Do we REALLY have an energy crisiss ?

[PJ]

Travel there at night to do maintenance? ;-)

[dennis]

Rock is a poor conductor of heat. You drill down to a few hundred feet of the magma and start extracting the heat and it cools rapidly. You need some method of exposing a large amount of hot rock so you can extract the heat.

It was suggested that dropping nuclear bombs down the hole would fracture enough rock to make it useable. Its a bit of a long term project as you have to wait a few decades before you can pump water down.

Fusion is the answer if it works.

I suppose that the west could kill off Africa and convert its entire output to bio fuels so we had a sustainable bio fuel economy as an easier alternative.

[dennis]

Which target?

We don't have the land mass to grow enough fuel to even run the cars so bio fuel doesn't work if everyone tries to do it.

All the "alternative" energy sources quoted are not sources at all.. just different transport mechanisms each of which wastes energy and makes global warming worse unless the source of the energy is carbon negative i.e. nuclear, hydroelectric at the moment (I challenge anyone to prove that wind is even carbon neutral in actual power plants in operation).

[dennis]

It has competition though.. we export and import the stuff already.. its called wind.

[dennis]

I agree.. Sizewell B could melt down in minutes.. an AGR will run for days without coolant before anything happens. PWRs are a by product of the defence industry and are not a good design from a safety angle.

An AGR is more like a ground heat source than a bomb unlike PWRs.

[Dave Fawthrop]

|!>> If we had long enough pipes we could export our warmth to somewhere in |!>> the southern hemisphere during their winter, and vice versa. |!>

|!> :-) |!>

|!> I like that idea! |! |!It has competition though.. we export and import the stuff already.. its |!called wind.

Doesn't work very well :-( The doldrums round the equator, more or less, separate the world into two sections north and south.

[Owain]

Go to bed and sleep like the Good Lord intended.

Owain

[The Natural Philosopher]

Bioseaweaed springs to mind then..a genetecially engineered kelp that produces straight diesel when pressed and lives free in the ocean :-):-)

Yup. Some wind, some bio, some wave, some sunlight, but mostly lots of nuclear is the PRACTICAL way to go.

If the pollution standards for conventional power was anything LIKE as stringent as nuclear, it would be priced out of the market completely.

What pollutant threatens life on earth totally, will take millions of years to make safe, and is being produced in vast quantities?

NOT radiactive isotopes. Carbon dioxide.

>

[Huge]

And a lot of conservation. Stop wasting the damn stuff!

[Stuart Noble]

Question from a primary school kid during half term. "Why can't we build solar panels in the Sahara so that the people there could shelter under them, and we could buy the electricity?". I think the concept is already being explored, but the idea of people living under them is interesting.

[Dorothy Bradbury]

I very much doubt it is.

- Air is not a very dense fluid - increasing turbine size gets disproportionately expensive in cost & carbon usage.

- Water is a far more dense fluid - but the same applies.

Many land turbines are not producing the energy envisaged.

Likewise the "eco" cars proposed so far consume more carbon in their manufacture, design, R&D, fuel production & transport than they will save during their operational life.

Nuclear, even if outsourced to France, remains the best option. The Dutch have very high redundancy nuclear plant designs.

We do not have enough land mass for our alcohol fuel needs, but the USA & rest of world does - perhaps enough to export. Alcohol solutions are viable long before $200/b oil; Brazil.

[Dorothy Bradbury]

Electrical solar panels are still too inefficient (& expensive).

However it is possible to use solar energy via reflectors to heat sodium/water to power turbines & gensets. Not quite as simple as it sounds either in design or cost, but Australia has a big pilot. I think the Australia version uses light pipes so can cover a much greater area more economically & without having to track the sun.

However the output varies during the day - and night :-) *blink blink*

[dennis]

There is plenty of wind in the doldrums.. it just doesn't blow the sails the right way.

[David Hansen]

On Fri, 16 Feb 2007 15:17:36 GMT someone who may be "Dorothy Bradbury" wrote this:-

Those who assert this could get hold of the reference outlined in

and point out the flaws. It is reference 4.

Correct.

Incorrect. Increasing turbine size is one of the reasons that the cost per output power has been going down for decades. "Winds at 60m are around 4% higher then winds at 45m. This corresponds to around

7% more energy."

The larger the turbines then, for a given farm output, the smaller the number of turbines. This reduces foundation costs, transport costs, electrical costs and operational costs.

Annex B, which is where the bit I quoted comes from.

Source?

[Stuart Noble]

I guess they'd be more efficient if they tracked the sun, and apparently there's a cheap way to do that with led sensors

At some point there has to be a leap of faith in the hope that technology will evolve once the thing gets going. Bottom line economics isn't going to work.

[Paul Herber]

how well would solar panels survive a few erosion years by sandstorms?

[Owain]

Oh great ... Seaweed Wars :-)

Owain

[Stuart Noble]

I imagine the answer to that must already be out there somewhere.

[The Natural Philosopher]

yes,..I forgot that..

[The Natural Philosopher]

Its a good one.