| You claimed: "As for fusion, you could add the chances of success if they were completely different approaches, but they are not." 1. I asked for support: "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." A basic presentation about the projects is NOT supporting that... You back away from that, now that you have read up on the basics. Is that your standard method when you have guessed about something you don't know anything about? 2. The only "real" thing we know about TriAlpha is that they got large investments from people that presumably got more info. (They claim to publish more in 2010.) There is data on a previous project and IIRC, they talked about FRCs. So on what do you base your claim about probabilites for TriAlpha?! Note: AFAIK, to breed tritium is quite common for all fusion DT plans. 3. I haven't looked into the subject about extracting hydrogen from the lead/litium -- why do you claim it to be hard? >>But we are not aiming at technology demonstrators running sustainable reactions AGAIN: You made a claim 90 years in the future. These will be built (if one works) inside 20. And deployed inside 30. So your comment was totally irrelevant for my thesis. But you knew that. >>As for solar, you seriously propose replacing the roofs of every home in the planet with solar panels. Sigh, do I have to quote the BBC reference I gave: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8386460.stm A key goal for solar is what is known as grid parity. That is the point when it is as cheap for someone to generate power on their homes as it is to buy it from the grid. It varies from country to country depending on electricity prices, but the institute estimates that Italy - which has a combination of sunny weather and relatively high electricity prices - should reach grid parity next year. Half of Europe should be enjoying grid parity by 2020, it estimates. So in ONE decade, half of Europe are expected to start plastering everything with solar cells -- there would need to be a reason NOT to put solar cells on a roof (or south facing side of a house). I already explained about pre-high scool math. But AGAIN: 10 x 10 km of solar cells is enough for ten million people. That is nothing, considering that you can take unwanted land 50-100 km from the city, if you really need more. Are you trolling? That will happen in 10-20 years. Consider how much cheaper/better solar cells will be in 30 years... http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/24240/ Now go up to 90... >>Unless there is a huge political drive behind this, AGAIN: See BBC reference. Solar cells will generate energy cheaper than today's normal price for many countries -- already in less than 1-2 decades. And they seem to keep falling in price. Why would politicians be involved -- except wanting to tax solar cells? >> [Thorium] Active research subject today, India is building a prototype. Not totally trivial, but there is afaik no known show stoppers for deployment inside 90 years(!). Do you know of any? |