An Answer To Our Energy Crisis?
 

The Electro Kinetic Road Ramp
YouTube Vid on the Ramp

...Well... wow. This could actually work well. There's already electrical lines, telephone lines, sewer systems and whatever else running along houses - if batteries are used to store the power generated, they could potentially be sitting on a solution to energy problems world wide. Apparently these things release no emissions, have few moving parts so are easy to maintain and are cost effective.

If this works as well as it does it is awesome and amazing. Just so I have a frame of reference, about how much is 10kW?

Also, I can't wait to see what excuse we as a nation come up with to not implement them.

I used to lie awake and wonder when someone with the technical know-how would put together an effective vehicle-based energy-generating system. I honestly had to wonder why no one had yet.

Then someone did, and I feel better about everything now. Mr. President should be eating this up like delicious cake ASAP.

This is not anywhere remotely close to a solution to any energy problem whatsoever. Well its a nice way to not waste energy but its not an energy production technology. The biggest most obvious staring you in the face problem is that cars don't go without some sort of energy source of their own. This being a relatively inefficient use of the energy of the car any attempt to power a car from it would leave you coasting to a stop pretty darn quick.The ramp is supposed to produce 5-10 kilowatts of electricity but no one mentions over what period of time. Even if it produced 10 kW every second for 24 hours that is only 240 kilowatt hours. You'd probably be lucky to get 10 effective hours of generation at full power. This brings us to the second point which is that 100kWh is a whole honking lot less than barely any power in the scheme of things even 1000 kWh is just barely barely any power in the scheme of things. The US alone uses about 3.9 TRILLION kilowatt hours of electricity a year. The US produces about 4 TRILLION kWh a year of electricity.

We're talking at least 4 million of these and then we still have that car problem. Not to mention it would be nearly impossible to implement a stable electric grid with these things. There would be no real way to guarantee the baseload let alone the intermediate or peak loads. The reserve is totally out of the question. All other considerations aside the complexity of running a stable electrical grid prohibits the use of one type of power generation.

I think we could fit 4 million of them, and it's at least a step in the right direction, but I don't think anyone is seriously considering replacing entire grids to rely on these things, that's just a fanciful thought right now. Supplimental energy is nice, though.

And I don't think they wanted to power the CAR from it, that's an even worse idea.

1) 4 million is a giant number. Given the relatively small number of areas where these plates would be feasible it is impossible. Just for reference these plates basically replace speed bumps and would basically have to be driven over once every couple of minutes at least 10 hours a day to come even close to 100 kWh in a day. I doubt we have 4 million places that need speed bumps much less 4 million places that need speed bumps that get traffic that heavy 10 hours a day. The actual number might be closer to 10,20 or even 40 million.

2) The title of the thread is "An Answer To Our Energy Crisis?" which it clearly isn't

3) Any energy solution would involve the replacement of fossil for the movement of cars. The best solution is of course batteries and electric motors. If a significant amount of power were coming from electrics running over these plates to generate electric power we would have a big problem.

Edit: Damn it and being so late my number was off. Its closer to 4 hundred thousand or a little less depending with less than peak production. That's still a ridiculously huge number.

You said it doesn't say how much it takes to create 10kW. It creates that much energy every time a car drives over it. That's what the article says. So, every single time a car drives over it you get 10kW, which adds up pretty fast.

The whole thing about cars still needing power and whatnot... Yes, they do, but that power is going to be spent regardless, so maybe we could have the power already being spent also go to creating some energy as well.

Yes, the thread title is a misnomer. However, just because it isn't, "Hey! Never have to use any fuel source again ever!" doesn't mean you should just dismiss it. I mean, with that logic... Wind power doesn't power everything. Fuck that. Solar power doesn't power everything. Fuck that. Etc. Etc. Guess we better keep using the hell outta gas since the other energy sources only lessen how much we'd need to use gas and don't replace it completely yet.

The kilowatt is not, I repeat NOT, a unit of energy. It is a unit of power which is the rate at which energy is produced. 10 kW for 10 seconds is about .0277 kWh. The kWh actually being a unit of energy.

Except the energy being used to move the car is already being used to move the car and could be much more efficiently and consistently reused by regenerative breaking. It also prevents this from ever being a solution to any energy crisis.

Except that you can easily get 20% of your power from wind alone. Heck if you really wanted to there is enough wind power in the US to meet at least 4 times our electricity demand. World Wide there is enough wind power to meet the World's electricity demand at least 9 times over. Not sure of the scale of solar but I'd guess its similar. Any purposed solution to be taken seriously has to at least break 10% and this clearly can't.

Don't forget this may not be cost effective.

Let's see. Saying an average price for electricity per kWh is 12 cents USD, and it generates the stated maximum possible power of 10kW for ten hours a day. Exchange rate gives a cost per ramp of about $35,000.

So generating a total of 100kWh a day, which is being extremely generous, it will have paid for itself in eight years.

Not too shabby actually. But, this is extremely optimistic and ignores maintenance costs. Just how long do the ramps last before needing to be replaced anyway? There's not many high traffic areas you could put it in either seeing the thing's essentially a speed bump.

Basically, the applications for it are pretty limited.

I admit I am not as knowledgeable as I would like to be on the subject, and apologize for arguing where I had no place. That said, I just looked up regenerative breaking and it seemed like it had only been done with trains. Is it something that could be done with cars, and would doing that exclude the possibility of doing this as well?

I don't think this is necessarily a solution to all of our problems, but I definitely agree in that I think its a step in the right direction, which is the most important part to me. I mean, it may not generate enough power to light up a whole city just yet, but we need a starting point. This sort of technology will probably be refined in the future if it works out well enough and seemingly has potential.

And I don't think there is any ultimate form of energy that can be used as our answers to everything just yet, but if we can combine technologies to economize in the meantime, well, what's wrong with that?

Its done with at least a few hybrids I believe and is basically useful only for electric cars. While the two systems don't exactly preclude each other the ramps are meant to be placed where cars would be slowing down anyway so as to not rob the cars of energy it needs to keep moving and cost the driver gas. This is basically reclaiming energy that would be used for breaking. Since regenerative breaking already does that more efficiently and consistently this system would in effect steal energy from any car with regenerative breaks.

This will never even be close to economical on a city sized scale. Further, any money spent trying and inevitably failing is money better spent doing something that would actually work. You don't have to build and test things like this to tell they aren't going to work on a meaningful scale. It is pretty clear it wont simply by considering where its getting its energy from and all the problems that come from that.

But as you said, they'd be slowing down regardless, wouldn't they?

They'd be slowing down already and that energy would be going into the batteries in the car to be used later by them to drive the car. The ramp would instead get a portion of that energy to power the city which would then not end up in the driver's batteries to power his car. Considering the driver already purchased that energy for his personal use and has implemented measures to recover it taking it is tantamount to stealing.

How would the ramp get a portion of the energy? I'm afraid I don't understand how the ramp is stealing the energy. My understanding of it was that the ramp gets the energy from the force of the car going over it or some such and the energy for the battery was a separate thing.

It basic conservation of energy. Energy does not pop out of nowhere or disappear into nowhere. Regenerative breaking works by converting the cars forward movement into electrical energy thereby slowing the car down. The ramp works by converting the cars forward movement into electrical energy and thereby slowing the car down. Its a little more complex in the case of the ramp but the net effect is that the car loses forward speed by going over it. Now the driver only wants to slow down so much and will get so much energy from regenerative breaking if he uses his breaks to slow down that much. However, if the ramp then slows him down further he now has to speed up, using energy, to get back to the speed he wanted. Alternatively, seeing the ramp and knowing it will slow him down the driver engages his regenerative breaks for a shorter period of time regaining less of the energy for his use with the rest going into the ramp.

Speed Bumps will do that anyway, won't they?

Frost heaves? Head in the clouds is nice but a practical foot firmly placed is also a plus.

There's a hydraulic form of regenerative braking that Ford's incorporated into a series of concept trucks too.

They're saying it reduces fuel use by 25-30% in stop and start conditions, such as travel through a city.

While it wouldn't be as effective in a car because of the lower vehicle weight, it could still be worthwhile seeing it would be compatible with non-electric cars.

It sounds like the energy is taken from the weight of the car passing over it moving a series of plates. Speed should not play a role in this; even if you came to a dead stop on one then resumed driving it sounds like it would generate the same amount of energy as if you passed over it at the maximum allowable speed.

I see no reason why this and regenerative braking should be mutually exclusive. Put together, they're enough to save a decent amount of energy.

A force is not a source of energy at least not in that way. In this case the car rides up a slight incline in while pushing it down. The moving up the incline itself takes some kinetic energy from the car which it would normally get back from going back down the other side. The only problem is that the incline falls while the car is on it and steals the energy. Also, the design of the ramp redirects some of the forward force of the car downward in order to power the generator resulting in gaining more energy than just the energy the car used to climb the incline. Of course this all comes back to conservation of energy. If the weight of a car, or anything else was a source or electricity, we would just pile something big and heavy on a generator and solve our energy crisis.

This thing would literally steal from anyone using regenerative breaking and isn't really that big of a source of energy.

Speed bumps don't really slow a car down. That is unless you go over them to fast and scrape the belly of your car or worse. The car does slow down as the wheels go up one side but then it gets all that back, well 99% of that back, when it rolls down the other side. This ramp if it wanted to produce 10 kW for 10 seconds from a 1.5 ton car passing over it would need to slow the car down by 27mph. So if the car was going 30mph it would be going 3mph after crossing the ramp. With a speed bump you'd be hard pressed to measure the difference in speed. (Note that value is only .0277 kWh which is basically nothing in terms of electrical demand.)

When I hit a speed bump, no matter what speed I'm going, I'm not going anywhere near that speed when I come off it. You certainly know your stuff and have a greater understanding of this subject matter then I do, but I'm not going to accept that 'speed bumps don't really slow a car down' when over a decade of driving over them tells me otherwise, sorry.

There's also the fact that you generally have to slow down anyway to avoid beating your car up.

It might not be speed bumps force your car to slow down but they certainly do force you to make your car go slower, for the most part.

On the OP; seems like some tech with the right idea but we just don't have the kind of capabilities for it to be effective, in cost as well as others.

Certainly the shocks in your car eat up some of the energy of going over a speed bump but not much and you could reclaim that too. I've been driving just under a decade and I've never really experienced a significant speed reduction from a speed bump. (Any significant decrease in speed was probably because you let off the accelerator and was more due to friction in the various parts of the car than the bump itself.) Certainly nothing in the range of 27 mph. Lets assume that a 1.5 ton car loses 5 mph going over a speed bump. (Which from my experience is very high.) That's about .000944 kWh worth of energy. If we then size the ramp to take this much energy and assume 90% (which is very high) efficiency of conversion to electricity that is .000850 kWh of electricity per car.

If we assume 1 car every second for 10 hours each day (36000 cars a day going over it) that is 31 kWh of electricity per day. That is 11,000 kWh hours a year. That's about 350,000 of them to power the US and there is no way we have 350,000 places that gets that much traffic, and needs a speed bump. If we assume a car every 5 seconds for 10 hours (7,200 cars) we'd need about 1.8 million. A car every 10 seconds (3,600 cars) means 3.5 million. In reality we'd be lucky to find places that need speed bumps that saw 500 or 600 cars a day which is basically .5 kWh per day or 186kWh a year which means we'd need roughly 21 million of them.

In reality to keep them more in line with the speed bumps you would have to limit them to 1mph or less of speed decrease and hope someone doesn't start reclaiming the energy lost through the shocks.

Already addressed that and how there are much better ways to get that energy back.

Its just not physically possible to get any sizable amount of power from this system.

In my experience speed bumps slow you down else you're in a large vehicle (SUV) and can just ignore it or you'll be pulling out your wallet to pay the mechanic for new shocks much sooner than is actually necessary.

Pity, that money you could have saved could have been invested in these electro-kinetic-whatchama ramps.

Doesn't really seem like a bad idea to me, for intensely high traffic areas like bridges or something. It would even be neat if they could be designed to turn on and off based on traffic density. Of course that'd just make them more complicated and thus more expensive. But an answer to our energy crisis? No, I don't think so.

Okay, so looking at the video, it strikes me that the speed at which a car hits it is much less of an issue than enough cars doing so at a reasonable interval to keep it spinning underneath. This is NOT a speed bump. They even say the point is to keep the ride as smooth as possible for the people going over this thing.

In fact, the unit in the video is specifically stated to be for low-speed use.

Looking at that, there isn't a parking lot in the world this thing couldn't be installed in multiple times over, or designated turn lanes, roundabouts, or bicycle lanes. Anywhere that has a low speed limit would be fair game.

Will it solve our energy needs? Likely not. But at least it can give us a bit of power back to no real detriment to the shocks of our cars or the speed that's posted.

Read what I posted. These things get energy by slowing the car down and therefore would only be placed in places where the cars should be slowing down. Most of those places are places where we put speed bumps but you could kind of put them at some slower intersections. Further, the use of these to reduce the speed of a car that has regenerative breaking is basically stealing.

Aside from that the actual amount of energy than can harvest is less the microscopic unless you want to very significantly slow the cars that pass over them. For example if we limited them to slowing cars down by 5 mph and wanted only 10% of our electricity to come from them we would still probably need over 2 million just in the US alone. If we limited them to a much more realistic speed decrease of 1 mph and still wanted 10% of our electricity we would need 10 million of them. Anything less than 10% is so insignificant as to not be worth even discussing. We can easily get that with moderate efficiency changes which would be much cheaper for everyone.

Knowing my limits, I'm simply going to ask. If one were driving let's say 25 mph and came to a halt at an intersection, and had the reflexive brakes previously mentioned, how much energy would the action of coming to a halt at said intersection normally provide? And beyond that, how much energy would actually be stolen if one of those devices were located at said intersection? I'm just wondering if this theft is the equivalent of losing a bit of water say by pouring it into too shallow a container and having some splash out over the sides.

Beyond that, while this wouldn't be a power source capable of running a stable power grid, when we do shift to alternative fuel sources such as batteries, etc, for vehicles, wouldn't it in theory be possible to use these ramps as a way of charging said batteries? Again, limited knowledge in my question, but couldn't a city or organization that has a fleet of cars store said power and then use it to recharge their vehicles as necessary with any excess diverted as a donation?

Before I go onto the energy bit its important to know that it is basically impossible to use one of these to slow a car a significant amount. Assuming, generously, that the ramp is 9ft long and the car is decelerated evenly the whole way bring to a stop from 25 mph means a negative acceleration of 4.64 g. If we assume that we want to limit the acceleration to .1 g then you can slow a car from 3.67 mph to 0 mph in 9 ft. Alternatively you can slow a car from 25 mph to about 0 mph in 414 ft using 46 of the ramps. I figure .1 g is about what you could do comfortably. A 100 pound passenger would feel a 10 pound forward force and a 200 pound passenger would feel a 20 pound forward force. Even that might be a bit unsettling.

So we know you could never hope to realistically convert much more than to be safe lets say about 3 mph worth of kinetic energy into electricity. If we assume a 1.5 ton car to be about average that translates to about .000340 kWh per car. Assuming a semi realistic, but probably high, 70% conversion to electricity (the joints in the ramp, the transfer of the energy to a fly wheel and then to a generator, and energy lost in the shocks of the car, being most of the losses) that's .000238 kWh of electricity per car. Here were I live we spend about 12 cents per kWh so that's about .0028 cents, or just under 3 thousandths of a cent, worth of electricity. That means it would take about 1000 cars to get one cent worth of electricity.

The regenerative breaking system of a car can be designed so that there are very few moving parts between the wheels and generator. They could theoretically eventually become around 80% efficient. Further the regenerative breaks can easily act over the entire 25 mph slow down. So the regenerative breaking system would recover more of the energy over a greater speed range. Technically speaking the amount stolen from the driver is minuscule but people can be touchy. Aside from that its not really worth it in terms of the amount of energy you get. It would take forever just to pay for itself and you couldn't power much with it. The time, effort, and money would be much better spent installing small solar/wind systems and increasing energy efficiency.

Damn, wish I'd been paying attention earlier.

Isn't the problem with wind and solar power the fact you have to build tons of windmills and solar panels to collect said energy? I've kinda figured those two options are nice in certain areas on a small scale, but on a larger scale you run into power-to-land-occupied (basically to get a decent amount of power, you would need a ton of land/whatever to build a sufficient amount of solar panels or windmills) or problems and then fights start with other groups over the consequences of building these things (Apparently the windmills have a bad habit of butchering birds and bats, and the main areas they'd be built are major migratory routes - can't remember where I saw that tidbit).

Personally, I'm in favor of nuclear fission and fusion (assuming if the government will back it enough to get it developed sooner than the standard 50yrs+ answer we keep getting) power plants, along with hydrogen fuel cells and other gas-electric hybrids for vehicles.

Land Use:
Wind
Wind land use is nowhere near what people make it out to be. It used to be a problem with the older and smaller turbines that where first put up in California. The blades moved faster and so you had issues with throwing ice. They also had large truss support towers that look sort of like the Eiffel tower which take up a lot of space. (They have other draw backs which will be addressed later.) What's even worse is that they were set up basically shoulder to shoulder to the point where the blades almost overlapped and all facing into the prevailing wind. That and they are relatively short. The combination of these factors made them very inefficient uses of land. Not to mention the best wind potential is like 50 miles offshore anyway.

Modern wind turbines are giant and set on single poles with no support structure. They take maybe half an acre or so of land for the actual pole and a little more for the access road to get to it. Their size also means the blades spin much slower. Further they are designed in combination with this slower speed so that they only shed ice straight downward when a blade reaches the bottom. No more chucking dangerous pieces of ice. Not to mention the turbines are now hundreds of feet in the air. The net effect is that you can farm and graze animals all the way up to basically the pole of a modern wind turbine. When you add it all up Natural Gas plants use 3.7 acres of land per MW, Nuclear uses 2-3 acres per MW, and modern Wind power comes in at 3 acres per MW. So in reality there is no problem at all.

Solar
The main potential of solar power lies in intermediate size solar systems. We're talking putting solar panels mainly over parking lots. For comparison, with current solar technology if we covered 10% of the land that we have already paved (US only) in solar cells we could meet 100% of the nation's energy demand. This also translates to about 1/3 of the land currently used for military basis. Both figures count only used land area that is in the physically connect 48 states. This is land that has already been more or less destroyed in terms of Nature and can continue to be used by humans as we intended while also generating power. There is the added benefit to doing solar over parking lots in terms of Vehicle to Grid (V2G) technology when electric cars become more common. V2G technology is very promising in terms of smoothing out the power fluctuations that can sometimes happen with solar as well as improving the performance and reducing the operating cost of electric cars.

Note that there is still room for the efficiency of solar panels to double which would reduce the figure by half. Also note that no one wants to rely 100% on solar or wind. The current figures generally stated are around 20% from wind and around 30% from solar with the balance of the left over power made up for with other less mature renewable technologies (tidal, geothermal, biofuel, etc), efficiency, and conservation. There would probably still be some large solar plants put up in some places but nothing nearly as bad as what some people would have you believe. Additionally the areas will only shrink as the technology improves.

Bird Kill:
This is where those old support towers from the wind turbines come in. Birds tend to be rather good at avoiding moving objects and not so good at avoiding stationary ones. Generally speaking the turbine blades don't kill the birds. The problem with bird kills is basically exclusive to the California wind farms that were built with those Eiffel tower like support structures closely packed in a line. When a flock of birds try to fly through that some smack into the metal trusses and some are forced into the metal trusses by the birds next to them. This can be a big problem but has mostly been eliminated by several key changes:
1) Single pole construction greatly reduces the bird lethal bird strikes on the support structure.
2) Wind turbines are now huge and very very far apart. So far apart the squeezing effect isn't really an issue.
3) The wind potential in an area is now very accurately mapped and turbines are placed to optimize performance. They can also swivel 360 degrees and change the pitch of their blades to take full advantage of the wind to produce greater efficiency. Combined with larger size this means less turbines and giant wide open spaces between them.
4) Before anyone bothers to build a wind farm the check bird migration routes so as not to put them in the way in the first place.
5) The best wind is a good ways off the coast in basically any large body of water to begin with.

To really get a perspective on this you have to compare the number of bird kills via other human activities. Current wind farms kill about 2.6 birds per turbine per year and to get 20% of our current electricity demand we'd need 211,000 turbines which would kill about 550,000 birds a year. In contrast to that communications towers (cell, TV, radio etc) kill 4-5 million birds in a year. Pesticides and oil spills kill 67-76 million birds in a year. Vehicle collisions claim another 80 million birds every year. The buildings we live in work in are attributed with 78 million to 930 million total kills depending on various factors and who you ask. Finally, the number one undisputed champ is domestic house cats which kill about 450 million birds every year. So as you can see not only are wind farm bird kills a non-issue we could potentially cause a net decrease in the number of birds killed just by eliminating the need to ship and pipe oil.

Transportation:
Hydrogen fuel cells are just stupid plain and simple. You waste energy producing the hydrogen and storing it is nothing but a headache. Then when you get down to it hydrogen generally has lower power densities than batteries. Especially the newer batteries that are being made with nanotechnology. Batteries that are not only cheaper and safer than Lithium Ion but also so signs of ever increasing power densities, decreasing weights, and charge discharge rates that make capacitors look slow. Gas-electric hybrids only make sense sort term until we can get to true electric cars which aren't really that far away. We have all the technology more or less but not the will to use it probably. (Contrast this with Fusion where there are giant gaps in technology and even theoretical understanding.)

Fission
Fission is just not an option. For starters any energy solution as to be a global solution. The problem with fission is that once you have the ability to make fuel for a fission reactor you can make bomb grade material in the same facility and its basically impossible to tell which you are doing. This is even more so the case when you actually take steps to hide what you are doing. As such giving out fission technology isn't really a viable option. Incidentally, neither is building the fission plants and selling them the fuel. One of the by products is the production of Plutonium that can be used in a bomb. This can be separated from the spent fuel rods with simple chemical methods at sufficient purity to build a bomb. So even if we just gave away plants the countries that got them could still make bombs.

The other big issue is storage. We've got no where to put the waste and its going to be around for a long time and there is a lot of it. The shortest of the dangerous types has a half-life of 24,000 years, the next 213,000 years, after that 2.3 million years and then 15.7 million years. These numbers are worse than they seem because it can take many many half-lives before this stuff decays to non-lethal let alone non-damaging levels. As a sense of scale recorded history doesn't even stretch back 24,000 years. Then on top of all this there are the risks of accidents and attacks and it just really stops making sense as a method of energy production.

Fusion:
Fusion really does hold great promise. Problem is that it has been 20-50 years away now for about that long. Its not entirely a problem of funding either. Who knew that harnessing the power of a star and holding it in a metal tube would be so complex? It is immensely complex to the point that every time one problem is solved it produces several more. There are innovative solutions out there that could work in much shorter time scales but its akin to gambling. Why risk that fusion may not work in time, or ever, when we have proven technologies right now that can do the job for us more quickly and much cheaper. Once we get moved to renewable sources I'm all for pouring on the gas towards fusion. We just really need to get out of our current predicament first.

That in a very large nutshell is where we should be heading in the long run in terms of energy.

If that stuff about solar power is true, then why the hell haven't we done it?

Money, politics, NIMBYism, denial; take your pick.

Because fossil fuels are still cheaper in terms of the plants already existing for the most part and the fuel itself being easy to get. Generally speaking the energy sources that make up most of our supply cost about 3 to maybe 4 cents per kWh to produce and then get sold for 3 or 4 times that. Wind is at about 4 to 6 cents per kWh now which is why so many wind farms are starting to go up. Currently solar costs about 20 cents per kWh and most of that cost comes from converting the DC power of the panels into AC power that you can use. A small not even single home sized inverter (the power converting thing) can cost almost $2,000. You can overcome this by building parking lot sized and up solar power systems as well as getting better at mass producing the panels and the inverters themselves. The Department of Energy and the Utility industry as a whole expects that by 2020 solar power will be down to about 6-7 cents per kWh. In short, its purely about economics and not being motivated to make the change.

There is of course the massive misconceptions out there that have already come up in this thread. The continued propagation of which can at least in part be traced to propaganda and lobbing.

Only barrier I could see would be funding and working out who owns all the property.

Edit: Beaten to it with much better arguments

Thank you for clearing up my misconceptions actually. I'd rather be told I'm wrong about something, kinda helps in that there learning process.

I'll admit I was only thinking locally with Fission I mean, in terms of the large energy consumers worldwide: the US, China, India, Europe; already have the know-how to make reactors and bombs, and having us/them cut fossil fuel usage by building said reactors would have great impact until means to help the other nations with their energy problems arises.

As to the waste storage: How much waste does a reactor produce during its lifetime (what is that, 50yrs or so?) and how much of the world's nuclear waste is actually from other sources (weapons production, medical usage, etc.)? Sorry for pestering you with questions Sithdarth, but you seem to have the info and have done a pretty good job stating things in ways I can understand :D

Even locally it doesn't make sense. Nuclear power plants are horribly complex systems. Horribly complex systems are inherently unsafe. Worse yet the more safety features we add the greater the potential for failure. Some of the worst disasters were direct results of safety measures. Three Mile Island was caused by a stuck pressure relief value on the reactor itself. They had already been having trouble with it sticking so they put a sensor on it to indicate if it was open or closed. The thing is that one day the valve failed and stuck open and the sensor failed saying it was stuck closed. This caused an inappropriate response which came very close to a meltdown. No matter what you do things like that are going to happen and its a miracle it hasn't happened more often. Not to mention the costs of making a nuclear plant are increasing exponentially because of the safety features which aren't really doing all that much in terms of safety.

Just for reference if a nuclear plant does go in a worst case scenario event its going to probably kill more than 100 thousand people and ruin miles of land for a long time. When you loose coolant the fuel melts and the puddles at the bottom of the reactor. There it heats even more until it burns through the bottom of the reactor. It still doesn't stop there and is hot enough to actually melt through the concrete floor. The build up of the steam from this eventually causes a steam explosion that blows the containment dome apart and spreads radioactive material for miles as it gets blown by the wind. The funny part is that the radioactive cloud actually stays airborne for awhile and can end up coming down directly in the center of cities miles away that were originally thought to be safe.

Its just horribly irresponsible to keep using a technology that has already killed tens of thousands (Chernobyl) and will eventually kill many more. This is even more so when we have other energy sources that demonstrably work without the possibility of all those deaths. Its even more ridiculous that the main motivating factor is that currently nuclear power costs a little less so its perfectly ok to risk human life and ecological catastrophe. (This is very ironic considering all the hoopla about wind power bird deaths that is blown out of proportion and no where near as bad as a nuclear accident.) There simply is no logical reason to ever build a nuclear power plant. The land is basically useless forever (in human terms) once the plant it decommissioned. Tons (about 740,000 tons in the US) of depleted Uranium is just dumped or used for bullets essentially dumping it on other countries. The left over dirt from the mining of the Uranium in the first place is also dangerously radioactive and is also simply dumped somewhere. Nuclear also takes much longer to build and get operational than wind or intermediate size solar. Then there is the spent fuel problem.

Speaking of spent fuel:
Current reactors produce about 20 tons of spent fuel per year per reactor and we already have 59,000 tons stockpiled in cooling pools. There are currently 104 nuclear reactors operating in the US making 2080 tons of spent fuel a year. We'd need to increase that number by at least 3 if not 4 times to get the majority of our power from nuclear so that's 6000 to 8000 tons of spent fuel a year on top of the 59,000 tons we already have no where to put. Last I heard in February Yucca mountain was no longer under consideration as a dumping place. It turns out it was a pretty bad place to being with having once been an active volcano.

So now we have almost 60,000 tons of highly dangerous spent fuel (and more coming everyday) sitting in relatively non-secure, sometimes not very safe, and in most cases decades old cooling pools. Cooling pools that already tend to leak and if the water ever gets below a certain level the rest will basically boil off and even before that the radiation in the pool room would be deadly. After that it'll catch fire and burn loosing highly radioactive smoke into the air which would be carried by the wind most likely to populated areas. Its basically as bad as a meltdown in terms of contamination. Nuclear fission was just a bad idea to begin with and has only gotten worse with time.

Thanks for all that man. I guess I'll be changing my position on fission reactors then.


And on the lithium-ion batteries for electrics, I found this article somewhat amusing from the New York Times: In Bolivia, Untapped Bounty Meets Nationalism. If the indigenous people of Bolivia can screw over American mega-corps, I say let's go full steam ahead with this.

And heading back to fusion technology: Let's hope this group's crazy idea works...

Last I read, conservative estimates of bird kills by a world powered on bird-killing wind turbines would be much, much, much less than the slaughter we perform on nigh-immeasurable species all around the world on a daily basis. Hardly a great justification, but it puts it into perspective at least. What's another few million bird bodies among foundations?

If you want efficient solar energy production then stop thinking about putting them on a planetary surface. put them in orbit and have the collected power sent via microwave energy transmission, that way you cut out the atmospheric dilution and get far more energy from light, not to mention space is so goddamn big that you don't have to worry about owning large areas of property.

Also, if you want humanity to advance, fission energy is going to be necessary. Full stop. Saying that fission shouldn't be used because it could kill hundreds of people in a worst case scenario is like saying we shouldn't allow commerical flight because there is a worst case scenario of a plane being ripped apart over a city into ten thousand pieces of wreckage and every single piece hitting someone fatally. And the jet fuel landing on a tire factory and starting a poisonous rubber fire that spreads fumes over the whole state. Also, your description of a worst-case seems to be hinging on the plant crew having a gulag-enforced level of incompetence where instead of actually doing something to avert the crisis, they stand back and let it happen for fear of being blamed for making it worse. Actual reactors are designed with countless fall-backs and safeties so that if anything happens, it gets stopped early.

(The reason so many people died at chernobyl was - in addition to crippling incompetence - crowds gathering to watch the pretty light spewing out of the reactor on account of not knowing any better, by the way.)

Furthermore, while nuclear fuel refineries can be used to make weapons grade, the sheer level of enrichment is so different (scale of around 5% enriched for fuel against 95% for weapons grade, last I checked) that it's kind of obvious if someone's making weapons-grade if you actually check instead of doing the honor system.

Lastly, the US has such bad numbers because people have been protesting any development in the field, which means we're kind of stuck at 70's level technology. if you want to see the numbers of an actual Modern Nuclear powered country, look at France.

As if solar power wasn't expensive already, let's put our panels in space. Enough panels to power 20-30% of the globe that way?

Don't get me wrong, it's actually something I would be willing to pay towards (better than half the other things my taxes go to), and it forces improvements on the efficiencies of getting things into orbit, but it is a very obvious criticism.

planet-based collectors spend half of their time doing nothing because of day/night cycle, whereas an orbital collector has no such downtime. planetary collectors have to worry about damage from wind/storms/sand, whereas orbital collectors only have to worry about the occasional micrometeor. lastly, getting any significant amount of power by planetary collector takes what, hundreds of square miles? that's nothing in space, but on a planet there's always going to be someone inconvenienced by it, especially if its in a place where you can easily maintain and repair it (because of the aforementioned storm damage).

I am aware of the many benefits of an orbital or space-based solar panel, however, the criticism still applies in full force.

Edit: And as an additional, if we did have large "farms" of solar panels spreading out in orbit, the fact that we also have massive amounts of space junk there could pose a problem of damaging said delicate panels, thus drastically reducing their effectiveness and, worse, costing more millions or billions of dollars.

putting stuff in space is expensive, true, but nothing says they have to be made on earth. one proposition was to build a factory on the moon and manufacture them there from lunar materials, where the cost of getting them into the proper orbit is roughly 100 times cheaper. as for space junk, well, space is big. Its not like you look out the window and see junk floating around, you can look around all you want and not find anything because Earth's orbital zones are huge. even with all the space junk out there, its chances of hitting anything are like trying to hit a bullseye on a dartboard from the other side of the house. even if junk IS inbound on a solar collector, all we have to do is what modern space stations do, namely just move out of the way temporarily.

Why go through the trouble we've got more than enough land down here to do it just fine without ever having to touch new line. Its down right idiotic to put the things in space when its absolutely not necessary in any way. Not to mention the limit of solar panel efficiency is not the atmosphere but the physics of the solar panel itself. Contrary to popular belief even the cloudiest places in the US can do more than enough solar to make it worth while. The sunniest parts of Germany or less sunny than the cloudiest parts of the lower 48 here in the US and Germany gets significant amounts of its power from solar. So again space is not where we should be putting solar panels.

Fission is absolutely unequivocally not needed in anyway for the advancement of humanity. We have more than enough wind and solar many times over to do everything we would ever need. This is especially true if we pay just a little bit more attention to energy efficiency. The worst case scenario isn't all that unlikely really. Especially as the complexity of the systems increase. All those wonderful safety measures increase the complexity and the cost of the plants. They also make it much harder to understand exactly what is going on. Three Mile Island happened because well trained and fully competent people responded exactly as they should have to the data they were getting from the safety system. It just so happens the safety system was the problem and that potential is never going to go away.

Further, the worse case scenario is nothing like banning commercial flights because they could crash. Its like banning commercial flights in planes that could crash in favor of using planes that are scientifically proven to not crash. Its not a hard concept to grasp. You have two energy systems one of which could potentially kill hundreds of thousands and the other can't even if you tried. Both share basically the same benefits and can give us the same amount of power. Its stupid beyond comprehension to go with the one that could potentially kill hundreds of thousands no matter how unlikely vs the one that could never kill anyone. The stupidity increases exponentially when you add in every other problem that comes with nuclear energy.

Its actually not obvious at all. All the equipment is exactly the same and is used in exactly the same way. You cannot tell even with the closest inspection what is actually being done at the facility. You'd have to get a sample of the weapons grade material coming from the facility which the government doing the refining can easily keep you from doing. It would take a great deal of international cooperation to get to a point where we could be reasonably sure that we could actually get a first hand sample and not just what was passed on to us. There is also the fact that the newer refining technologies can be hidden very well. So once we give them the technology they build a show plant to produce fuel and then a hidden one that we can't find or test to produce weapons. It is simply not worth the risk for a fuel source we don't even need.

They've done better but all the problems are still there and its still a really bad idea for every reason I have given. The chance of failure still exists, the spread of nuclear weapons still exists, the waste disposal problem still exists, the mining waste problem still exists. Face it nuclear fission isn't a good idea. It wasn't a good idea in the 50s either but the US was so concerned about the image of nuclear power because they dropped the bombs on Japan that they pushed it into production even when it was clear there were major drawbacks.

The damage solar cells receive on the ground is no where near what they would be subjected to in space. There would be extreme cycles in temperature as the panels cycled from the day to the night side that requires very expensive and special panels to cope with. There are also large temperature gradients between the front and the back of the panels. Then there are cosmic rays, the solar wind, micrometeorites, and space junk. The increased UV alone is going to play hell with the cells. It takes very special very expensive cells to survive long in space.

We have plenty of space on earth to build these things. Like is said there is more than enough already paved area in terms of parking lots to meet our solar needs. There is 19,000 square kilometers of parking lots in the lower 48 and if we covered it all with solar panels we'd have 160% of our current electricity demand. The cool thing is that shading the parking lots with solar panels are actually better for the people that park there. Its also better for the environment because you keep the ran from running off the pavement and picking up the various oil derivatives that went into making the pavement. Not to mention there is basically no inconvenience in terms of repair. Now I don't know what's going on in your head but its thousands of times less convenient to have to repair something that's in orbit than something that's on the roof of a parking garage.

The people in control of Chernobyl where not incompetent. They were actually trying to preform a safety test. Admittedly it was a stupid safety test that should have never been preformed but the controllers were just as well trained and competent as the ones in any other country. A lot of deaths occurred because the Russian government order firefighters into the hot zone to put out the raging fire that had started in the reactor itself. This fire was one of the major ways the radioactivity spread and is why 14,000 to 15,000 cancer deaths have been attributed to Chernobyl. There are also vast tracts of land including entire villages where people still cannot safely live. All this and it still didn't get anywhere near as bad as it could have and Three Mile Island proved the US isn't immune from a loss of coolant failure either.

Fission and space based solar might be cool but the are impracticable, unnecessary, and just down right stupid. We have the means today in terms of wind power (especially off shore) and solar power (especially over parking lots) to meet all of our energy needs and then some more on top of that. The solution has been found we can stop looking and start building.

Edit:
This is just preposterous. Its like deciding you need a drink of water so you fly to Europe and then take a horse to Asia and then a train to Africa and then finally a steam ship to a spot 2 miles from where you decided you needed that drink. Its still much more expensive then just building them on Earth where there is more than enough already used space and where its much cheaper to get to them and repair them. Not to mention how horribly expensive and technically challenging it would be to get the power back to Earth. Really how can you not see how ridiculously insane this idea is compared to just building them over a parking garage.

Also: We can totally build ways to store the solar energy that would be much cheaper and simpler than building orbital solar collectors. I mean batteries are cheap and getting cheaper and there are other ways to use solar energy in terms of using and storing the thermal part that can continue with power production into the night. Combined with wind and the drastically lower demand at night this really is not a problem.

Sithdarth, nearly every major technological advancement humanity has ever made can be turned into a weapon somehow. Not every one, but nearly. Most advancements that are inherently safe and peaceful required the creation of something that was not. Case in point: Fission research led to the study of Fusion. The joke? Fusion can just as easily create a destructive weapon. And since it yields a much, much higher energy than fusion, it will yield a much more destructive weapon. Or a reactor failure could also do it. And whether you use the technology or not, it still exists. Someone will use it for destructive potential. These days, figuring out how to enrich uranium and make a bomb out of it is no harder than figuring out how to make a cell phone. Someone knows how to do it, and the technology to do so it in front of you. You should at least try to harvest trhe positive side of a technology as best you can, instead of ignoring it, because it exists once discovered, like it or not.

Anyway, you are right in that wind farms are the way to go. And since the room they take up is a problem, you just put them on mountains. You know, where the wind is? Thing is, nobody really lives there or does much with the land. And, they put wind farms there already. Its never was a real problem. Also, I am an electrician. I just helped install one such wind farm. Oh, about 24 300' tall windmills visible from 10 miles away.

Right next to a very large, very dirty coal plant. One of the largest. It helped pay for the wind farm. Oh, the irony.

The roadplate generation thing? You'll be lucky if the plates at a single traffic stop can be used to generate enough electricity to power the traffic lights at just that stop. Much less the street lights at night. It just is barely efficient.

My solution, is to move from centralized generation (power plants, wind/solar farms feeding everyone) to a balanced approach to individual and centralized generation. Individual generation is where each individual homeowner has his/her own means fo power generation. Their own small scale wind/water/solar on their roof or in their yard, depending on what they have. It has problems. First one is, not everyone has a yard. Well, you still need power plants for cities and more urbanized environments. But they should still be trying to maximize their generation potential. Second is, its expensive. Well, its only expensive at first. You start with big tax credits to lessen the blow, then as people buy the generation equipment and have it installed, it becomes cheaper. Mass production and specialist contracting. Wont ever be hundreds of dollars, but it can be cut to a few thousand. Which reduces the amount of time it takes to pay for itself. And the last problem I see it it doesnt generate as much as a homeowner will use at peak. But it will drastically reduce the need for huge coal plants, and lots of real estate.

As far as reducing individual energy demand goes, geothermal heat pumps can go a long way towards that end.

Even if solar panels or wind turbines may not be practical to install on private residences, a geothermal heat pump is effective almost everywhere and can reduce heating bills drastically.

The downside? Initial cost. On average, however, the system can pay itself off in about five years.

Geothermal is no less practical than any renewable energy installation is for a private residence. However, it needs to be implemented regardless.

Ground source heat pumps, not direct-heat geothermal power generation.

Geo-exchange (the short term) takes solar energy absorbed by the ground and moves it into a building. It's the same principle that a refrigerator uses, only in reverse.

Direct-heat geothermal takes energy directly from the Earth's mantle, and typically involves drilling down at least 3 kilometers (almost 2 miles).

Geo-exchange is extremely practical for residential use, while direct-heat is not, aside from a few locations.

I was implaying that geo-exchange is just as viable an option as solar or wind, as they all cost similarly, require similar amounts work, and have similar yields.

And none of them completely remove the need for outside sources of heat or electricity, but reduce it greatly. So the sooner the implementation, the better.

Geo-exchange probably costs more than private wind turbines or solar panels ($13,000 for a 3.5 ton system, what!) but is more available, because wind or solar can be limited by geography or weather.

But Geo-exchange can meet heat requirements for most homes, at least theoretically; depending on the house, installation costs may be impractical. And since it still requires electricity.

All that said, however, Geo-exchange is more efficient than just about any system out there, and would complement renewable systems very well.

1) You are underestimating how technically difficult it is to enrich Uranium. If someone gives you the plans and the technology its not so bad. Generally speaking its not to hard to ensure that plans for enrichment never get distributed. It happened once but they are more secure now. Certainly it wouldn't be a problem at all if we dismantled all the enrichment plants and destroyed the detailed planes.

2) If you give a country a fission plant you give them an excuse to need fissile material. Once they have a reason to have and produce fissile material it becomes impossible to determine if they are building a bomb or not. If they don't have a fission plant then you know immediately that any fissile material is going into weapons research.

3) There are about a bazillion (that's a technical term and totally not an exaggeration) other things wrong with fission. That's not to say we should shut down the plants we have but we shouldn't be building more and we should simply let them run out their lifespans and replace them with something else. There is obviously enough renewable energy out there that we don't need them. For instance, I learned just the other day that MIT estimated the US hot rock geothermal resource at 200-2000 times the annual energy consumption of the US.

In short, we don't need to use it and it can be used to hide weapons technology. It really is ethically irresponsible to use a dangerous resource that out puts highly toxic waste when we have other options just because someone invented it.

The answer to our energy crisis is a cooperative movement towards currently more expensive technologies, but god damn they're more expensive because they aren't used. They'll get cheaper. This isn't a pitch to use one or the other but there's plenty of green power sources compared to the current model of energy production. Boohoo we'll have to pay out the ass to save the planet, but at least we'll have a planet worth living on.

You don't really need a yard to produce your own power at home (though I guess you'd need a house, atleast for now). They've begun developing homes capable of producing all the electricity it needs to power its own functions while being insulated enough to require scarsely more than human body heat and light bulbs to remain warm during the dead of winter. The Solar Decathlon Winner –"Living 2015" Prototype from 2007 produces more power than it needs, with the ultimate goal being private homes that are not only self-sustained but put surplus power into the grid.

Of course, this relatively small house cost 550,000 euros to build, so it isn't like it's available to most people today, but then again prototypes don't come cheap.

The practical part of alternative energies is that they can actually be cheaper in the long run than conventional means of energy (coal, oil, gas), especially as nonrenewable resources become scarcer. The real obstacle is initial cost on many of these systems.

Well that is, in other words, what I said.

And it'll probably be my rationale for investing in these alternative strategies as I accumulate more wealth.