[ExI] Michio Kaku makes 3 predictions about the future

[William Flynn Wallace]

Billw, something for you to ponder until then: coal currently generates
about 20% of the power in the USA.  If we phase that out, what do we
replace it with?  And if we manage that, how do we generate all the power
needed to charge the Teslas?



spike         Spike, you know very well what the answer is:  nuclear.
People die every day from polluted air mostly generated by coal plants,
such as in Western Carolina.  Oh, if people were only rational!  They are
afraid of nuclear and used to coal and it ought to be the reverse.  bill w

On Sat, Mar 26, 2022 at 6:31 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

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> *…*> *On Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Michio Kaku makes 3 predictions about the future
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> >…I am a little surprised.  I thought we were trying to get away from all
> uses of coal because it is dirty.  Does turning it into liquid fuel solve
> that problem?   bill w
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> Hi Billw, it sure does solve that problem if… you don’t burn it in the
> process of converting it.  South Africa needed liquid fuels, didn’t have
> oil wells, their oil sources were unwilling to send their supplies down
> that way during the war.  All they had was coal.  Plenty of that.  So… they
> used a process which was known but not particularly practical, using the
> coal as a power source to convert coal to liquids.
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> Consider the following thought experiment.  Given a carbon source of
> sufficient purity, such as coal, and plenty of energy, any liquid fuel can
> be synthesized.  Granted it is expensive liquid fuel, about twice the going
> price of… well what it was a coupla months ago, but it can be done, and
> nearly everywhere has coal.  The USA has lots of it, ooooh buttloads.
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> Now, imagine an existing enormous solar power station out somewhere such
> as up on the north range at China Lake Naval Weapons Research.  Find
> Ridgecrest California on Google maps, or go here:
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> https://www.google.com/maps/place/China+lake+hexagram/@35.7155249,-117.7385172,16887m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m13!1m7!3m6!1s0x80c113469a186557:0xbdabae683d01aff2!2sChina+Lake,+Ridgecrest,+CA+93555!3b1!8m2!3d35.6507888!4d-117.66173!3m4!1s0x80c1053d4da104dd:0xb9022d3ffbe3d60f!8m2!3d35.8171639!4d-117.7414367
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> and find the VX9 airstrip up there, looks like a letter A.  Zoom in on
> Aircraft Graveyard 1 so you can get a feel for how big the place is out
> there.  Now look out west of there a mile or two and see a straight
> something going north/south called SNORT.  That is a research track where
> they put a rocket sled on a track to find out what happens if some prole
> had to bail out at supersonic speeds.  Now we know: bad things happen.
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> SNORT isn’t used anymore, but out west of there is the area of interest.
> None of that is being used anymore, so the Navy could cut some of it loose
> to make an enormous solar power research facility.  Given the area
> available, far from anything that would bother anyone… there would be
> enough power to cover the towns of Ridgecrest, Inyokern, Trona, everything
> around there, with plenty of power left over to send over to Bakersfield.
> Powerlines and rights of way already exist to send out that power from the
> flight range west of VX-9.  The airstrip is plenty big enough to haul in
> equipment on C-130s and even the mighty C-5s can land and take off outta
> there.  We could easily find space for several square miles of land west of
> SNORT and south of the China Lake Hexagram, which is now considered a
> preservation site of historic interest, because they built a mockup of a
> commie SAMsky site.  OK so we did some weird things during the cold war,
> and we want to remember it for all time.  Sheesh.
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> But OK, with that much land, there would be enough excess power to refine
> bauxite into aluminum, plenty to make fertilizer, to do whatever you wanted
> with abundant, reliable power, including converting coal to liquid fuel.
> In the deal we already have the roads capable of bearing the load, to bring
> in the coal, along with existing pipes to haul out the fuel.  Every bit of
> that can be done now.  Did anything I wrote there cause heartburn to anyone
> here?  Well… there is something.
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> It has been proposed and debated before but environmentalists managed to
> stop it.  There are desert tortoises out there.  So… no solar panels on the
> north range.  So far.
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> But wait, there’s more.  I will write about it in the next post, gotta
> scoot.
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> Billw, something for you to ponder until then: coal currently generates
> about 20% of the power in the USA.  If we phase that out, what do we
> replace it with?  And if we manage that, how do we generate all the power
> needed to charge the Teslas?
>
>
>
> spike
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