China's thorium reactor may be the way forward.

 

scott s.

.

 

29 minutes ago, scott967 said:

The Navy has had accidents but I don't think you would include Thresher nor Scorpion as nuclear accidents.

The loss of a ship, aircraft, or missile with a nuclear powerplant or nuclear weapon aboard is, by definition, a nuclear accident.  It may not have been caused by the nuclear device, but the presence of fissionable nuclear material in the accident wreckage activates protocols significantly different from a similar accident not involving nuclear materials.

Semantics, yes, but then again, words mean things...  😉

18 hours ago, birdguy said:

Outside of massive solar arrays how else would you harness it?

Noel

 

At present, PV cells. I'm sure you've seen thermal cells where you allow water to flow through pipes to heat it. Solar fuel technology, where sunlight is turned into fuel, still in its infancy. Solar farms using mirrors to collect light and direct it at a collection node, this system is in use but still requires large plots of land. PV cells that also act as windows are a thing.There are quite a few methods.

PV cell advancements are the most promising with new materials like perovskite that can utilise additional wavelengths. Max efficiency at present is 22%. But its not just about efficiency, if you can reduce cost its advantageous and the new thin film cells can be applied to multiple surfaces. 

Detractors point to large arrays as a negative, but the area covered will reduce as technology improves and as we've said, fossil fuels aren't exactly minimal in terms of the land they disturb. 

When you have cheap, relatively efficient solar films, you can pretty much mount them on anything.

We also have to remember that the smart grid offers many benefits and the intermitency of renewable energy isn't as simple as renewable energy detractors make out. The old adage that "when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine they don't work" is true but also false. If its not sunny or windy in one part of a nation then it is elsewhere. And if one form of renewable energy isn't providing power then another is. Hence why, the more renewable energy we have and the more varied the type of renewable energy, the less the intermittently issue matters. Especially with "smart grid" technology.

In addition, we already have an international grid system, with many nations sharing power. As we mentioned before, in the Channel Islands we get our power from France, renewable energy. So again, if the winds not blowing or sun's not shining, it is in another country. This does of course rely on international cooperation and stability.

 

18 hours ago, dmwalker said:

I imagine some aircraft electronics might be vulnerable to microwave radiation. Is there any advantage between microwave and laser transmission?

 

Yes, I'm sure the aviation authorites would have the same opinion as with mobile phones, in that to be on the safe side they would divert aircraft. I'm just making the point that intensity would be low and if an aircraft did wander into the area it might not be a big deal.

I'm not sure about the laser alternative. Lasers can be impacted by atmospheric conditions but it might depend on the wavelength. But yes, lasers have been suggested.

4 hours ago, martin-w said:

As we mentioned before, in the Channel Islands we get our power from France, renewable energy. So again, if the winds not blowing or sun's not shining, it is in another country.

Are you on France's grid?  Do they run wires from the mainland to your island?

Noel

Edited November 24, 20214 yr by birdguy

Small modular reactors – Rolls-Royce

The web page says "A single Rolls-Royce SMR power station will occupy the footprint of two football pitches" but the downloadable brochure says "Sit within a power station that would be roughly five and half times the size of the pitch at Wembley".

I'm probably missing something.

5 hours ago, birdguy said:

Are you on France's grid?  Do they run wires from the mainland to your island?

Noel

 

Yes Noel. The cable goes to Jersey and then Guernsey. There is a fishing dispute related to Brexit that Jersey are involved in, and the French have threatened to cut off Jersey electricity. Won't happen of course, they were just being silly, but as we are fed from Jersey it was a concern for a while.

4 minutes ago, martin-w said:

French have threatened to cut off Jersey electricity. Won't happen of course, they were just being silly, but as we are fed from Jersey it was a concern for a while.

Oh good! Shipping you my Honda Micro-Fusion home power supply would be horribly expensive!

5 minutes ago, n4gix said:

Oh good! Shipping you my Honda Micro-Fusion home power supply would be horribly expensive!

 

😁 Did you build it in your shed?

41 minutes ago, martin-w said:

Yes Noel. The cable goes to Jersey and then Guernsey.

Are they underwater cables.  I suppose they must be.

I thought the renewable windmills and solar panels were on the island itself.

Noel

25 minutes ago, birdguy said:

Are they underwater cables.  I suppose they must be.

I thought the renewable windmills and solar panels were on the island itself.

Not sure about where Martin is specifically, but the UK has several offshore wind farms, with some truly massive windmills (the turbine blades can be longer than an airliner's wing). And yes, they are all connected with undersea cables.

https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/news/uk-offshore-wind-farms/#

https://www.semprius.com/wind-turbine-blades-size/

Edited November 24, 20214 yr by goates

On 11/22/2021 at 12:02 PM, martin-w said:

Actually solar car park canopies are a thing. 

I love 'two-fers', and this is one for sure.  You get shade for your car and will absolutely use less A/C when the car is shaded versus in direct sun.  I think we also somehow need to consider how long a particular application is realistic.  Right now Walmart isn't going away in the very near term but I can see trends towards delivered goods increasing so at some point giant retail will probably continue dwindling.  Government buildings, schools and other settings that are relatively stable are good places to invest in solar.  Plus, distributed power is far safer from a security standpoint (read Ted Koppel's Lights Out).  

I lean towards nuclear for baseload w/ new modular reactors and there will be new solutions to improve nuclear fuel use more.  It currently is not feasible to ship nuclear waste into deep space so we will need to consider ways of improving efficiency of getting more energy out w/ less waste.

Never ever does anyone acknowledge the giant and growing elephant on earth, and that of course is ever growing human population:  in one lousy long human lifespan ago we went from ~ 1.5B people to ~8B people and with that a meteoric rise in per capita resource consumption.  This doesn't bode well at all for political, economic, social, nor environment security--but no one will admit it and focus on it.  Even environmental scientists don't even dare to tread on this taboo subject.  Quite frankly I'd like to bigtime negative population growth until we get back to maybe 3-4B people tops.  One child is it per couple, period, end of story.  It is flying flight simulators that have made it immenintly clear to me human growth is very analagous to cancer growth:  like cancer, we expand exponentially, polluting the environment in more ways than you can contemplate at every turn.  Cancer cells when they metastasize send out signals to the body to create new blood supply to feed the newly seeded tumor (angioneogenesis)--they remind me of our cities and roads.

59 minutes ago, Noel said:

Quite frankly I'd like to bigtime negative population growth until we get back to maybe 3-4B people tops

As a wild guess, I think a one child policy could do it within three generations but the world economies would collapse. Ironically, there is concern in countries where populations are decreasing. I am not sure what conclusions can be drawn from China's one child policy as there were many external factors.

Edited November 24, 20214 yr by dmwalker

3 hours ago, Noel said:

 It currently is not feasible to ship nuclear waste into deep space so we will need to consider ways of improving efficiency of getting more energy out w/ less waste.

Here in New Mexico we have a nuclear waste storage site over 2000 feet deep in a 2000 foot thick layer of sea salt left behind by the Permian Sea.  It's near Carlsbad New Mexico.  It's an ideal location in an asysmic section of the country.

To date over 13,000 shipments of waste have been delivered to the site.

They built a highway bypass around Roswell for trucks transporting the waste to the site.  Not many people are aware of this storage site,

https://wipp.energy.gov/wipp-site.asp

Noel

 

Edited November 25, 20214 yr by birdguy