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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (8528)	12/28/2004 3:46:27 PM
From: axial	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 46821

Frank, the concept being used by the Chinese originated with Farrington Daniels... "In 1943, a Manhattan Project team led by Enrico Fermi sustained the first man-made nuclear chain reaction in a pile of uranium blocks at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Lab. A chemist named Farrington Daniels joined the effort a short time later. But Daniels wasn't interested in bombs. His focus was on a notion that had been circulating among physicists since the late 1930s: harnessing atomic power for cheap, clean electricity. He proposed a reactor containing enriched uranium "pebbles" - a term borrowed from chemistry - and using gaseous helium to transfer energy to a generator. The Daniels pile, as the concept was called, was taken seriously enough that Oak Ridge National Laboratory commissioned Monsanto to design a working version in 1945. Before it could be built, though, a bright Annapolis graduate named Hyman Rickover "sailed in with the Navy," as Daniels later put it, and the competing idea of building a rod-fueled, water-cooled reactor to power submarines. With US Navy money backing the new design, the pebble bed fell by the wayside, and Daniels returned to the University of Wisconsin. By the time of his death in 1972, he was known as a pioneer of - irony alert - solar power. Indeed, the International Solar Energy Society's biennial award bears his name." wired.com I used the term "Daniels model" to refer not only to reactor design, but relative safety, modularity, scalabilty and affordability etc associated with large-scale use of such reactors. My apologies for sending you to the Search Engines. "...You ssem to instead depend on the reasoning that has characterized the economic modeling of the fossil fuel industries, both of the past and the present, and now moving into the future." The point from which we're working is here... "Doing the math, in order to double the world's energy supplies over the next 50 years, the world will need to build, among other things, the equivalent of 2750 new 1 gigawatt natural gas-fired power stations, 1000 new coal-fired 1 gigawatt power plants with carbon capture, 1.5 million windmills deployed over a bit less than 300,000 square miles, 2150 new nuclear plants, 1500 new 1 gigawatt hydropower stations, not to mention new solar and biofuel technologies." Message 20886234 The scenario includes nuclear, solar, biofuel, wind and conventional fossil-fuel generation. "Am I being overly critical on this point, - or have you put some thought to this question and subsequently resolved that the necessary gestation periods for new sources are not conducive to the time frames and massive scales that we've been discussing, i.e., to meet the electric power needs of over nine billion people 50 years from now?" That's it exactly, Frank. The italicized portion of your comment. How long will it take to educate the public on the impending realities, and can they be persuaded of the need to act, soon? To refine the Daniels technology, and begin building? To get all the pieces in place? Alternative generation technologies fall 'way short of meeting demand, although they certainly help. Meanwhile, the "energy cost of doing business" rises, and the capital needed to build for future demand flows offshore. Jim