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[mainiac]

I'm guessing you guys aren't particularly familiar with the concept of semi-transperancy in high wavelength radiative heat systems or with the statistics on meteorite density and speed nearby to earth... because you seem just a teensy bit pessimistic to me.  Well, more then a teensy bit.  More like many orders of magnitude really...

[a1s]

can you provide links for that semi-transparency thing? we might not be as knowledgeable as you, but it's well known that communication satellites (which use microwaves or even radiowaves, which are even longer) routinely have problems with how much energy is absorbed by atmosphere (or the water vapors in it to be more precise). and there's the microwave ovens...

[Servant Corps]

...How in the world does satellites power cars? Much less actually make it easier to sell cars?

Meaning, I think it's a little offtopic here. But meh. We all know EuchreJack's "Awesome Building to Sell Cars" will come eventually.

[JeebusSez]

Funny. I thought the efficiency of something was measured by the maximum effectiveness and the actual effectiveness.

You're correct, but I think you're looking at it funny (as in how much the panel can yield vs how much it will yield; it'll usually be 100% on the ground or in space as long as the panel is in good and working condition and is in full sun).

In the case of solar panels, maximum effectiveness is the theoretical power yield of sunlight (for example, 1000kW/h); the actual effectiveness is how much the panel can covert (i.e., 100kW/h, with the remainder lost to reflection, heat, etc.). Thermodynamics dictates that unless we feed some energy into the system, we will never reach 100% effectiveness (some power is inevitably lost in the conversion of light to power in the form of resistance, etc). Currently mass-production panels are around 20% efficient, but I think they've gotten some experimental cells up to 40%.

[EuchreJack]

...How in the world does satellites power cars? Much less actually make it easier to sell cars?

Meaning, I think it's a little offtopic here. But meh. We all know EuchreJack's "Awesome Building to Sell Cars" will come eventually.

And I do hope that's the actual name in the game!

[Guy Montag]

Man, there is a lot of misinformation going around here, I don't even know where to start.

First of all, electric cars are only as pollution free as the powerplant providing the electricity it's batteries are charged with. If most of the energy in your local grid comes from a coal powerplant, you might as well be driving an V-8 muscle car with 12 mpg.

If you want to talk about renewable and pollution-free energy, the options available are not very promising.

Nuclear is clean and very safe. With a modern 5th generation reactor its literally impossible for it to melt down, unless you bombed the facility with several bunker-busters or something. More radiation comes from a coal plant then a nuclear powerplant.

Nuclear waste isn't even a problem if you reprocess the fuel rods. You'd get back nuclear fuel and depleted uranium, which is stable enough to store pretty much anywhere. The problem with this is that if you can reprocess spent nuclear fuel, you can produce weapons-grade material too.

The main problem with the viability of nuclear power is the massive investment of time and money to build the reactor, the red-tape and other impeadments you have to overcome to build them, and the diminishing availbility of uranium. Eventially we will run out of uranium ore like we will coal and everything else.

Solar isn't looking great either, the best designed photovoltic cells you could possibly make are still very expensive to manufacture, and are just very poor sources of energy.

The largest solar powerplant in the world is at Nellis Airforce base. It covers 140 acres, cost 100 million to construct, and it only supplies 30% of that one airforce base's energy needs. It will pay for itself in another 100 years from the electricity it produces.

Its just not viable. Its not practical to cover an area the size of texas with solar panels, even if we could afford to do so in any stretch of time.

I have no idea why people think its practical to put solar powerplants in orbit. That would be immensely expensive, and unless its attached to a space elevator, it would likely cost more in energy and pollution shooting it up into space with rockets and spaceshuttles, and then sending up more shuttles to maintain it, then it could possiblely make up for, it would defeat the entire purpose. Its by far, the most expensive, impractical possible solution to solving our energy problems.

Wind power, is nice, but also not significant enough to be viable on a large scale. I have no idea why this guy posted that it would "slow down the wind" and cause enviromental damage. It doesn't slow down the wind or take any more kinetic energy away then buildings or trees or mountains do, for that matter.

The main problem with wind power is it takes up a lot of space, and people, for whatever insane reasons, don't like them around. The NIMBY effect keeps them from getting built. They have windy areas in the midwest nobody lives nearby, which would be great to build windfarms are far as the eye could see, but its so remote and far away from anyplace that NEEDS the electricity, it would require billions of dollars and decades of contruction just to get that power where it needs to go when its being generated in the middle of nowhere.

I also don't get why people think Geothermal is the answer either. First of all, they are very difficult to construct. They have to be built where there is a lot of geothermal activity close to the surface, like in iceland. Even if we had the technology to dig straight down in places without volcanic activity, and it was somehow not extremely expensive to do so, it would still not be a perfect solution.

The heat in the rocks toward the mantle underneath a geothermal plant cool off when you are pouring water down there to make steam. Eventially, it cools off to the point where the plant makes less and less energy, and it has to shutdown for 10 years for the rock to heat back up again. Its happening already in the older plants in Iceland.

I have no idea about Fusion power. This technology looks like a dead-end. Every "breakthrough" turns out to be a step backwards, and the best anybody has acheived is getting enough energy from the reaction that it breaks even. Due to the difficulty in maintaining a reaction anywhere besides the sun, or in a hydrogen bomb, I think fusion will always be that technology that is "20 years from now". But, it remians to be seen. Needless to say, we can't rely on something that doesn't exist beyond theory to power these electric cars everyone wants.

Thats my opinion in the matter. If you ask me, electricity is going to be very expensive once coal and oil are gone, and it will just take a 200 year long new dark age untill we can slowly cover the world's land area with biofuel farms and solar panels.

Anyways, there should be a way to get rid of cars you don't want. How about you can sell them to a chop-shop or private individual for some money, but there is a random chance of a Police encounter that your seller get caught in.

The alternative could be to just ditch it somewhere or donate it to an artifical reef project or something.

[mainiac]

The idea behind a solar panel station economy is that it would use the abundant resources available on the moon, thus eliminating launch costs.

[Rezan]

Nuclear is clean and very safe. With a modern 5th generation reactor its literally impossible for it to melt down, unless you bombed the facility with several bunker-busters or something. More radiation comes from a coal plant then a nuclear powerplant.

Citation needed.

Nuclear waste isn't even a problem if you reprocess the fuel rods. You'd get back nuclear fuel and depleted uranium, which is stable enough to store pretty much anywhere. The problem with this is that if you can reprocess spent nuclear fuel, you can produce weapons-grade material too.

The problem isn't that we can't store it, it's that it will still take a good ten to twenty thousand years before it's harmless - and I'm sure we don't want corrupt third world / second world countries in the world producing nuclear weapons along with their electricity.

On a sidenote:

Thorium-reactors seem to be far better alternatives. The proposed reactors would be incredibly efficient, have no risk of melting down (unlike Uranium-reactors, which always carry this risk), would not be able to make the kind of material needed for nuclear weapons, it's plentiful in many countries, and the reactors would be small enough to put in cities. The problem however is that the technology is not yet developed; and that the by-product is highly radioactive (though has a much shorter half-life) so we need better ways of storing radioactive materials.

Oh, and there is around 550 times more Thorium than there is Uranium. I can't recall the specifics of how much energy it gives out in comparison, but it was enough to consider it a better alternative than Uranium if the technology was developed.

I can agree that solar panels are a bit inefficient at the moment; but cheaper solar panels are being worked on. They are a viable alternative to home-electricity the moment they become cheaper (when it pays in the long-term).

I have no idea why people think its practical to put solar powerplants in orbit. That would be immensely expensive, and unless its attached to a space elevator, it would likely cost more in energy and pollution shooting it up into space with rockets and spaceshuttles, and then sending up more shuttles to maintain it, then it could possiblely make up for, it would defeat the entire purpose. Its by far, the most expensive, impractical possible solution to solving our energy problems.

^ this.

I have no idea about Fusion power. This technology looks like a dead-end. Every "breakthrough" turns out to be a step backwards, and the best anybody has acheived is getting enough energy from the reaction that it breaks even. Due to the difficulty in maintaining a reaction anywhere besides the sun, or in a hydrogen bomb, I think fusion will always be that technology that is "20 years from now". But, it remians to be seen. Needless to say, we can't rely on something that doesn't exist beyond theory to power these electric cars everyone wants.

Dead-end? Fusion power is basically limitless renewable energy; provided we have water. The SUN runs on fusion power. I think we can both agree that the Sun is not dead-end?

The current idea is to hold the temperature up by creating electromagnetic walls (since ordinary things just won't cut it for keeping the core at a few million degrees Celsius).

Once fusion power is perfected, there will no longer be a need for nuclear, solar, thermal, wind or wave power. Though, we'll need lots and lots of water. Possibly some electricity to start the reactor going.

[mainiac]

I have no idea why people think its practical to put solar powerplants in orbit. That would be immensely expensive, and unless its attached to a space elevator, it would likely cost more in energy and pollution shooting it up into space with rockets and spaceshuttles, and then sending up more shuttles to maintain it, then it could possiblely make up for, it would defeat the entire purpose. Its by far, the most expensive, impractical possible solution to solving our energy problems.

^ this.

The idea behind a solar panel station economy is that it would use the abundant resources available on the moon, thus eliminating launch costs.

[Rezan]

Cite these "abundant resources"; and the ways we would be able to use them. You have no grounds to say we would be able to "pay for" the solar panel with abundant resources or electricity, whereas we have the grounds to say otherwise because of the excessive launch and maintenance costs.

[mainiac]

Cite these "abundant resources"

The surface of the moon littered with open veins of iron.  The surface is covered in "moon dust" which is 25% silicon (and 40% oxygen.)  Neither of these would be particularly hard to process.  Solar panel stations would consist of 99% iron and silicon...

[Guy Montag]

Citation needed.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf06.html
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf08.html

Sorry if its a whole lot of tl;dr but the point is that modern reactors have passive safety features that can prevent a meltdown without human intervetion and without human error (the cause of chernolyble, was due to a panicked worker pushing the wrong button) they are passively, very safe. It could not melt down even if everyone in the plant was killed and somebody TRIED to cause a melt down.

Modern reactors 3rd generation the sort are very, very safe. Thats also why they are expensive and take years to construct.

[Yanlin]

Ugh. It's not the reactor that worries people. It's the POLLUTION! That nuclear waste is a serious pollutant. It stays there for thousands of years. We're talking about 10000 years.

Currently they keep it in huge cement casks. But those will only last for about 2000 years.

I heard something about Thorium reactors. The nuclear waste generated by these is far more radioactive but has an EXTREMELY short half life before it becomes safe. It is possible to have it live out its half life in controlled conditions and then just dumb the residue in any old landfill.

But I also heard the reactors themselves are less efficient. But in the long run, they are far better. For both us and the planet.

[Sergius]

What would be cool is to have some kind of RAWs in LCS so that we can add any building we feel like 

[Sergius]

Ugh. It's not the reactor that worries people.

Really. I guess I'm going to have to tell those hundreds of people that keep complaining about how they hate the reactor and are afraid of it, that they in fact are not worried.