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| Re: Gas Hits $3.15 in California (20179) | |||
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Re: Gas Hits $3.15 in California |
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Posted by willD on Sat Mar 19 01:27:39 2005, in response to Re: Gas Hits $3.15 in California, posted by SelkirkTMO on Fri Mar 18 12:23:43 2005. I agree wholeheartedly. Even biting the greater pollution of increased Coal consumption for a short period while the NIMBYs are told to shut up and sit down while new Nukes and perhaps even solar-thermal powerplants go in would be an improvement over the current situation. Places like California and the west could likely make great use of solar thermal powerplants, where land is cheap and the sun plentiful. Nuclear would work better for the more expensive and cloudier east, provided the NIMBYs can be overcome.Nuclear powerplants should be of a standardized design, it doesn't take a whole lot of thinking to see that France actually has an excellent power system derived from a standardized reactor design. We need to end the myth that nuclear power is a for-profit industry, have the US government (or perhaps even the Military) run it like Rickover ran the US Navy's nuclear program, without the interference he ran on competing programs. Solar thermal powerplants have the advantage of being both fairly cheap and almost environmentally non-existant. Just take metal, shine it, and bend or tilt the metal focus to focus the sunlight onto some sort of liquid which will be heated and run through a turbine. It's vastly cheaper than photovoltaic cells, and produces almost no side effects. Other more exotic power sources would include something like a Microwave power system, with solar energy pumped down to recieving stations by microwave energy. Tidal energy could be a possibility, and certainly if we could make it work, Fusion could provide the answer to almost all our prayers (except of course what to do with all the heat, since all energy degrades to heat eventually). We cannot utilize either of these technologies effectively with the automobile, which is basically restricted to petroleum derived fuels, fuel cells, or batteries, all of which have a greater inefficiency than the simple system used to relay power to a train. If we are ever to get serious about regaining our position in the world then we need a drastic decrease in the import of oil from other countries, and that decrease almost only can be brought about by the expansion and electrification of transit facilities. |
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