Power from space, we fry you, you pay for it :-)

PG&E is under political pressure to support "renewable" power sources, so they go through the motions. This satellite thing is even crazier than wave power.

Our local excuse for a newspaper, the Chronicle, states that the solar power available in orbit is 1000 times as intense as on the ground.

John

Well that depends on the orbit...

Sounds like a good bet to me-- my guess is that they won't have to pay for a cent's worth of power.

In orbit around Mercury?

...tell them it is even GREATER *on* the sun....

The only mention I've heard of the obvious answer, nuclear, was a mention in passing in a local PG&E commercial, where they mention solar, wind, nuclear, clean coal.. something like that.

I can't understand why the warmingists and the "dependence on foreign oil" crowd haven't jumped all over nuclear. Geez, ZERO emissions, virtually infinite electricity, and you can buy one essentially off the shelf:

Probably because people think power plants are equivalent to bombs. And even _that_ shouldn't be an issue - we've already got 10,000 or so bombs. "Terrorists will steal the fuel to make bombs!"? That ship sailed decades ago.

Thanks, Rich

On a sunny day (Fri, 17 Apr 2009 08:39:14 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

Hi we are the kids from upstate highschool. We have hijacked your satellite and want a life long supply of M&Ms and less homework or else we will point the beam at your office.

The reason is that they don't *want* us to have an adequate energy supply. They want block all available power sources in order to remake society.

John

Nonzero, actually. But quite a bit less. About 2% of coal's CO2 emissions by most estimates. This includes mining, refining, frabrication, etc. (Yes, in a nuclear economy, these emissions could, theoretically, be "zero" -- but face it, in the real world, all those trucks burn diesel, and they'll be burning it, or something like it, for at least the next 50 years.)

Some reactors, such as CANDU, naturally produce tritium emissions (tritiated water, steam and gas), and reprocessing (not done in this country) releases radioactive krypton and xenon. Radioactive gasses are a surprisingly small contribution, though; they decay fairly quickly (a few decades, about like those greenhouse gasses do), and disperse extremely quickly (whereas solid waste and fallout stay in the soil). Even so, a typical coal-burning plant releases more radiation (in the form of uranium and thorium in the ash that gets past the filters) per GWh.

The biggest problem is cost, which is extremely capital-intensive (a few gigabucks to open a new few-gigawatt plant). Operating costs (fuel and maintainance) are fairly good, taking about 20% of the cost of electricity generated. The other 80% pays back construction and decomissioning. Supposedly, this is the primary reason nuclear power went into decline in the 70s, although Chernobyl pretty well sealed its fate for the next couple decades. And, as you've noticed, nuclear continues to suffer from bad PR.

Tim

There's nothing crazy about wave power. Salter's duck scared the nuclear industry enough that they chose speed over secrecy in killing it off.

I won't deny that there's plenty of irrational fear regarding nuclear power, but there are plenty of entirely rational reasons to relegate nuclear power to the "last resort" option.

A Chernobyl-level accident is pretty unlikely, but lower-level incidents do occur even in relatively well-run nuclear programs, and they do end up causing non-trivial amounts of radioactive pollution.

Waste disposal is an unsolved problem. Actual *disposal* is currently an insoluble problem, so you're left with storage. And anyone who claims confidence in a particular storage scheme being safe for tens of millenia is talking out of their arse (even a century is pushing it).

More significant is the meta-issue: nuclear power may be adequately safe (all of the options have some downside) if it's done right, but the current climate of "oh shit; we've been asleep on the job and need a quick fix" isn't conducive to doing it right.

In a climate with an elevated risk of screw-ups, renewable energy projects tend to have better worst-case scenarios (i.e. you just waste money) than nuclear.

Nuclear certainly isn't a cheap option, nor is it likely to be a quick fix. AFAIK, there's currenly only one manufacturer of pressure vessels in the world, and they aren't short of orders. It's favoured mostly because you can locate a nuclear plant near the consumers (much to the dismay of many of the actual consumers), whereas renewables have location constraints, and would require upgrading the grid.

...and melt the M&Ms?

so

//

Nuclear power plants aren't equivalent to bombs. A nuclear power plant contains tons of highly radioactive material. Drop a nuclear bomb on a power plant and you disperse enough radioactive material to write off a most of a continent. Chernobyl was nothing in comparison.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

so

l"

Rubbish. The regular global warming activists (as opposed to the lunatic fringe tree-huggers) don't care how much energy society uses, so long as it comes from a renewable source. What worries you is that all the renewable energy sources that we know about at the moment cost about twice as much per kilowatt hour as you are used to paying PG&E.

We'd survive and thrive if we went over to renewable sources today. The economy would rattle around a bit - just as it did in 1973 when the price of oil went up by a factor of four over-night - but it wouldn't create as much of a problem as US junk mortages have done over the past year.

And if we did go over to renewable power on a large scale, the economies of scale would rapidly cut the costs of renewable power. At the current rate of deployment, wind power is expected to become as cheap as conventional power around 2030, and solar power by 2045, but more vigorous pump-priming would make this happen sooner.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Wouldn't this actually contribute to GW? I mean it would appear to be increasing the amount of energy from the sun to the earths surface....or would the collector create a matching shadow to mitigate that?

How are they going to make the space segment work? If you are going to beam down a megawatt you have to have to have a megwatt of electric already. How did they turn sunlight into that kind of high density power? It is correspondingly worse for 10's of MW, 100's of MW, and

They must be living on a different planet.

Sylvia.

It seems there's lots of money to be made selling a dream.

The true economics don't matter.

Sylvia.

On a sunny day (Sat, 25 Apr 2009 23:56:29 +1000) it happened Sylvia Else wrote in :

Oh yes, and Al Gore is really good at making money from global warming. Things went a bit too far recently when a paper was published that 'fat people cause global warming'. See my posting to us.politcs: