Energy Thread - How to Power Civilization

Mist_sl said:

I was reading that some of the newest production wind turbines can pay for themselves in as little as 8 months.

That seems like it's damn near a tipping point.

Solar seems relatively pointless until we can go straight to organic solar cells. Regular photovoltaic materials seem to use too much rare earth stuff to ever be truly wide scale.

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Well, the interesting thing is large scale solar plants don't need PV, they can use CSP--which is just a bunch of mirrors focusing a field of sunlight on a tower to super heat it. The tower, if it uses molten salt, can actually provide 12+ hours of energy even when the sun is down, so it can actually handle base load. And the mirrors, as far as I know, don't use any rare earths. The downside is that the system needs some large scale mechanical alignments, so it's overhead is more--also, it's much more dependent on radiance, so it can't be built in certain areas without a lot of sun. But where CSP can work? I believe it's strictly superior to PV. So in the South, Solar might still end up being king.



In the end though, the Gen 3 reactors still kick everything's ass.

BrutulTM_sl said:

The biggest problem for Nuclear is the ignorant NIMBYs that refuse to let a plant be built within 100 miles of them. Since they cover the entire country that makes it tough to get anything done.

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Which is only one side of the medal.
Nuclear plants essenially work like huge water boilers, they heat water up to steam to generate power, thats what those clouds you see at the coolers are, basically steam.
With all that still hot water (after turbine) you could easily heat the household of about a million people in its direct neighbourhood.
Still you have yet to see a nuclear power plant in eg. NYC hudson river, or SF Alcatraz island.
Now you need to come up with an answer as to why is that.

PS: With the plants being basically money printing machines (about 1 million profit per day), direct estate prices are of lesser concern.

Once the Tea Party takes over Master Blaster will be powering Bartertown with pig shit.

Only rich people bitch about wind afaik. Poor people are too busy working to give a shit about the view.

I wonder how many of them are idiots or attention whores and how many are just so poor they needed the temp job.

Crazy hippies are crazy.

Well, I was wrong. People suck.

This thread needs Mikhail or Izo to be ranting about the horrors of nuclear power. It is way too rational atm.

A lot of our current nuclear plants were built to produce waste that the govt. bought to make weapons, so many of them aren't really competitive.

Agraza_sl said:

A lot of our current nuclear plants were built to produce waste that the govt. bought to make weapons, so many of them aren't really competitive.

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O might be wrong, but I don;t think the waste produced in normal operations is suitable for weapons. The old nuclear plants were designed to be able to produce weapons grade plutonium but the reactors have to be run in a slightly different way to do it.

The point is just how good nat gas currently is and may remain for decades. Barring all the aquifer pollution shit which i personally don't believe, you spend a couple weeks and maybe a million developing and pad, fracking, and hooking up a pipeline and then sit back and collect 10mil plus in nat gas and other petroleum liquids... and you can do that one like 5 mile grids for entire states.

There's no mine reclamation, mountaintop removal, acid mine drainage, billion dollar thousand year nuclear waste disposal bungled bullshit, or possibility of ultimate catastrophe.

I think it's amazing it's competitive enough to low ball nuclear plants that are already in action, especially when Obama just finished cleaning house on coal fired plants.

I think sea levels have already started to rise, I read recently? And at this point theres no reversing the effects for decades, maybe even a century even if we halt all fossil fuel use. I don't think global warming is a controversy anymore, just a fact

Half as much co2 as coal fired plantsNatural Gas | Clean Energy | US EPA