Freedom from ME oil.

[Ringel05]

I think it is pretty limited on Earth but I guess you don't need a whole bunch of it. I would LOVE to see the US become the world leader in nuclear power.

If I remember the report correctly (it was a week or so ago and I was busy negotiating D.C. traffic at the time) that was one of the great things, very small amounts needed.

are you talking about the hydrate(sp?) that is on the ocean floor?

CF thinks it was Hydrogen 3, I honestly don't remember if that was the element they were talking about in the report.
But I still think my idea of harnessing the hot air generated in congress would solve all of our energy problems.

 

[garyd]

I would certainly help... Now if we could just come up with a way to use verbal BS for power all we'd need is congress, ever.

 

[Douger]

Well o.k. OZZ a bit of an extremist yourself then hmmm? But let's try to come up with some solutions here. I think that when the electric car becomes cheaper that eveyone should at least CONSIDER replacing one of their households cars with a plug in. I also beleive that we need 10-20 nuke plants by 2020 and I think the only way to do that is for the FED to build them.

There is no 2020.

 

[PatekPhilippe]

BC I am pretty sure Hydro doesn't produce CO2.......Beyond that you may have noticed that I advocate for nuclear power and solar panels on your house could in the near future with "super capacitors" to store enough energy to recharge your plug in.

Please explain what a "super capacitor" is? Since a 10 farad capacitor is the size of a modern day train locomotive I would be interested to hear where you plan to put all of these "super capacitors".

 

[PatekPhilippe]

I still think the BEST way to get plants online by 2020 is to have the gov't build them and then lease to power cos. The FACT is gov't can get past MANY problems faced by private development. Eminent domain ring any bells?

So you advocate usurping environmental concerns as long as it's the government doing it?

 

[Cold Fusion38]

I still think the BEST way to get plants online by 2020 is to have the gov't build them and then lease to power cos. The FACT is gov't can get past MANY problems faced by private development. Eminent domain ring any bells?

So you advocate usurping environmental concerns as long as it's the government doing it?

Well since I consider energy to be a national security issue then I guess I would. I am very concerned about our enviroment but I understand how important it is for the US to have a reliable domestic source of energy. I have even sofened my view on more domestic drilling.

I hope despite our differences on MSNBC we can be civil to each other.

 

[Cold Fusion38]

Supercapacitors (also known as ultracapacitors) store electricity by physically separating positive and negative charges—unlike batteries which do so chemically. The charge they hold is like the static electricity that can build up on a balloon, but is much greater thanks to the extremely high surface area of their interior materials.

Super capacitors are very good at efficiently capturing electricity from regenerative braking, and can deliver power for acceleration just as quickly. With no moving parts, they also have a very long lifespan—probably longer than any car.

A super capacitor is also known as a double-layer capacitor. It polarizes an electrolytic solution to store energy electro statically. Though it is an electrochemical device, no chemical reactions are involved in its energy storage mechanism. This mechanism is highly reversible, and allows the ultra capacitor to be charged and discharged hundreds of thousands of times.

A super capacitor can be viewed as two non reactive porous plates, or collectors, suspended within an electrolyte, with a voltage potential applied across the collectors. In an individual supercapacitor cell, the applied potential on the positive electrode attracts the negative ions in the electrolyte, while the potential on the negative electrode attracts the positive ions. A dielectric separator between the two electrodes prevents the charge from moving between the two electrodes. Diagram 2 depicts an supercapacitor, its modules, and an supercapacitor cell.

 

[Navy1960]

The solar issue while a costly one in terms of individual(s) purchasing solar for home usage could be easily solved. The easiest way would be for the Govt. to offset the purchase of solar panels for a set period of time. They already provide a lot of tax incentives in some cases up to half the purchase but it still is unaffordable for most average familes. So it would seem the best way around this would be to provide incentives that are even higher and then require the user to show at the end of each year after install overall energy usage as a requirement for getting these loans much like someone would send P&L's on SBA loans. What this would do would increase demand and also increase production and supply and bring down the cost overall to everyone. One other benefit of this would be a large energy reduction for residential area's in places like I live, Arizona, and you may be surprised that Solar on homes here is not as common as you may think and thats because it is often promoted poorly and seen as a niche technology that is too expensive and does not save money. To me it's a matter of changing perceptions on residential usage and when solar can be as common in building as say dry-wall then it will put a large dent in our overall national energy usage. However, it must be said this is but one block in many needed to be in place to build a energy plan that works , we only need to have the courage to do it and stop demonizing industries because they don't suit our agenda.

 

[garyd]

But if you live in a place with a lot of cloud cover Solar isn't all that hot. Seattle for instance gets about 60 days of sunlight a year and compound that with much longer nights in the winter. We are going to need a combination of things. And lets not forget that oil is used for a hell of a lot of things other than energy production. Anything made of plastic needs oil.

 

[Cold Fusion38]

Gary.....The best place for solar would be in hot climates. The best thing about putting solar in those areas is that it would produce the most power at exactly when it is most needed to run AC units.

 

[garyd]

Not arguing that at all and solar panels as currently conceived may be on their way to dinosaur status. there is a lot of new stuff coming out in the solar field that will be cheaper and easier to make and much less space intensive.

 

[Navy1960]

Thats the reason why I said Solar is only a building block in an overall energy policy and not just a singular solution. It always strikes me when people advocate one or two technologies and then exclude others as a solution to this nations energy needs. In fact I have advocated an "all in" approach that uses every available technology to end our need to rely on foreign oil.

 

[garyd]

Good.

 

[Old Rocks]

hell. TMI wasnt the disaster the enviroweenies claimed
nothing like chenobyl

Three Mile Island wasn't supposed to be able to happen at all. The fact that it came so very close to a catastrophic meltdown astounded everybody. Some very bad assumptions were made, assumptions that anybody in maintenance could have told you would lead to disaster.

Technology Lessons from Three Mile Island | Daily Cup of Tech

Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, page 183One of the most famous incidents in history, for example, was the near meltdown oat Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear station in 1979. Three Mile Island so traumatized the American public that it sent the US nuclear power industry into a tailspin from which it has never fully recovered. But what actually happened at that nuclear reactor began as something far from dramatic. As the sociologist Charles Perrow shows in his classic Normal Accidents, there was a relatively routing blockage in what is called the plant’s “polisher” - a kind of giant water filter. The blockage caused moisture to leak into the plant’s air system, inadvertently tripping two valves and shutting down the flow of cold water into the plant’s steam generator. Like all nuclear reactors, Three Mile Island had a backup cooling system for precisely this situation. But on that particular day, for reasons that no one really understands, the valves for the backup system weren’t open. Someone had closed them, and an indicator in the control room showing they were closed was blocked by a repair tag hanging from a switch above it. That left the reactor dependent on another backup system, a special sort of relief valve. But, as luck would have it, the relief valve wasn’t working properly that day either. It stuck open when it was supposed to close, and, to make matters even worse, a gauge in the control room that should have told the operators that the relief valve wasn’t working was itself not working. By the time Three Mile Island’s engineers realized what was happening, the reactor had come dangerously close to a meltdown.

No single big thing went wrong at Three Mile Island. Rather, five completely unrelated events occurred in sequence, each of which, had it happened in isolation, would have caused no more than a hiccup in the plant’s ordinary operation.

Almost sounds like sabotage.

No, just failure to follow regs, sloppy management, and Murphy's. That is all it takes.

 

[jillian]

hell. TMI wasnt the disaster the enviroweenies claimed
nothing like chenobyl

matter of degrees....

 

[garyd]

And as Isaac Azimov put it in an op ed shortly after 3 mile Island:

The dosage of radiation recieved by an avearge person within 3 miles of three mile Island about 1/1000 of what you get from a chest x ray. And over about the same amount of time.

And Jillian it aso only a matter of degrees betwen freezing to death and dying of heat stroke.

Three mile island was the most singularly over hyped essentially non event of the last century. Comparing that to Chernobyl is like trying to compare a five mile an hour breeze to a 300 Mph F5 tornado. Yeah their both wind but one of them is deadly the other one isn't.

 

[RavensFan]

I would like to have an honest, fair, and POLITE debate about energy policy including plug in electric cars and other alt energy cars. I would also like to discuss new ways of producing energy and the idea of new nuclear power plants to supply our energy until such a time as we can get ALL our power from solar sources.



ONCE AGAIN I WOULD LIKE TO KEEP THIS THREAD FRIENDLY!

I think nuclear energy is the way to go, it's proven that it works and I believe the U.S. has the most regulations on safety issues, so I don't think safety would be a problem. I think we should be looking into all sources of energy (although I'm not sold on wind power yet)

I could be wrong but in reading your post, it sounds to me you would eventually like to see the U.S. eliminate oil as a source of energy at some point. Am I right in thinking that?

 

[Cold Fusion38]

Yes Raven I would like to be free of oil some time in the future and I do realize that a great # of things will need to happen before w can do that. I am aware that MANY houshold products come from oil.

 

[DiveCon]

hell. TMI wasnt the disaster the enviroweenies claimed
nothing like chenobyl

matter of degrees....

TMI had a containment chamber, Chernobyl didnt
HUGE difference

 

[Cold Fusion38]

The fact is TMI was NOT the horrible disaster it was made out to be and even if it was it has NOTHING to do with the Next Gen reactors.