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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal>On Mon, May 6, 2013 Tomasz Rola <<a href="mailto:rtomek@ceti.pl" target="_blank">rtomek@ceti.pl</a>> wrote:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'><br></span><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>>…<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal>> And BTW, I am not afraid neither of nukes nor of solar. I will be happy to have thorium in my basement and solar on the roof, please. And a computing cluster in between, of course. But I don't want coal plant nearby, and I don't want to live under wind turbine<span style='color:#1F497D'>…<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><br><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>We box ourselves in with our traditional notions, such as a wind turbine with huge electric cables carrying power to population centers. Long cables waste power and use resources to manufacture. Wind power is capricious, and it is noisy and ugly. Solution: put the wind turbines out in Wyoming where there is not much of anything but coal, lots of coal. Build factories that convert coal to liquid fuels powered by wind. Use the wind power to create fertilizer, which can be used to promote plant life which will help sequester the excess carbon produced by processing the coal. I don’t want to live under a wind turbine either, but we don’t need to. I want to live under rooftop solar. Nuke plants are safe, if we locate them out away from the shoreline.<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>The hardcore environmentalists will not like any of this, but the fact is we need low-cost energy or we die. There is no point in denying the obvious: we already have population densities that require cheap energy in enormous quantities. We can’t give up plentiful low-cost energy.<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>People should take a driving vacation out in America’s desert western states. You can rent a hot car and drive as fast as you want for hour after hour and see nothing but land so desolate even the lizards don’t want to live out there. And yet there is coal available, low grade coal, but perfectly adequate for conversion to liquid fuels. Go out there, see it: eastern Oregon, eastern Washington, most of eastern California, Nevada, Utah, southern Idaho, Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico. Drive, see it for yourself, or failing that, open Google maps, go into satellite view and just look at all that: vast tracts of open undeveloped land, plenty of sunshine, coal is available, water is scarce but available in the necessary quantities, oh my, the possibilities, all of it currently just sitting still and quiet, lonely, waiting, waiting, waiting, for us to get with the program. There are cubic buttloads of money to be made out in that desert.<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>If we get on with it, we can transition from oil to multiple alternatives and do so without a Mad Max apocalypse.<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>spike <o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p><div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div></div></div></body></html>