An Answer To Our Energy Crisis?

[Azisien]

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.

[stefan]

Originally Posted by Azisien

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).

[Azisien]

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.

[stefan]

Originally Posted by Azisien

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.

[Sithdarth]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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 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.)

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:

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.

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.

[Cid Highwind]

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.

[Kepor]

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.

[Cid Highwind]

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

[Kepor]

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.

[Cid Highwind]

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.