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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: b-witch who wrote (10121)	11/12/2001 8:32:35 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi b-witch; Re: "Solar energy production does not require the massive factory level sites." Massive production of energy, even distributed, is going to require massive factories. Saltine crackers are made in massive factories, I doubt that solar energy equipment will be made in anything less massive. Re: "Smaller, individual production is more at the user level claiming energy at individual level." You're probably looking only at the production level. The fact is that most of the cost of solar energy will be in the production of the equipment that generates it. Instead of having a single big nuclear reactor, you'll end up with extra buildings on every building. But in order to get a substantial amount of power from it, it's going to have to take a lot of area. The rest of the costs will be in the upkeep and maintenance. Re: "It's simplicity is part of what keeps it from being pursued-large energy corporations haven't seen a way to make a profit in it yet." This is a silly statement, and completely in contradiction with our everyday experience with large corporations. These rumors abound on the left, everything has to be some kind of conspiracy. Big companies make things of every size, from toothpicks to battleships. And if an energy corporation were unwilling to take advantage of the business, why shouldn't a small company do it? Why don't you start that business? If it's so damn profitable you'll make yourself a millionaire. Re: "I trust time and human ingenuity will provide the opportunity. My point of nculear energy is the afterlife danger of nuclear waste and the potential of targetting sites for explosiion and radioactive exposure as weapon. This topic may appear OT at moment; i also trust that it will become integral to international development sooner than later." The cool thing about making everybody paranoid about nuclear energy is that you get to make sure that we won't transition to nuclear power until *all* the oil is gone. Heck, I like having high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, I'm looking forward to seeing Florida mostly underwater, scuba diving beats Disney any day. And won't life be less boring when we get to read in the papers about all the poor people who freeze in their homes because our failure to plan ran the price of energy through the roof. But don't worry about western civilization. The backward, primitive, stupid nations that embraced nuclear power (like France, Sweden and Belgium at over 50% of electric generation, and Finland, Japan, Korea, Spain and Switzerland at over 30%) will undoubtedly give us an economic hand, and subsidize our fossil fuel power sources by buying oil for us. After all, we've been so kind to them. Or I guess we can always harvest all those whales. Re: "My point of nculear energy is the afterlife danger of nuclear waste and the potential of targetting sites for explosiion and radioactive exposure as weapon." So instead we use fossil fuels and end up sucked into a nightmare of Middle Eastern terrorism. Hell of a bargain. Hey, if we didn't care about oil, we wouldn't be worrying about terrorism. And the fact is that the oil is going to run out no matter what we do. As far as defending high level wastes from terrorists, the fact that the volume of high level wastes is so tiny would indicate that defending it shouldn't be a terribly difficult problem. It doesn't take much of a military to defend a rather small amount of high level wastes. On the other hand, it takes a huge military to force nations filled with people who don't like us to sell us cheap oil. [Note Foreign Affairs tie in.] Lots of scientists and engineers have been working hard on solar (and other) energy sources ever since Jimmy Carter first (as far as I recall) put in the tax advantages for the stuff. 25 years have gone by, and no real breakthroughs. But it really doesn't matter because after we run out of oil, we are either going to build the coal burners, which produce billions of tons of toxic waste in addition to massive strip mines, huge transportation issues and billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, or we'll build nukes. -- Carl

To: b-witch who wrote (10121)	11/13/2001 8:57:48 AM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Solar energy production does not require the massive factory level sites. Sorry B-witch... That's a myth. It requires tremendous amounts of construction materials to build a solar power plant on a large scale basis. jamesphogan.com "What this means in real terms is that while there might not be any utility billing you for the fuel, an enormous amount of effort must be put into concentrating the energy to a usable degree, and this doesn't come free. Here are some figures for materials needed for the construction of a thousand megawatt (typical size for a large coal or nuclear plant) solar facility: Aluminum 35,000 tons Concrete 2,000,000 tons Copper 7,500 tons Steel 600,000 tons Glass 75,000 tons Chromium/titanium 1,500 tons This is in the order of 1000 times the materials needed for a comparably rated nuke, spread over 50 to 100 square miles as opposed to something like 40 acres (a sixteenth of a square mile), with all the corresponding escalations in transportation and construction. All of these materials come from heavy, energy-hungry industries that produce large amounts of waste, a sizable proportion of it highly toxic. And that's not the end of it. Normal power-industry practice is to design for peak ratings of several times the rated capacity of a plant, to allow for heavy-use periods and recharging storage systems. To compare like with like, we need to multiply the above figures by, say, 2.5 minimum for a solar facility capable of doing the same thing as what's meant when we say "a thousand megawatt nuke." Current capacity of the USA is around 750 billion watts, which, multiplied by 2.5 gives 1.875 trillion watts for all-solar replacement. Based on the "Solar 2" demonstration at Barstow, California, which delivers 10MW for an outlay of $180M, this would require $33 trillion, equal to $118,000 per person or $472,000 for the average family--500 to 1000 times the cost of coal or nuclear (even with nuclear hiked by a factor of five as a result of political obstructionism). Your $200 per month utility bill just turned into $100,000. Still interested?" Btw, if you wish to discuss this topic further, I would love to... But we should probably do it over here: Subject 50614 Hawk