California hoses its energy future – again

@ur momisugly Maurice Garoutte (12:20:46) : & kim (06:45:54) : Re: nuke waste in the ocean.
That’s nothing new. Oil drums full of it were being dumped a few hundred miles off the US west coast in the mid ’50’s. Hasn’t seemed to bother anything.

I shouldn’t worry too much. There is a sunk ammunition ship in the Thames near London with some 1500 tons of munitions still on board. She has been there, her upperworks show at low tide, since 1944.
So there she be and there she stay and she ain’t gone bang yet, despite scare stories every few years.
Kindest Regards

Please tell me this is all a joke.

When I lived out in the CA desert (about 12 years), periodically we’d get nasty wind/sandstorms that would actually frost the windows on a vehicle parked out in it overnight. How do the solar mirror companies deal with that little problem out there in the Ivanpah flats? Visited/camped around that area back in the 70’s, it surely is/was? a scenic and a beautiful area. Hacking it up with a worthless solar installation seems like a damn shame. Probably makes no difference, as the desert aint what it used to be anyway. Last time I was out near the Old Woman Mountains, the light pollution from Lake Havasu and Vegas could be seen plainly at night. Not much of a wilderness experience when you can read the newspaper at midnight by the city lights in the distance.

@ur momisugly kuhnkat (19:36:56) : I’d refer you to a couple other areas: The Explorer Trench, and the subduction zone just south of the Aleutians, both very deep and excellent drop sites. And of course, let’s not forget the several nuclear bombs and missiles that have been lost at sea ( Savannah Georgia), a couple nuke subs (our’s and Russian), and the hundreds of tests carried out during that period. Personally, I think folks freak out far too easily over nukes – waste or weapons.

Typical, they demand clean renewable power and then moan and protest when it is offered.
They do not want clean power, they do not want progress. What they want is for humanity to be sent back to the stone age, or made extinct altogether.

As this incident and many others strongly indicate, “environmentalism” is often a disguise for something else entirely. Many of the same folks who promote “green” can be expected to protest construction of any “for profit” power plant, regardless of the proposed technology. The pathetic energy densities of wind and solar yield terrible economics (hence the subsidies) and an enormous physical footprint. Although the economics will eventually kill both technologies in any event, the humongous footprint will probably save us $ billions in avoided subsidies and skyrocketing utility costs because that footprint makes successful “environmental intervention” a walk in the park.

Well the Jan 2008 issue of Scientific American Magazine, has a serious article about a 30,000 squ mile solar plant out in those south western desert wastel ands, all covered with solar cells; and another smaller one of 16,000 squ miles with solar mirrors, and steam turbines.
If those plants were to get built, they would become vandal and terrrorism targets; not to mention vulnerable in any local war scenario.
So they would have to be fenced off, and patrolled by armed guards, with all human habitation removed from that total land area.
30,000 squ miles is 19.2 million acres, which just happens to be the exact size (roughly) of the entire Arctic National Wildlife Reguge; in which drillers would like to take up 2400 acres to drill for the oil there.
Solar energy, which powers ALL renewable energy sources, arrives at 1 KW/m^2 peak on the surface, and averages a small fraction of that over time. The land area required is always much greater (except on the equator, because of shadowing of one collector by another. So the trouble with renewable energy, is it simply doesn’t renew, any where near fast enough.

Wind turbines rotate at about 7 rpm. I timed them while driving by. The notion that they blenderize birds is nonsensical.
The notion that ethanol is turning food into fuel, and causing starvation is exceptionally nonsensical. Do you really want me to point out all of the ways?
Perhaps the solar plants should be moved to drier southern ranch country, such as New Mexico. The cattle would enjoy the shade and richer vegetation. I don’t understand why some people here are imagining that a little partial shade will result in sterile soils with no soil biota, let alone no grass. The rancher gets some additional money. That doesn’t address the lack of cost-effectiveness for solar.

“”” Adam from Kansas (19:54:12) :
They call it good for the Earth, but just look at how much space that plant would’ve taken, space animals like bighorn sheep and condors need.
Here’s an idea BrightSource, put more money into getting ultra efficient solar panels to market, then generate your power in the urban areas instead of covering the whole desert with mirrors and displacing plant and animal life. “””
Well somebody recently set an all time world record of about 41.6% conversion efficiency for a triple layer solar cell.
Now you have to be careful, about what that means. If the application is for outer space (NASA) where weight costs money, then expensive triple layer cells might save a whole lot of money in launch payload costs. But that means they are also dealing with air mass zero solar spectrum, of 1366 W/m^2 roughly.
But for use on earth, you are not going to be dealing with TSI; and only on the equator would you have near air mass one . For most US based applications you realistically have to look at AM 1.5-2.0 and not only are you dealing with less than 1000 W/m^2, but the spectrum is also corrupted from TSI spectra, so now you have to design a different triple layer cell, that what works best in outer space, to better match the earth surface spectrum.
That would be very expensive proposition.
Also high tech triple layer solar cells are typically used in optical collectors, so you don’t have to make such large areas of expensive materials.
The optical collection strategies aren’t trivial either, and there are a number of non imaging concentrator optics that are often employed.
The simplest imaging type optics, and the NI optics as well, usually don’t have uniform focal spots, so local heating hot spots can be a problem. Making the irradiance uniform can cost in maximum concentration ratios.
So high tech Optical methods, are not likely to be low cost.
Any biological solar conversion, such as plant growth, is even less efficient than artificial conversion; so bio energy sources, are even more space wasting than solar cells; not to mention the often punitive water costs of most bio processes.
In the end, there’s no getting around the wide dispersion of solar energy, and the unavoidable costs of gathering the stuff up.
I’m not in favor of going back to clambering around in trees to gather figs, just so we can eliminate fossil fuel energy.