OT: Can we design our way out of this?

Don't need innovation. Drill, and use oil shale, coal, and nuclear. They easily solve the problem.

John

The non technical problems can't be solved by any technical means. There are only two ways:

1) Return to the old good Anglo Saxon ideals of hard work and high moral. Leave in modesty like the rest of the world. Do not spend money that is not earned. Quit the degeneration and degradation of all sorts. 2) Pumping the oil from the Iraq colony can keep the current lifestyle afloat for quite some time.

Vladimir Vassilevsky DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

Yes innovation can save us. In the long term, innovation is the only answer that really will. If we had the drill rigs to do it, we could drill for more oil inside the US but the rigs are basically busy so that won't happen. The oil companies have several years worth of places to drill that they haven't gotten to yet. The US has about 3% of the worlds oil supply so pumping it all out doesn't do much.

Since the value of oil is rising, the guy who has the last barrel wins unless something happens to make the value drop. This means that nobody really has a strong motive to greatly increase their production. As a result, we can expect oil supplies to remain tight.

The idea of using oil shale is often brought up because the US has lots of that. Unfortunately it is easier to produce coal than oil shale. There are two basic ways to go after oil shale. You can mine it like coal and then process it or you can use the in situ-retort process. If you mine it, you may as well mine coal. The in-situ- retort process requires huge amounts of water to make into steam and only produces a fraction of the total oil. The only places where in- situ-retort can be done is where the shale is near a very large river. If you check a map, that is basically nowhere.

Natural gas is a good way to go for a bridge fuel. The US has quite a bit of it and it works very nicely for the things we want done.

Atomic power can make a lot of energy in a stationary location. The atomic powered car isn't going to happen. This means that we would have to make some method of moving the energy around part of the plan. Getting rid of the waste from atomic power plants is a bit of a problem. It isn't the high level waste that is the big issue. There is only a small amount of high level stuff. The so called low level stuff is the bits of plumbing etc that have to be replaced that really is the problem. When a reactor hits the end of its life, it becomes a huge pile of low level waste. I have suggested that we could just bust them up and dump them in the great salt lake but the regulators didn't like the idea.

Fusion power has been 20 years in the future for about 50 years now. I expect it to remain that way for many years to come. Atomic fusion is very hard to make work.

Solar power works well for some things. We use it for outdoor lighting, for example. The problem with solar power is that it is spread out over a large area. If you need a lot of power in one location, you have to do a lot of work to concentrate the energy. PV panels cost a lot. Solar thermal looks like a more likely way to get much energy from solar, unless we have a breakthrough.

Wind power really blows. Some days you don't get any and others you get way too much. The power of wind runs as the cube of speed. This makes the math really awful.

Is that why China, Russia, and France have gone into the piggy bank for a few trillion $$ and formed a tripartite joint effort to solve the problem? There is one hell of a lot more H2 (and Du2 and Tr2) in the world than U235. If those three get their hands on the fusion genie, yesterday's Wall Street selloff will look like a kid's candy store.

Sure, the problem is horrendous, but the result is spectacular (and Helium is a lot easier to get rid of than radioactive Thorium, Plutonium and the nasties that come along with splitting rather than fusing).

Jim

On Sep 30, 11:19=EF=BF=BDam, Jim Thompson

As Jim correctly points out, energy abundance is not the problem. Political will is.

What about the warn-out-and-now-activated-equipment part of the waste problem?

The cost/W of PV panels decreases by some 16%pa, and currently stands at about $2.50/W

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John Lark>Don't need innovation. Drill,

Where are the idle refineries that will **process** that output? With the time and money it would take to build more petro-crackers, cleaner reneweable solutions could be build

--solutions that will put cash into the pockets of Americans (especially when we sell those items offshore).

...and for those who say "Wind|solar|tidal is not a *complete* solution", how many of you are willing to take *5% less* for salary?

...and as Ken pointed out in this thread, USA petro reserves are a tiny fraction of the global picture.

Ecologically a very dirty production process--and energy-intensive.

Dirty to use without mandated standards.

All nuclear waste produced in the USA since 1943 STILL EXISTS. It's still sitting around in ill-suited containers in poorly-secured areas. Unless a commitment is *first* made to use breeders and burn essentially ALL the fuel, the American nuke plants will continue to produce waste at a rate of 95 percent. (Americans' experience with building breeders is pitiful).

For decades the French have had a scheme the USA should mirror:

1) Have a STANDARDIZED design for *all* nuke plants. 2) Burn as much of the fuel as possible in the reactor. 3) Turn the waste into something stable. 4) Have a central repository for that waste.

There are also pebble bed reactors that don't have to be huge and are fail-safe.

If you don't factor in ALL the costs (not just *immediate* _monetary_ considerations).

or

I'm not sure I believe the reports. This is not mobile oil that is in a normal sort of a trap. The rock has to be fractured to recover it. It smells like trouble to me.

They still won't fit in your car. I'm sorry but the 1950's Pop Mechanics isn't going to happen. They still have a limited life too.

Besides they are *french*

Would you want to pay for all that light?

?

2. > If those three get their hands on the fusion genie, yesterday's Wall Stre=

et

m

The deuterium + tritium makes as much radioactive waste as our existing reactors. There is no shortage of fuel. Australia has a great big mountain of the stuff. It is something like a 200 year supply all in one place.

I don't know the details. I'll ask my #2 daughter, the chemical engineer, and see if she knows.

I wasn't (pardon the pun) driving at cars... just the waste cycle.

The food is good ;-)

My outdoor lighting (on timers and photocells) amounts to less than $1 per month.

...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
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I just got some 1.5 watt LED Edison based lamps for my gate posts. I'll take a picture for the binaries group to show the difference between one of the LED lamps, and a 25 watt incandescent. The LED lamps were $4 each.

The other outdoor lights are on motion sensors, as well as the lights in the hallways in the house. It's nice to open the door and walk in at night without looking for the light switches.

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On Sep 30, 6:54=A0pm, Jim Thompson wrote: [....]

Unless she works for the oil business, I would not be surprised if she didn't know. The issue is mechanical not chemical and it is a very specialized field. You could look up "hydrofracing" this is what they call it in the business. They used to use explosives but the results weren't nearly as good as using water. The idea is you create a huge pressure that forces the rocks apart to create the passages to let the oil flow.

I think the rock in question is like a closed cell foam of rock with bubbles of oil in it. We have to create fractures that link all the little pockets of oil together to get the oil out. Once you do that, the oil will try to rise to the top (more literally the rock sinks) where the recovery wells are drilled.

Well, until I get my atomic powered flying car I still say they lied to us. They *promiced* us atomic power flying cars.

Agreed :)

That is very little lighting. Walk outside some time at noon. Look around and think about how many light bulbs you would need to provide all that light. People seem to take all that light for granted and don't count it into the amount of solar power we actually use.

She _is_ educated ;-)

Doesn't take much light to see the edges of a sidewalk.

What I do need to solve: I have a gate into my back yard, the sidewalk is lighted, controlled by a switch 70' away... also the closest source of power :-( Maybe a battery powered RF link??

...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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 I love to cook with wine     Sometimes I even put it in the food

You have a breeder reactor design that doesn't produce waste? Have you considered filing a patent?

Some PIR security sensors use RF. It shouldn't be too hard to find one made for outdoor use.

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Richard Henry wrote:

**LESS** waste. Far less than 95%:

Optex has a couple good ones. (Google it.) I little solar-powered RF remote, as Jim suggests, would also work.

Jim - I have (I think?) serveral new (but no longer manufacturered) US Solar 3W, 6-volt panels I can make you a really good deal on. Say cost of shipping + the price of a Belgian AIe down at Total Wine. :)

Real nice panels. Aluminum frames, integral polarity diode, etc....

-mpm

Isn't coal kind of contrary to the warmingist agenda?

Thanks, Rich