Re: Fusion

puppet_sock_at_hotmail.com
Date: 06/07/04 

Date: 7 Jun 2004 07:18:57 -0700

"Hej*" <hejhejhej@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<BnHvc.1113$dx3.11020@newsb.telia.net>...
[snip]
> Are there any alternatives to oil today? Oil price is rallying and
> production peak might be here already or within 15 years.

Oil actually only produces a small portion of electricity supply.
Primarily, it's used for transportation, and a bit for heating,
and it feeds into various chemical processes to make plastics, etc.
So folks who talk about wind and solar as alternatives to oil will
need to make some new technology to run automobiles. If we make an
electric car I'm very happy. I'm in the nuclear power industry.

In most places, wind is a fickle source of power. Those windmills
are picturesque as all hell, but they don't make good power suppliers.

Solar would cover a huge amount of land that many people would
have other possible uses for. The back-of-the-envelope rule for
solar collectors is that they would have to be about twice the
area of the city they would supply. That number is not very
accurate, of course. A fairly spread out city like LA, in a
fairly sunny location, would need a smaller ratio. A densely
packed city like NYC, in an area with a fairly mean winter,
would need more. But even for LA, a collector as big as the
city would be pretty unpleasant. Anybody who has driven down
Interstate 5 and seen "LA, Next 200 Exits" knows that LA is
a big city. Sucking up that much more of the countryside to
supply power is probably not on.

Basically there are two real alternatives right now for large
electrical supply: coal and nuclear. Coal is hugely massively
nasty bad. If the choices were burn coal or freeze in the dark
it would be a tough call.

Happily, we have nuclear to keep us going till we figure out
fusion. There is certainly enough Uranium to keep going for
a few decades. Especially if we are clever with some new fuel
cycles that burn some more of the U238 instead of just the U235.
As another thread here has pointed out, there are some clever
things to be done with Thorium as well.

After that, if we have not been smart enough to find our butt
with both hands and get the science, then maybe humans are not
all that intelligent after all. For example, the ITER project
seems to have stalled on politics. Each of several countries
seems to be willing to see it not built if it does not come
to their country. Oh well.
Socks

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