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Future power sources for the US

If only we could run our cars on Republican bullshit. It seems to be limitless "natural" resource.
 
You can have the nuke plant a few miles down the road from me. As long as you take the leaking tritium, the collapsing cooling towers and the owners who don't even know where the pipes are.
 
I have been calling for this country to have a minimum of 1,000 nuclear power plants. At least 10% of the should be portable. This power plant should be fueled with thorium.

With this additional energy, hydrogen in large quantities could be produced for most in cities transportation. Beside that, with these 1,000 nuclear power plants we could realize a country where not one watt of electrical power is produced with fossil fuels.
 
a777pilot said:
I have been calling for this country to have a minimum of 1,000 nuclear power plants. At least 10% of the should be portable. This power plant should be fueled with thorium.

With this additional energy, hydrogen in large quantities could be produced for most in cities transportation. Beside that, with these 1,000 nuclear power plants we could realize a country where not one watt of electrical power is produced with fossil fuels.
Click to expand...

Finally some common sense thinking. A thousand points of light!

And its quite possible that despite not having the engineers to run the few we have we could easily train the unemployed to operate them. Cab drivers could be in charge of the portable ones and McDonalds employees could be a double shift by refueling the nuke plants.
 
Right now, power plant's are built to service specific markets rather than the most efficient size for the respective technologies. That is because they are dependent on bonds and other public financial instruments. I propose smaller hybrid technologies that can be paid for by local communities just to provide power for that community. Hydrogen, solar, fuel cell, digestor technologies could all be adapted to meet those needs.

There are also needs that can only be met through large facilities and nuclear power is a viable solution for those needs.
 
For cars: no govt regs so Natural gas can be used and so fossil fuel can be used more efficiently... the govt has been preventing the use of natural gas. However, things like the Prius are only 4 cylinder so they accelerate slowly as shit and they're all light and jank.

In general: abolish the dept of energy because it has costed taxpayers too much money and has just been preventing progress. Abolish all U.S. federal gov standards. At the local level, deregulate the utility companies. Allow completely free trade in copper. Local deregulation (including sale of public local roads) would be a good idea also, because that would allow the market to promote DC power. AC is too electrically noisy (unless the power supplies of everything that runs on it are really nice) and it allows for utility companies... while they would be replaced with natural resource companies, at least each household would have (control of) its own power grid.
 
techs said:
Finally some common sense thinking. A thousand points of light!

And its quite possible that despite not having the engineers to run the few we have we could easily train the unemployed to operate them. Cab drivers could be in charge of the portable ones and McDonalds employees could be a double shift by refueling the nuke plants.
Click to expand...

The beauty of the free market. When people start seeing nuclear engineers and technicians making 150, 200, 250k+ due to market demand, well guess what those people will do?

In fact, you could increase that effect further by having the govt subsidize the education of anyone who goes to school for that and graduates with a 3.0 or higher.

Sounds good to me and should to anyone who isn't naive enough to think that wind and solar are enough to sustain our current consumption, much less future consumption.
 
a777pilot said:
I have been calling for this country to have a minimum of 1,000 nuclear power plants. At least 10% of the should be portable. This power plant should be fueled with thorium.

With this additional energy, hydrogen in large quantities could be produced for most in cities transportation. Beside that, with these 1,000 nuclear power plants we could realize a country where not one watt of electrical power is produced with fossil fuels.
Click to expand...

What is happening to our world? I .... agree with a777pilot.
 
p.s., Another nice little benefit of using thorium, besides the fact that thorium reactors are cheaper and safer than uranium ones, is the spent fuel cannot be used to make nuclear weapons.
 
techs said:
Finally some common sense thinking. A thousand points of light!

And its quite possible that despite not having the engineers to run the few we have we could easily train the unemployed to operate them. Cab drivers could be in charge of the portable ones and McDonalds employees could be a double shift by refueling the nuke plants.
Click to expand...


Could it be the fact that we stopped investing in nuclear power plants that caused people to think that going into that line of work might not be such a good idea?
 
I think we need a two prong approach to our future energy needs. For the short term, thorium fission reactors would probably be the best bet, but we need to put a concerted effort into making controllable fusion a reality.
 
I think lots of nuclear-powered power plants are fine...as long as they only use power from one big nuclear reactor...



😀

The keys to using entirely sustainable energy are going to be:

  1. Continued deployment of solar and wind.
  2. A smart grid that can take power from as well as deliver power to any residence.
  3. Continued development of batteries.

Lithium-air batteries have an energy density similar to gasoline. This means electric cars (and also things like electric airplanes) will have the same "tank capacity" as their gas-powered counterparts. And although filling the "tank" will take longer, it will be cheaper to fill up. The smart grid connection will allow plugged-in cars to send power out at times of high demand, balancing the grid and paying their owners money for just leaving them sitting there!
 
Nuclear can be possible future power source. However I really believe that the NRC and the nuclear industry needs to be overhauled. Realistically I don't believe the power companies that run the nuclear plants in the US have safety as there number one interest. For me I really question to competency of the people running the plants. The fiasco near me with the San Onofre plant. They completely missed the effects of the new turbines they installed on the heat transfer tubes. The tubes where rubbing against each other and starting to fail after only a couple of years. To me this in inexcusable. What really gets me is out of all of this the rate-payers are picking up the tag for this mess that Southern California Edison created. Nuclear plants can be run and designed to be very safe. I just don't trust the people in charge of running the plants and I don't trust the NRC to have proper oversight.

All that being said. The first thing we need is a really revamped grid. The grid is the critical piece when you have large scale renewable energy. Usually good areas for renewable energy are far away from the consumers of electricity. You have to have a robust grid to deliver that energy.
 
(sic)Klown12 said:
I think we need a two prong approach to our future energy needs. For the short term, thorium fission reactors would probably be the best bet, but we need to put a concerted effort into making controllable fusion a reality.
Click to expand...
MagnusTheBrewer said:
Why? I think there is room and a place for many types of power sources.
Click to expand...

Michio Kaku also touches on this question in his book "Physics of the Future"

He notes that in about 10 years Solar and Hydrogen will be the same cost as petroleum based fuels because Solar and Hydrogen are going down in costs while petroleum is trending up.

He also mentions ITER. A nuclear fusion research project in France that is being funded by Russia, Japan, South Korea, India, China and the U.S. as well the E.U.

If nuclear fission is part of the future it'll most likely be transitory as it takes a long time to build a reactor and buy the time nuclear new reactors are brought online advances may have made Solar and Hydrogen better options.

If new fission Reactors are built they should be Thorium or another fuel process that is less risky than uranium.

Michio Kaku talking about energy here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_B-2tklDQw&feature=player_embedded#!

He starts talking about future energy sources at about the 9 minutes into the video.
 
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