Solar cheaper than nuclear

A non-Silicon solution...

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=A0 =A0 ...Jim Thompson

Yes indeed!

Congratulations on obtaining the necessary environmental permits to finally break ground!

That is probably more difficult than the actual engineering and building.

Michael

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

I did an image search for Solana, found it interesting, others might also.

Oh this is probably what you're looking for.

I mentioned Solana here several years ago. When I heard of it I sent an E-mail to APS asking how it worked. Got a nice call from an engineer who works there who walked me thru its operation. Kewl!

It's for real! Shows what can be done if you keep government away and leave the profit motive to drive the direction of research. ...Jim Thompson

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

The DoE is loaning them $1.45B, which isn't exactly keeping the government away. :-)

But it looks like a could be a "win" for everyone involved, which is great...

Ya, butt what about Solana? :-) MikeK Oh, I noticed you altered my post, now somebody might look!

When sucker money is offered, you take it. Every time they hand out money, I get a cut... I love it... why should I turn it away?

Hopefully! ...Jim Thompson

If they're into bubble-butts ;-) ...Jim Thompson

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The waste issue hasn't been solved. Reprocessing is very very messy, well unless you like vats of acid.

I used to be pro nuclear until I read Helen Caldecot's "Nuclear Power Is Not The Answer." No rants in the book, just facts laid out in a linear fashion.

But the solar nuts (you) keep telling us that point-of-use PV is the way to go. If it were, wouldn't a PV plant use PV? No one is saying that nukes are scale to point-of-use. ...or perhaps you think that PV plants should only be built in >1000MW quanta too?

Time to upgrade the lines to something bigger than speaker wire.

I don't have a garden on my roof, so there is many room for a solar-system! Nuclear energy need uranium. I don't like the governements of countries who are selling uranium.

The sun delivers much more energy as all nuclear systems in the world, it's only a matter of getting better equipment to make energy out of sunlight. I gues with Nano-technology Solar systems will gonna have much more efficiency in the near future. It will be cheaper to produce solarpanels too.

Nuclear-energy will always be dangerous, besides it needs a network for transport, solar systems make consumers independent when they generate their own energy.

That's not naïve, that's clever!!!

They need to use oxygen free copper monster wire. :)

tm

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: snipped-for-privacy@netfront.net ---

No wonder solar is so expensive.

Electrowinning would go well here, but this is only done point-of-use, like near copper mines in Chile. A bit far from Bonneville to do any good. And shipping ore concentrate just doesn't make sense.

I don't know what other metals would be effective. Precious metals are already metallic, other semi-noble metals (like nickel) aren't common enough to produce in the same way as copper. Anything else, for example iron, lead or zinc, is too cheap to be worth spending electricity on when they can be made easily with coke.

Electrorefining comes to mind, which is done for lead and pyrometallurgical copper. I don't know that it would even be economical to move such a plant, even if the electricity were dramatically cheaper.

Otherwise, you can do the same thing, and just push it back later, with a vanadium redox cell. The electrochemical equivalent of pumping water in and out of a lake. Or molten salt sorts of things, etc.

Tim

The barriers are political.

For example, there are plenty of salt domes that have contained petroleum for a couple hundred million years. Vitrified waste would stay there quite well. Then there are depleted uranium mines, which held uranium ore for a couple hundred million years or so. Vitrified waste with a few feet of concrete around it would do fine there. A doable amount of concrete will absorb enough radiation to make "high level" radioactive waste safe to store there.

However, there is NIMBY. States don't want other states' trash, even if they can be paid well to take it.

And there was the artificial barrier enacted in the early 1980's, requiring muclear waste to be monitored and retrievable. That rules out dumping it in salt domes or exterrestrially.

Why am I not hearing complaints about manufacture of vehicle batteries?

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

That is true. There is a lot of waste on all the fronts.

I would say people around Chernobyl have a different idea about nuclear energy. I know a few people from there and the stories they tell are very sad.

I agree there is a lot of desert land in California and Arizona that have clear skies most of the year. I don't have a problem using solar or eolian energy. One single eolian generator can deliver 3MW. 50% conversion efficiency on solar panels is achievable.

The energy of the future is going to be a clean, portable, and a lot more advanced than the energy discussed here. I don't believe there will be any distance transmission of energy, the way we do it today. But that is my personal opinion.

Drop it over a mid-ocean subduction zone. You won't see it again for a hundred million years.

John