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Bill Gates Investing $2 Billion In Renewables
An anonymous reader writes: Bill Gates has dumped a billion dollars into renewables, and now he's ready to double down. Gates announced he will increase his investment in renewable energy technologies to $2 billion in an attempt to "bend the curve" on limiting climate change. He is focusing on risky investments that favor "breakthrough" technologies because he thinks incremental improvements to existing tech won't be enough to meet energy needs while avoiding a climate catastrophe. He says, "There's no battery technology that's even close to allowing us to take all of our energy from renewables and be able to use battery storage in order to deal not only with the 24-hour cycle but also with long periods of time where it's cloudy and you don't have sun or you don't have wind. Power is about reliability. We need to get something that works reliably." At the same time, Gates rejected calls to divest himself and his charitable foundation of investments in fossil fuel companies.
Do you seriously think Billy boy isn't well aware of Nuclear?! Watch this:
http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates?language=en
4th gen can run on things which are waste products of current generation of nuclear power and they promise to be 100 times more productive.
Yes, fission is not renewable, but it can be damn efficient with what 4th gen is promising. At same time it is not fossil - neither in true meaning (fossil of long dead things), or by what is commonly meant by this (burning it up and releasing CO2).
What I'm advocating is exactly investing in stopgap solution - but with stopgap being 1000+ years, to allow us to look for true alternatives. Renewables are just not efficient/reliable enough to get us out of fossil completely and this means a lot shorter time period due to pollution (I count GW as pollution).
TEs are ridiculously inefficient and aren't looking to be much better anytime soon
Because thermoelectric effect devices leak heat big time.
However there's also thermionics. The vacuum-tube version is currently inefficient - about as inefficient as slightly behind-the-curve solar cells - due to space charge accumulation discouraging current, but I've seen reports of a semiconductor close analog of it (as an FET is a semiconductor close analog of a vacuum triode) that IS efficient, encouraging the space charge to propagate through the drift region by doping tricks (that I don't recall offhand). The semiconductor version beats the problems that plague thermoelectrics because the only charge carriers crossing the temperature gradient are the ones doing so in an efficient manner, so the bulk of the thermal leakage is mechanical rather than electrical, and the drift region can be long enough to keep that fraction down.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Thick concrete walls and extensive routine inspections are safety measures.
Forcing plants to not process or reuse spent fuel is not.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
And yet, to date, nuclear power has done less damage to the environment, as well as killing fewer people (by several orders of magnitude) than just coal mining, much less coal power in general.
If we'd gone all nuke back in the 60's, we'd not have had the last half century worth of coal mining deaths, nor would we have the coal ash heaps piled untidily about our environment. And best of all, we wouldn't be talking about AGW, since CO2 levels wouldn't be this high by a significant margin....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Even now, a Prius with an inverter on the traction battery bank can provide a decent amount of power. With a MEPS alternator, you can get 5kw+ from a truck or van, so even though it isn't electric the vehicle can double as a generator (and with the emissions controls on vehicles, that is a lot better for the environment.)
We are lurching slowly towards that, especially with motorhomes. For example, Roadtrek announced last week the addition of 200-1200 ampere-hour battery packs that charge from the engine. I worked on designing a Transit van conversion that would use a "hybrid" inverter so if plugged into a house (or a small vacation cabin), it would run the electricial system from the van's aux battery bank, then once the batteries hit 60% SoC, fire up a generator.
I wouldn't be surprised to see this technology filter into cars, be it plugging the vehicle in and using an alternator as a generator, or having the car's battery bank be used first.
What 'damage'? You got Chernobyl. Which was done on purpose.
People like to point at Japan, but not to point out the futility of a 15 foot seawall against a 20 foot tsunami. And so far the 'damage' in Japan is noisy geiger counters. (There were 2 old men overexposed trying to fix generators - I haven't seen what happened to them.)
There are so many people that think something bad actually happened at Three Mile Island. When I remind them that nobody died or even got sick; well they don't believe me. And then they don't even hear you when you say that nobody is suggesting that we build TMI-style plants.