the research necessary to build a commercial version would be minimal. China is already pursuing this promising course, and we could join in the Thorium Race by pumping in say $10 billion or more (if we're serious) to take our society into a new era. Doing so would go a very long way towards solving many of the economic and social problems that currently have us deadlocked- so many things come down to the availability of energy.
This is our Green Nuclear solution, and it would allow us to build the society that we dream about with abundant services for everyone, but not unless we reform our attitudes away from fossil fuels or trying to "farm" our energy, which has kept us pre-occupied for some 40 years. It's time to wake up and get moving!
Of course everything we do has trade-offs, positives and negatives on the surrounding environment, and economically.
But to compare for example the "messiness" of solar panel creation with the warming of the global climate by 4 to 7 degrees Celcius (that's 9 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit !) through continued fossil fuel use belies a lack of perspective on the relative scales and severities of these problems.
We need that quantitative perspective to wade our way through these problems. We need rational solutions. Saying "everything is bad" does not help.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
In Canada, the nuclear regulator wanted to keep a nuclear plant closed because it had not met the agreed safety requirements in its upgrade process.
The Conservative government promptly fired the head of the nuclear regulatory agency and put in a patsy who would rubber-stamp the plant's
ability to operate.
Shortly after that the nuclear reactor had to be shutdown for 15 months for repairs.
But of course reality (and nuclear safety) has a well known liberal bias.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Problem is that solar can't scale economically to meet global demand. The point is that no matter what we pick, it's going to have significant drawbacks. Assuming it's feasible in the first place. With our current proven technology, the only two heavy hitters that (I am aware of) can do for a long time that are coal and nuclear.
Pick your poison. Cheers.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
No, we would listen to them plus physicists, geologists, biologists, etc. Using nuclear power involves a lot more than just running a nuclear power plant.
How convent.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The government of Canada, in its great wisdom are actually selling Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) the makers of its CANDU reactors.
The Conservative Government is retarded.
I bet they will get a great price so soon after the Japanese incident. It certainly makes logical sense to sell it now, particularly when Ontario has committed to building more nuclear.
I am sure this will help us meet all those carbon targets that we never met, etc...
What a douche.
There are two ways I know of to collect dilute solar energy that might be economic, i.e., lower than the price of coal.
.
First is over 40 years old, go into space and beam energy down as microwaves.
Zero gravity and no wind means the collecting structures can be far lighter than anything on earth. They are still way too expensive to haul up by current or projected developments in chemical rockets. The cost must come down by a factor of 200 for current rockets and a factor of 40 for the projected cost of the Falcon Heavy. $100 per kg is what's needed..
That looks possible (at 500,000 tons per year) by using partly air breathing vehicles for the first stage and beamed energy (lasers) for the second. Details here: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7898.
The second way is to float the collectors at 20 km where you can avoid clouds and the cosine effect by pointing a 2 km parabolic reflector at the sun. This works as far north as Stockholm. You bring the energy down in a 50 meter diameter light pipe, convert to heat which can be efficiently stored at high temperature.
Based on materials cost, the investment looks to be around $1.2 B/GW and the power cost between one and two cents per kWh. The storage system (35,000 cubic meters of firebrick) costs a tenth of a cent per kWh. I worked on this for a year and a half. We found no showstoppers, but the engineering detail got beyond what could be done with a small unpaid team. More here www.stratosolar.com
End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain
More basic research is needed but renewables will become economical on their own eventually.
You mean like this: http://beyondzeroemissions.org/
Just a pity our (Australian) economy depends so much on digging up coal and iron ore to send to China.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion