State of the Union Address

ORIGINAL: GuntherHess

they are building the first new reactor in 30 years here in Maryland.

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30 years??? We'll have cold fusion by then. Sheesh. LOL!

That's a handsome Casper's, Louis...! Tumblers are collectors, too... Maybe you could finagle a trade to get that beauty polished up...

Yeah, up here in the hills of western MA there are any number of isolated cellar holes, sometimes actually clusters of them from long abandoned villages... But, for the life of me, they seem to have been swept clean of the stuff we dream of...

Contemplating picking up a used metal detector and giving them another sweep...

Ron

cold fusion

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Unlikely, cold fusion turned out to be BS (bad science). A case of too much wishful thinking.
Nuclear fission reactors will probably never make a huge comeback in this country. Too many problems, cost too much to build, extremely toxic waste products, the fuel tends to come from unstable places in the world, etc etc. Not to even meantion the bad public perception. There are some interesting ideas for new smaller modular encapsulated nuke plants.
I think the large solar farms they are building in North Africa are interesting. Something that could be done in our southwest.

ORIGINAL: GuntherHess

cold fusion

Click to expand...

Unlikely, cold fusion turned out to be BS (bad science). A case of too much wishful thinking.
Nuclear fission reactors will probably never make a huge comeback in this country. Too many problems, cost too much to build, extremely toxic waste products, the fuel tends to come from unstable places in the world, etc etc. Not to even meantion the bad public perception. There are some interesting ideas for new smaller modular encapsulated nuke plants.
I think the large solar farms they are building in North Africa are interesting. Something that could be done in our southwest.

Click to expand...

I was joking. LOL! Solar farms are fine; however, I think we need to be thinking beyond the technology of the 1980's, wind is no better, 1850's technology, and both are just stop gap measures. We really need to come up with something new, something innovative. I can't believe that someone hasn't been working on some new system for generating energy. Not to mention that the same forces that have stopped production of nuke plants, coal power plants, and oil refineries will be on high alert and attacking solar and wind energy producing facilities with equal vigor, because they don't want humanity to advance one step further away from what they perceive humanity should be. Unfortunately they seem to win in most cases of this anymore.

There are no easy answers to the energy problems, we really should have been working on this since the days of Carter, but through administrations on both sides of the isle it has pretty much been ignored. We can only blame Big Oil for so much honestly, a lot of this has to do with old hippies. I just pray to the maker that they don't try to switch completely to an electric car, because our electrical structure just can't take the extra load, and with most of these generation plants running on coal, it isn't going to help on iota with the global warming situation like their tiny little minds think it will. Remember these are the same people who think that they can reduce their carbon footprint by buying carbon offsets, they aren't going to think about how much of a carbon footprint their plug in electric car is producing, because they will believe that they have effectively offset that impact onto the electrical company. Hybrids that can generate their own energy while using the gasoline engine is ok, but for the most part we aren't there yet. I'm amazed that someone hasn't found a way to generate energy to recharge the batteries from the rolling of the car. They have a system like that for braking in some hybrids from what I gather.

Grrrr, where's my freaking energy efficient flying car? LOL!