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[Kogut]

<post to watch>

[Solifuge]

Either way, I'm hoping that [the impending nuclear disaster in Japan] provides a welcome incentive to research power sources other than nuclear energy. Solar Plants don't leak deadly matter and energy when they have problems, and we've explored the technology only to a fraction of the degree we have Nuclear Plants. I can't help but think that the power industry's endless iterations of using hot things to make steam to turn turbines is horribly inefficient and generally unsafe, when we should be skipping the middleman and creating electricity directly from chemical reactions utilizing a source of energy that is free and nigh-endless in supply.

I did a hell of a lot of chemistry while I was in school.

I am afraid that getting electricity out of a pure chemical reaction isn't practical at all. And in the cases where you can, the process of getting the chemicals into the right state uses more energy than you get out of it. Advanced photovoltaics can be more efficient that a heat engine, but they require exotic materials and nanoscale structures to do so.

Heat engines are about as good as you are going to get for most large scale practical applications. A sterling engine could be more efficient at high temperature differentials than a turbine, but they are more complicated to build.

I didn't mean that to suggest using a finite chemical reaction to generate electrical energy; batteries already do that well enough. I meant using chemicals to harness ambient energy, such as that made available by photons or heat emitted by the Sun. So much energy is lost in burning fuel to boil water to power a turbine (in light, chemical byproducts, mechanical energy lost due to friction, etc.) that it's a woefully inefficient way to generate power. We are still getting our electricity from turbines, using methods that are little changed from the windmills we used for mechanical energy back in 800 BC. We might want to consider revising out methodology after nearly 3 millennia, you know?

Photovoltaic cells have gotten neither the attention nor research time most other power sources have, both in that they are still establishing themselves culturally and industrially, and that they haven't been around as long. Wild plants do a magnificent job of efficiently converting the tiniest fraction of light emitted by the sun into chemical energy, and photovoltaic cells are in many ways a crude recreation of their chloroplasts. The suns energy is unlimited in any scale or way that concerns us now; the only problem is harnessing it in more efficient ways than those presently at our disposal.

I'll conclude in saying that, for many problems, you can look to biological models for the most sustainable and efficient solution, perfected over thousands of years of trial and error. You won't see any organisms deriving their energy from the rotation of a turbine, but the dominant form of life on Earth has been using solar power for far longer than history records, and they're still going strong.

[Nadaka]

Trying to keep the alternate energy talk out of the japan thread...

Either way, I'm hoping that this provides a welcome incentive to research power sources other than nuclear energy.

Either way, I'm hoping that this provides a welcome incentive to research other nuclear power sources.
'course, Fusion would be the headliner, but there are other kinds of Fission too. Anything's worth researching at this point, I think. Especially if it has less tendency to slowly burn rads into the atmosphere.

Unless it doesn't produce deadly byproducts that we will never be rid of, in a timescale that is relevant to human life or civilization, we ought to get beyond Nuclear Fission. Fusion is a nice nuclear alternative, and I'm really excited for it... but changing the radioactive material du jour does not a safe, sensible, and sustainable form of Nuclear Fission make.

Thing is that yes, next generation nuclear power plants really are that radically different in that they do not produce the same kind of waste at all, some of the designs as I mentioned earlier can even use waste as a fuel and convert it into easily manageable materials.

Fusion is not just an engineering problem a few iterations away from being perfected. Its going to take hundreds of millions or even trillions of dollars and decades before it is even break even, much less useful.

[Fayrik]

Trying to keep the alternate energy talk out of the japan thread...

Either way, I'm hoping that this provides a welcome incentive to research power sources other than nuclear energy.

Either way, I'm hoping that this provides a welcome incentive to research other nuclear power sources.
'course, Fusion would be the headliner, but there are other kinds of Fission too. Anything's worth researching at this point, I think. Especially if it has less tendency to slowly burn rads into the atmosphere.

Unless it doesn't produce deadly byproducts that we will never be rid of, in a timescale that is relevant to human life or civilization, we ought to get beyond Nuclear Fission. Fusion is a nice nuclear alternative, and I'm really excited for it... but changing the radioactive material du jour does not a safe, sensible, and sustainable form of Nuclear Fission make.

Thing is that yes, next generation nuclear power plants really are that radically different in that they do not produce the same kind of waste at all, some of the designs as I mentioned earlier can even use waste as a fuel and convert it into easily manageable materials.

Fusion is not just an engineering problem a few iterations away from being perfected. Its going to take hundreds of millions or even trillions of dollars and decades before it is even break even, much less useful.

As Ein said earlier.
Thorium is pretty cool stuff.
I quite specifically like the that, as a fission fuel, being kept in a liquid state means it can't go into meltdown.
So yeah, I'm not against Fission. Just our current Fission.

Also, I think really, the whole state of Japan right now means that we need to keep the "worst physical possibility" in mind at all times.

[Virex]

I'll conclude in saying that, for many problems, you can look to biological models for the most sustainable and efficient solution, perfected over thousands of years of trial and error. You won't see any organisms deriving their energy from the rotation of a turbine, but the dominant form of life on Earth has been using solar power for far longer than history records, and they're still going strong.

Funny you should say that. Photosynthesis is very efficient. That is, when talking about quantum efficiency. Every electron generated is used. For some reason though, the actual energy conversion in plants tops at 7% (with most plants not even going over 4%), which is from the point of view of a conventional solar cell in the "definitely not economically viable" range (maybe that it'd be viable for a cheap polymer or dye solar cell, but even then it's expected those won't take off until they hit the 10%).

[MetalSlimeHunt]

While we're on the subject of alternative energy, I did some math, and found out that a full-electric car is a viable option for my first car (that I'll be buying in two years or so). This makes me very happy, as not being bound to the freefalling oil industry is aces in my book.

[Solifuge]

Virex: hence the problem of scale. Moles are great at excavating tunnels, and though we could design our earthmovers after their claws, we'd certainly need it to be bigger than a mole. Plants only spend enough energy to grow and reproduce; their goals as life forms, and the challenges they face, guide them toward a certain range of optimal energy surplus for growth/reproduction. Aside from needing a way to squeeze the electricity out of ATP molecules, we would also need to find a way to scale the process up.

[Gorjo MacGrymm]

Dont know if its been brought up befire, but scientists in,,,,I believe San Diego....have been working on the first Fusion Reactor.  As best i can remember (we studied it in Astronomy Class to learn about Fusion), it only currently puts out and amount of energy equivalent to the enormous amount of energy requried to contain and maintin it via GIGANTIC magnetic controls.  Anyone else know abou tthis?

[Tellemurius]

Tokamak Reactor, currently built in the UK but only experimental. We are working on using lasers at the moment for controlling fusion.

[Urist is dead tome]

=Well, there's little uranium, much of it in unstable countries.

Untrue, the countries with the biggest uranium markets are Canada, America, Australia, and China.

All of which are, last I checked, quite stable.

Anyways. I would have to say coal is best, right now. Solar power doesn't even seem to be moving. Wind has too much geographical difference. And nuclear power, well it's just too expensive.

Back in the eighties, I think it was, Indiana (My residence), tried to build a nuclear reactor. Using the services of Public Service Indiana they built the foundation. Then they realized there were serious safety problem. The same problems that Three Mile Island had, in fact. Anyway, they were nearly bankrupted and it was never even finished.

I'm all for nuclear power as long as w can afford it.

[justinlee999]

nuclear

[PTTG??]

Coal puts more radioactive materials into the environment in normal operation than nuclear power plants do. Coal has a lot of toxic minerals in it, and when it's burned, it drops it all off everywhere downwind. Part of the reason China's urban industrial areas are toxic doom pits is the widespread use of coal there.

"Clean Coal" is a scam. Sure, we need to upgrade all existing coal plants with the scrubbing tech, but it's not going to replace renewable/green sources anytime soon.

Since we seem to be discussing general plans, here's mine:

- Modernization of existing nuclear plants, including complete rebuilds with recycling reactors.
- Widespread Geothermal development. Both large plants in active areas, and local plants for grid redundancy.
- Solar Power, including thermal solar plants and decentralized household photovoltaics.
- Strengthening the grid itself to move power from outlying geothermal, solar plants.
- Increased regulation of power companies on a federal level, since so many costs of power generation can only be considered on that level. (Consider Simcity. How many times have you built cheap coal plants on the edge of the map, making them magically half as polluting?)

[Nadaka]

Yeh, coal is ridiculously bad for the environment and people living near by.

It really isn't practical to "upgrade" a nuclear reactor though. The upgrade process would essentially be building a new plant nearby and then shutting the old one down.

What we could be doing is building new next gen nuclear plants and just retire the old ones when they reach end of life. Right now most old nuclear plants are getting extensions to keep running because we can't really afford to do without them.

[PTTG??]

No no no. We "Modernize" the plant... by building new reactors and deactivating the old ones. We ARE NOT building new plants. Just "making the existing plants safer."

Got it? That's the message. The only way anyone is going to get new nukes built is by being EXTREMELY politically correct. So, we are definitely not building new plants. Just upgrading existing ones.

[Siquo]

Fusion is not just an engineering problem a few iterations away from being perfected.

If that wasn't a pun, it is now.