Looks like solar could become the cheapest form of electricity within a decade. Seems it can meet the demands. Wonder if we'll get orbital elevators and microwave power transmission too.
Can we still have LFTRs though?
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god I hope so
And people think nuclear power is scary :P
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I'm not one of them. Orbital elevators are cool as shit.
I think Japan is working on microwave transmission for solar as well.
Orbital Elevators (aka space elevator) are a really cool idea but incredibly dangerous with the possibility for global catastrophe.
Microwave power transmission? Are you nuts? It would be safer and more efficient to fire a high powered riffle at a pinwheel to transmit power.
It's still difficult to scale solar to the level that is required by big cities. You have to remember that if you rely only on solar you need to be able to store (safely) incredible amounts of energy to run cities at night.
Nuclear is the pinnacle of power generation right now. Cost effective, safe (despite the media), very little impact on environment, incredible amounts of stable and controllable output.
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odds are fission will render every thing obsolete for mass power generation. solar and powerfelt will cover small devices and hydro gen fuel cells will cover cars and other vehicles .
I really hope so!
It's looking really good so-far.
They already have a positive yield but progress is cautiously slow and still very much in R&D.
Solar:
$1000 per 1kW/h
Offshore wind energy converter:
$6,000,000 per 6MW/h
The lower one is scalable up to 600MW in a single farm, how about the upper one?
Energy storage right now is plain bad, nothing else to say about that.
Well how often does the media have any useful knowledge of a subject they talk about and call it "reporting"?
Don't you mean fusion?
I don't believe solar is the problem i think it would be storing that energy through the night. Batteries are really expensive and short lived and by the time you mined and processed the lithium you will have been better off burning coal. Once we find cheaper, longer lived, and just better batteries we should not try to make it a major source of energy. Even if we do figure this out i don't think we should put all our eggs in one basket.
no. fission is the division of one atom into two, and fusion is the combination of two lighter atoms into a larger one.
in a more notable diffrence a fussion reacton heats up getting hotter and hotter as it reacts but still stays solid because eventually uranium gets too dense and stops reacting. fission produces a ball of plasma by creating a chain of small explosions that lasts untill all it's fuel is burned up. as a result fission produces no waste.
Not before 2030. =\ They are all probably going to be built in Europe and Russia as well. =\ LFTR is a generation IV reactor MSR design, none of which are likely to be built before 2030. Most of the research on the new gen IV reactors is coordinated through GIF (Generation IV International Forum)
To me, the simplest way to implement solar power is with supercritical power towers. Essentially, a huge black box full of water on top of a tower surrounded by mirrors aimed at it. Steam is generated and drives a turbine, and the rest of the heat is piped into a molten salt tank which stores enough heat to run the generator for the entire night at full load. If you stick it in a desert you basically have limitless power for as long as the sun shines. And for the most part, the upkeep is relatively simple, the mirrors will never degrade beyond needing a wash or a polish every now and then.
It depends on where you are, of course. Photovoltaic seems to be the best method if you don't experience sunlight every day, but in my mind for generating constant power and putting it on the grid, power towers in the desert seems to be the best large-scale method.
It's fusion which produces no waste, fission is used by current reactors. You've got the second part mixed around.
But even that isn't strictly true, in fusion reactors the casing absorbs energy from neutron radiation which causes it to become radioactive over time and decay. It then needs to be replaced. So in this sense fusion reactors do produce radioactive waste although it only has a short half life. The bigger problem is that it makes it expensive to run a fusion reactor and is one of the problems they need to solve before they can become commercially viable.
This it's essentially what the ivanpah solar facility is. Unfortunately its not performing as expected. And like most renewables if they were not subsidized by the government they would be finacially unstable and would bring in no investers.
In the end as long as rooftop solar individuals rely on power companies for on demand power (and I feel that will be for a long time) solar cant win.
As the quantity of kW/h decrease the price for each unit will need to increase, so it might be low priced now but it will hit a solar saturation point where retail generation will be very expensive at night when you want to charge your car.
The other aspect to consider is human characteristics. Humans tend to get comfortable. When your use to paying $100 per month in electricity, then install solar and see that drop to $0 per month after awhile the bill starts creeping up because they see it as free electricity. Then they get back to $100 per month except they are using double the amount. Its the same concept of when people get raises but end up with the same amount of free money because they end up spending on things they dont need.
This takes me to power storage..... We all know we are not there yet and batteries are not the solution. I feel the future will be super capacitors due to the longevity and reliability. The only downside is like most things it's cost and space requirements. Both will be reduced with the advancement of technology.
it's funny, because as someone who works in the PV industry, anyone who tells you that you can get "free electricity" or "zero out your electricity bills" in any sense is lying through their teeth. And people somehow have the idiotic notion that their utility company is just gonna front them a check for all the electricity they don't use, which is absolute nonsense. We're actually seeing demand charges being imposed by utility companies that reflect the peak power that a given array has been GENERATING, not the actual physical power demands of the property.
For solar power to be financially feasible, you have to let it sit for 10-20 years, and you have to enter into a contract that raises the value of your home but shafts the likelihood of anyone wanting to buy it, because putting the responsibility for the array on the new owners is convoluted and complicated.
Solar power is a feasible option, but what people fail to realize it's a feasible option roughly at the equator.
E.g. The nordic cointries don't do solar research because a more viable option is wind, wave and water power over there.
At least here in Germany, Nuclear power would not be kept online if the government decided to end subsidies.
Storage is a real bottleneck in all power that isn't constant.
Nuclear's probably the best option if there's more research put into alternatives. I've heard good things about thorium but they've never been backed so I'm a bit skeptical.