<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:#000000"><p class="MsoNormal" style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small"><span style="font-size:18pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">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?<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small"><span style="font-size:18pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS""><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small"><span style="font-size:18pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">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</span></p></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Mar 26, 2022 at 6:31 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div lang="EN-US" style="overflow-wrap: break-word;"><div class="gmail-m_-8439102260331111868WordSection1"><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><div style="border-right:none;border-bottom:none;border-left:none;border-top:1pt solid rgb(225,225,225);padding:3pt 0in 0in"><p class="MsoNormal"><b>…</b>> <b>On Behalf Of </b>William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat<br><b>Subject:</b> Re: [ExI] Michio Kaku makes 3 predictions about the future<u></u><u></u></p></div><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><div><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:18pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">>…<span style="color:black">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 </span>w<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:18pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">Hi Bill<span style="color:black">w</span>, 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. <u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:18pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS""><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:18pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">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.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:18pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS""><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:18pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">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:<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="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" target="_blank">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</a><u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:18pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">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.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:18pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS""><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:18pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">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.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:18pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS""><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:18pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">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.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:18pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS""><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:18pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">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.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:18pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS""><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:18pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">But wait, there’s more. I will write about it in the next post, gotta scoot.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:18pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS""><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:18pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">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?<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:18pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS""><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:18pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">spike<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p></div></div><div><blockquote style="border-top:none;border-right:none;border-bottom:none;border-left:1pt solid rgb(204,204,204);padding:0in 0in 0in 6pt;margin-left:4.8pt;margin-right:0in"><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p></blockquote></div></div></div>_______________________________________________<br>
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