J. Clarke wrote:
| On Sun, 18 Feb 2007 10:58:06 -0600, "Morris Dovey"
| wrote:
|
|| Prometheus wrote:
||| On Sat, 17 Feb 2007 07:28:00 -0600, "Morris Dovey"
||| wrote:
|||
|||| Ultimately, we'll need to move beyond fueled technologies
|||| altogether. The path from where we are to there appears to me to
|||| be bumpy and uphill - and our largest challenge appears to be
|||| that of preparing our offspring to make that journey and produce
|||| sound decisions en route. My biggest worry is that we're not
|||| meeting that challenge.
|||
||| I don't know that that is accurate- even with your projects, the
||| sun is used as fuel. Can't get something from nothing, but some
||| things are free, while others are not.
||
|| Yes, the sun consumes fuel - let's get past that. It consumes it's
|| fuel and will continue to do so no matter what. It was doing so
|| before humans appeared on the scene and will probably still be
|| doing so long after we're gone.
||
|| The practical difference is that the fuel cost of solar radiation
|| is nil; and that the supply is (for practical purposes)
|| inexhaustable. The energy delivered is limited to roughly a
|| kilowatt per square meter over half of the planet's surface at a
|| time.
|
| The fuel cost of fusion in a terrestrial power plant should also be
| nil or close to it. So why do you want to push solar instead of
| continuing to work on fusion?
You're being a bit free with your assumptions. Get in contact with
Greenough at PPPL and ask him who the person was with no project
connection who pushed him hardest for progress _NOW_ (starting in '76)
on Princeton's tokamak. If he hadn't a really good sense of humor (and
been a very gentle kind of person) I'd probably be missing teeth.
I asked what it'd take to expidite commercialization and was told that
it'd take on the order of a billion and a half (1976) dollars; and
that PU couldn't find it. /I/ certainly didn't have it; so all I could
do was beg the guys to work faster and smarter with what they did
have. When the first toroid was built, they invited me to stop by and
have a look see. (To imagine the magnetic pinch bottle and the
annhilation of atoms produced in an object that size inspired real
awe.)
I never saw the finished reactor. I understand it was assembled and
run at Tom's River for ten years or so before being dismantled. When I
saw that announcement I called one of the engineers and asked him to
say "Hi" to the guys I'd known and tell them that they'd dazzled the
hell out of me. BTW, there's a guy who worked on the project after I
left the east coast who lurks here on the wreck and can certainly
provide better info than I.
Fuel for the tokamak (if I understand it's operation properly) is
tritium (as in heavy heavy water) - not something one can order up in
bulk from any existing source. If you can supply the tritium and the
construction money, I think the guys with the real-world experience
(not to mention myself!) would probably be pretty happy to help make
it happen...
|| We can expect that at some point, we'll have exhausted the
|| planetary supplies of petroleum, coal, natural gas, and uranium.
|
| And by that time we should have fusion reactors online.
Eh? They should be online _now_! We just have more "important" things
to spend the money on.
|| Long before
|| they're gone, their prices will increase to the level where
|| ordinary folks won't be able to afford to buy either the commodity
|| or the energy produced from it.
|
| And when that point is reached, then it will become economically
| viable to use some other source. But until that happens a crash
| program to go to some alternate energy source will _increase_ the
| cost to those consumers, not _decrease_ it.
Hmm. Other than the wild (but usually silent) enthusiasm for fusion to
which I just confessed, who's advocating a crash program to go to some
alternate energy source? Not I - nor has anyone else I've read here.
|| I'm _not_ an advocate of converting everything to solar for the
|| simple reason that it isn't the best source of energy for all
|| applications. All energy sources have their own unique set of
|| advantages and disadvantages; and I've found it interesting to
|| search for applications and problems that match up with the
|| particular advantages and disadvantages of low-to-moderate
|| temperature (100F-1000F) solar heating.
||
|| What I'm doing has nothing intentional to do with global
|| warming/cooling. It has to do with finding more cost-effective
|| ways of doing things already being done with other technologies. I
|| see economic and social benefit in significantly reducing heating
|| costs, in pumping liquids, and providing refrigeration with simple
|| (few or no moving parts) devices and using freely available energy.
|
| Well, all of this is nice if you can make reliable equipment to do
| those things with operating and maintenance costs and initial
| purchase price low enough that the average person can afford them.
| But even if the lifecycle cost of a solar house is less than a
| conventional one, if the up front purchase price is twice as high
| then many people just plain can't dig up that much money at one go.
| The fuel cost is not the only cost.
Well then - by your criteria all this is pretty nice indeed. You may
surprised to learn that the up-front construction cost /can/ be
considerably lower. Whether or not that translates into a lower
_purchase_ price is a different matter entirely.
The up-front purchase price for solar equipment is all over the place.
If you want to hammer /me/ on this one, you'd better look up panel
prices at my web site and do some comparisons with similar products
from elsewhere. This isn't a subject I feel I should be discussing in
a newsgroup (but I'm tempted.)
I'm not sure how too say this as gently as I'd like; but your comments
indicate that you have considerable catch-up reading to do.
--
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto