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[umiman]

Let's get to the point. Here's what President Obama wants to do regarding the US's energy policy (All the citations you need can be taken from his many, many speeches on the subject):
1. Be energy self-sufficient
2. Focus on "green" energy sources
3. Cut down carbon emissions and "stop damaging the planet"

Here's a simple elaboration on each point:

1. Be energy self-sufficient
What this basically means is that they want to stop relying on Middle Eastern oil. According to the definition, relying on Canadian oil (more importantly, oil sands / tar sands) is still self-reliance because Canada is part of North America. This is vital as Canada has enough oil reserves to last the two countries for the better part of the next century. However, the problem with this is the following two points.

2. Focus on "green" energy sources
The US wants to focus more on wind, solar, hydro, and biofuels because of the low carbon footprint. The public opinion is that bad giant oil generators destroy forests and fuel global warming, therefore they must go for the good wind, solar, and other such good sources of energy. It should be obvious then, that oil and gas kinda goes against such a mindset.

3. Cut down carbon emissions and "stop damaging the planet"
More or less a byproduct of the above, but not limited to the energy industry. They plan to basically punish any polluting industries by leving heavier taxes, carbon capture technologies, carbon pollution permits, cap and trade, etc.

The Dilemma:
It bears no mention that green energy is stupidly expensive, hard to place, and generate miniscule amounts of energy for the amount of resources they use. Considering the state that the US economy is in, it's inconcievable that they will manage to convince the consumer that his energy bill will go up by 75% because they decided to go green. However, the alternative is reliance on more coal, oil, and gas facilities which obviously go completely against points 2 and 3. Furthermore, the public media has lamblasted Canadian oil to be completely putrid and terrible, a sin on earth. As Middle Eastern oil is relatively cleaner and cheaper than Canadian oil, it would make a better alternative... though that would go completely against the policy of self-reliance.

As you can see... every road seems to negate another. Granted, the issue is far... far more complicated than these few paragraphs entail but I'd like to hear your opinion. What would you do if you were now in Obama's shoes? Would you sacrifice self-reliance for greener, more expensive energy, or would you sacrifice the environment so that people don't go bankrupt on their energy bills?

If you're curious of my opinion, it's quite simple. Nuclear nuclear nuclear nuclear nuclear.

[Makrond]

Nuclear would be an even better solution for us down here in Australia, because we have rich sources of usable uranium, and large beds of rock which - get this - actually absorb the radiation given off by depleted uranium.

Also nuclear gives off such a miniscule amount of carbon that you could probably offset it by planting a few trees per power station per year.

[Captain Mayday]

Nuclear would be an even better solution for us down here in Australia, because we have rich sources of usable uranium, and large beds of rock which - get this - actually absorb the radiation given off by depleted uranium.

Also nuclear gives off such a miniscule amount of carbon that you could probably offset it by planting a few trees per power station per year.

Agreed, Australia really should have gone Nuclear already. That said, it's still well and good to be developing solar tech for residential use, because taking pressure off the grid is always a good thing.

[A_Fey_Dwarf]

Another point is that green energy is very unreliable. Here in New Zealand we pretty much survive of off hydro energy supplemented by wind farms and coal burners (a large coal supply exists here). The problem with this is that we are nearly dependent on rain as our power source. If there is no rain then we don't get enough power. Just recently the water levels at the hydro lakes diminished to such low levels that electricity costs spiked and the government started an advertising campaign to preserve electricity.

What the world really needs is a new way to create power. More research needs to be done into alternative methods. e.g. Underwater turbines spun by tidal currents. I also remember playing simcity3000 and there being microwave and fission power stations, are these even possible?

[Aqizzar]

Fission power is nuclear power.

Microwave power is using a giant mirror in space to concentrate solar energy into a more efficient collection system.  Namely, a space laser that can obliterate the landscape if it misses the collector, and would burn stupidly large amounts of rocket fuel getting the whole thing into space.

[Samyotix]

If you're curious of my opinion, it's quite simple. Nuclear nuclear nuclear nuclear nuclear.

Erm. How do you propose to get rid of the depleted waste material?
So far, no storage has been found that can be guaranteed to last the dozens of thousands of years needed. Currently, we're basically dumping huge amounts of deadly material in "long term storage" where the stuff ought to, if predictions hold, last a few hundred or thousand years. If some tunnel-building campany drills into one of these some day, basically it's goodbye mankind.

Even the Germans, with their reputation for technical perfection, have more or less just dumped thousands of barrels of radioactive waste into former salt mines ... which now turn out to be a lot less stable than previously assumed.

Also, when I was young I was in the Chernobyl dust cloud when it drifted over Central Europe, but it's okay, it only increased my cancer risk by a couple of percent ...


I agree that the idea sounds great - safe, clean energy! - but that's only what they print in the nuclear power plant brochures. NO ONE can seriously claim to know the cost of keeping deadly material safe for the next 200.000 years; and if it's so bloody safe, why are there spectacular accidents so often?

[Sean Mirrsen]

Permanent magnet motors. Surely there has to be some loophole in the physics to make them worthwhile.

Then, fusion. The obvious next step, and if Obama is serious about clean energy he should funnel resources into that research branch.

Microwave and concentrated solar energy seem to be yet another possibility, but the latter requires good weather (or high elevation) and the former has problems with producing a beam focused enough to be converted efficiently, in addition to the whole "Surprise Solar Killsat!" issue.

[IndonesiaWarMinister]

Yeah, uhm, but can someone tells me from where do magnets got their powers?

My physics teacher said that it comes from the electromagnetic pulses from Sun?

[Sean Mirrsen]

No, natural magnets are formed when ferromagnetic compounds are exposed to the Earth's magnetic field for a very long time. These are natural, 'black' ferrite magnets. Permamanget motors must be made with rare-earth materials like neodymium or samarium. In all cases magnetism comes from the material in question being structured into arrayed segments within itself. Whatever happens there causes the material to behave as if an electric current is passed through it, and it generates a magnetic field. I don't know the official explanation to that. My own belief is usually that since the power of a magnet comes from its structure rather than stored energy, it will keep working indefinetly much like gravity works for matter - matter 'generates' gravity by simply being there, without expending itself in the process, right? The other issue is that a magnet under heavy load will lose its structure, just like a steel beam bending under too much weight, and will deteriorate. I think this is where the "magnets run out" thing comes from - usual magnets are easily demagnetized by even small amounts of heat or magnetic forces a lot less than their own - so, such a magnet will deteriorate every time its field counteracts something with full force. Rare-earth magnets can be magnetized enough to withstand heat and magnetic forces comparable to their own - so, two such magnets can be made to work within a motor without wearing them out, so long as they don't effect each other at full force.

[Siquo]

And yet another perpetuum mobile. Sean, it cannot and will not work, no matter what the misunderstood-genius-inventors-of-the-internets tell you.

I say, let the USA pay for petrol and power what Europeans pay, and then they can start whining about the price. As it is now, it's practically free over there, and still they complain.

If Obama will invest money into "greener pastures", that will hit the treasury even more, but it will create jobs, prolong the life of the economy, and your grandchildren will thank you for it.

[Jreengus]

If you're curious of my opinion, it's quite simple. Nuclear nuclear nuclear nuclear nuclear.

Erm. How do you propose to get rid of the depleted waste material?
So far, no storage has been found that can be guaranteed to last the dozens of thousands of years needed. Currently, we're basically dumping huge amounts of deadly material in "long term storage" where the stuff ought to, if predictions hold, last a few hundred or thousand years. If some tunnel-building campany drills into one of these some day, basically it's goodbye mankind.

Even the Germans, with their reputation for technical perfection, have more or less just dumped thousands of barrels of radioactive waste into former salt mines ... which now turn out to be a lot less stable than previously assumed.

Also, when I was young I was in the Chernobyl dust cloud when it drifted over Central Europe, but it's okay, it only increased my cancer risk by a couple of percent ...


I agree that the idea sounds great - safe, clean energy! - but that's only what they print in the nuclear power plant brochures. NO ONE can seriously claim to know the cost of keeping deadly material safe for the next 200.000 years; and if it's so bloody safe, why are there spectacular accidents so often?

As for Chernobyl that was pretty much a one off result of some idiot technicians mucking around with the safety turn off. (Or so I have been told.) As for the waste the most logical thing to do seems to be load it onto rockets and dump it in space, of course I'm no expert in the logistics of that area so it may be harder than it sounds.

Fusion power is of course the future, it is clean and reliable the chance of some massive disaster is much much lower since exposing the reaction to the atmosphere would simply throttle it, and it uses a fuel that is readily available. As of when I actually did a paper on it the main problem was the fact that the walls of the tokomak kept reacting with the hydrogen and killing the reaction so it's not exactly out of reach merely  having teething problems.

[Cthulhu]

Every time someone buys a hybrid, I launch a running Hummer into the Ozone Layer

[DJ]

Here's a good read on the subject: http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
This site explains why it's too late to switch to alternative energy sources, how oil sands are not nearly as good as most people think, and how every single aspect of modern economy depends on oil. It explains this using the persuasive power of simple mathematics and widely accepted facts.

It's chilling and depressing, but it's time for us to accept the facts: it's the end of the world as we know it.

[andrea]

wind and solar are starting to be as cheap as oil to buy in europe. but it will be harder to use them on USA since i heard oil is veeeery cheap there.

and of course fusion is the future. much safer than fusion,no waste, more energy nearly unlimited fuel, easy to get (they take it from water!). but it is still being developed. i think we will need fusion.

[Duke 2.0]

 Then there is the issue of 'green' fuels that are not terribly clean. Biofuels release more harmful things into the air than normal sources because of all the work that needs to go into producing these fuels. And even then these are terribly inefficient conversions of plant to fuel. And lets not mention that the plans for biofuels using food crops, food crops that we kinds need for food.

 Biofuels have the perk of being renewable. Hmm.

 Now I am for the research for better solar collection devices, but we cannot rely on what we have now on a national scale. I would also like to see how much sunlight is absorbed/reflected, as large areas of dark substances create heat columns and thus the heat island effects of cities. Imagine heat islands in the middle of nowhere.

 Wind power... Well, from what I hear vertical turbines are more efficient than those horribly large horizontal blade turbines. I could very easily see domestic use of vertical wind turbines which can work in wind speeds much lower than Horizontal wind turbines. Perfect. I don't know how practical vertical turbines are for large-scale power, but domestic use is perfect for it.

 Hydrogen cannot be a use for similar problems as biofuels. You need to burn fuel to generate power to turn hydrogen into a usable state. Unless we can find a way to make hydrogen using only wind power(Even then, it would be more of a battery), or we find a theoretical ore of hydrogen which we can extract usable hydrogen from that wont fall to the first point of this paragraph, Hydrogen just won't work.

 Now I know oil isn't much better, but my point is that at our current level of technological prowess and corruption, we should wait before making a major leap to alternate power sources. Sure some people need to invest in such power sources so research into upgrades that make it feasible happen, but not a total conversion.

 Then we have the hype to work with. People are so charged on the theoretical risks of some energy sources and ignoring the problems of others that getting anybody to use a particular source is impossible. And don't say it is just America, because every country falls to the problem of 'what is popular right now?"

 As for nuclear energy, which is out of place as my last paragraph, has some things people are not paying attention to. We don't need to wait for nuclear waste to stop being radioactive, just for it to decay to the point where it is as radioactive as naturally occurring uranium. That stuff has been around underground without any major problems, and we can place our waste in drastically different geological places that their movement is slowed.

 I would like to see a chart on how radioactive nuclear waste is over the course of decay to gauge it with natural radiation sources, just to see how much shorter or longer it would take.