| >>Also, do you realize how much effort (and energy expenditure) would it be to manufacture 10 square meters for every human being alive? Please think before writing. Even today, much less energy is used making solar cells than they create... For material, the latest thin film is not a heavy weight per square meter... (also a hint, we're not running out of silicon for glass...). In fact, this would take very little resources compared to what a person need to live. If you want to make a coherent point, you'd note that my "energy budget" didn't include transportation or industry. We can apply all the clean energy sources we will have in twenty years, for that. Note that I'm just arguing known sources in one-two decades, assuming the remaining decades are without developments! And you can't answer even that. Let us assume space based solar in twenty years... 90? I can't even guess. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1215313... Did you have any counter arguments against Thorium reactors? Or you're silent because you lack arguments? >>100 billion square meters [is a lot of area, sic] You must be unique on this site to never have thought about how many square meters go into a square km. :-) 10 km X 10 km == 100 million square meters. Enough to give 10 square meter to 10 million people, a BIG city. Go check a map, that area is less than the area of the roofs of such a city... (Most people will live in cities, it seems.) Enough of the pre-high school math lesson... >>As for fusion, you could add the chances of success if they were completely different approaches, but they are not. I don't think you know what you're talking about. Please explain how a known success/failure of one of the three projects I mentioned would influence the likelihood of the others? I can honestly not see how you could argue that. I am sorry, but I wonder if you're a troll. I can't be bothered with the rest. |
The General Fusion, TriAlpha and Polywell are all a bit far-fetched. GF's thingie has a couple practical problems, like, for instance, extracting tritium from their liquid lead-lithium mix. There are a lot of problems with liquid-metal heat exchange itself, specially on a scale like the one they propose. Radioactive liquid alkali metal exchangers elevate the NIMBY complains to a whole new level. I would give them a 1%. The TriAlpha approach requires higher temperatures than Hydrogen-Deuterium fusion. I would give it about 0.5% chance of success in the next 100 years. If the conditions the GF machine are to operate can be called extreme, I lack superlatives to name what happens inside a Tri Alpha device. As for Polywell... I am an optimist. I would give them a 5% chance. There are some issues on the geometry of the fields (they had some leaks in the "corners") but I expect them to improve steadily enough for sustained operation.
But we are not aiming at technology demonstrators running sustainable reactions. We are aiming at commercial production on megawatt-scale generators. It's not just rescaling your AutoCAD model, even if you don't consider your whole supply chain.
As for solar, you seriously propose replacing the roofs of every home in the planet with solar panels. I live in an apartment, on a 50's building that's not very tall. There are 40 people living in the same building that has about 200 m2 of roof. That's 4 square meters per person on a not very dense arrangement. It's one of the least dense blocks in my region. Most of my friends live on 1 square-meter of roof per person or less zones (taller, newer buildings). This math will hardly work out. As it is, we have a pretty green energy matrix - mostly hydro. Even our cars run on sugarcane ethanol, but, still, ethanol production takes up a lot of land that could be used to grow food and that may be needed for that if the climate goes south and agriculture takes a hit.
You are more optimistic than I am. Things change, but they change slowly. Unless there is a huge political drive behind this, I don't believe we will see much of it before it's too late.
We need politicians who can focus on periods longer than their terms. I am not sure where to find them.