[ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030

[John Clark]

On Sat, Jan 19, 2013  spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

> Ben it is part of extropian thinking to look at what happens if there is
> no singularity and nuclear fusion never does work out for us.


That's the problem, nuclear fusion is hard, really really really hard. Even
nature has only figured out one way to produce intense amounts of fusion
power on a large scale and that is in a supernova. The sun of course gets
its energy from fusion but at any one time per volume the sun only makes
about a quarter as much heat as the human body produces from chemical
energy; more massive main sequence A2 stars that are about 25 times as
bright as the sun have a power production density about the same as
people's bodies have. Like nature human beings, at least so far, have only
figured out one way to release intense amounts of fusion energy on a large
scale, and that is in a H-bomb.

By the way, the giant Laser's at the National Ignition Facility was
supposed to reach break even in 2012, that is generate as much energy as it
took to produce, but about 6 months ago they announced that wasn't going to
happen because the hot dense plasma produced was not behaving as their
models said it should; they gave no new date when they thought break even
would be reached or even assurance that it ever would be at that facility.

  John K Clark
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20130119/81aa68e4/attachment.html>