Best Alternative Power System

What is the best alternative power system?
What system should provide us with everyday power in the future?

 

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Well the only viable power source that will be able to cope with future demand is nuclear. A dirty word with a lot of folks here, but the only realistic one that we've got. Yes we all know about Plutonium's 250,000 year half life etc, but there is no other alternative that the world can afford. Fossil fuels are now on the wane, wind ,wave, and solar are not up to much in most of the areas of the world where they are needed most, so what do we have left? fusion is a fantastic one if we can make it work- but in our lifetime?

 

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I sure wish fusion can be worked out. Actually cold-fusion. But to be realistic, I agree with Slotty, only with nuclear energy we can sustain the power demands.

 

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Why can't solar or some alternative power source work?
What if we got rid of motor vehicles? Would solar or other alternatives work?
Has anybody ever heard of anti-matter power? Apparantly it is a big thing in CERN.

 

Cool skill, I sure would like the link to anti-matter power post/article. Solar, could work. But being a high school student I dont really know why it isnt that widely used. But I have heard that it is nowhere close to nuclear power.

 

I don't know where in the world that you live dude, if its Arizona then i'm sure solar power is viable, if its in grey rain sodden britain where summer is on august the 5th for 4 hours then it aint! . Iceland uses geo-thermal to generate electricity, but it has the volcanics to do that. Its the same for all the wind/ wave/solar type stuff. Different places are more viable than others, but i don't know of anywhere that can sustain an infrastucture on a first world basis using just "alternative" energy. For all the risks involved (which are'nt that bad-as long as the Russians don't build it) nuke is the only way.

 

Yes I am definitely speaking on a first world basis.
Population is roughly 200,000 in a 4mi x 4mi square area.
City Structure: http://www.caliditta.com/citydesign/citystructure.htm
No-Car Concept: http://www.caliditta.com/concepts/nocar.htm




CERN and Antimatter:
Here is the link: http://livefromcern.web.cern.ch/livefromcern/antimatter/


European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN)
Antimatter is routinely produced at CERN (more than 10 million particles per second.)
The World-wide Web was invented at CERN. The world's largest magnet, weighing more than the Eiffel tower, is at CERN. CERN's biggest accelerator is 27 kilometers around, and particles travelling near the speed of light lap it over 11,000 times each second.

PRESS RELEASE
Copyright © 1996 Reuters Information Service
European scientists create first antimatter atoms GENEVA (Jan 4, 1996 7:04 p.m. EST) - European scientists have managed to create fleeting atoms of antimatter for the first time, bringing a dream of science fiction a step closer to fact.

The European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) said Thursday nine anti-hydrogen atoms were created in experiments last September, although each lasted only about 40 billionths of a second before being annihilated by ordinary matter.

 

Yup, it'll be great Cool. But not in our lifetime i think. Also there aint no way i would give up my car. I don't know wether you drive, but i suspect not. Once you've got wheels your life changes, and i don't care how "green" people think they are, if they drive, the idea of losing that freedom that wheels give you is a horrible one to consider. brrrrrrr makes my skin crawl even thinking about using a bus or a train

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Anyway, i did'nt break the planet- it was this way when i got here!

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I definitely drive. I have to. Actually, I've been without car for the past 2 weeks, and it's hell on earth. This is the longest I've been without a car in like 10 years. Driving is not a privilege. Driving is a burden and a curse.

Needless to say, my first post posed a question about power systems of the future. Not necessarily in our lifetime. The only problem there seems to be with the no-car concept is human attachment to their cars and the motor vehicle society.
The designs on the link (http://www.caliditta.com/citydesign/citystructure.htm) shows what such a city of the future would be like.

 

"The Holy Grail of researchers in the field of solar photovoltaic (SPV) electricity is to generate it at a lower cost than that of grid electricity. The goal now seems to be within reach. A Palo Alto (California ) start-up, named Nanosolar Inc., founded in 2002, claims that it has developed a commercial scale technology that can deliver solar electricity at 5 cents per kilowatt-hour. " As always, take these claims with a dose of salt the size of the Hope Diamond.

http://www.nanosolar.com/

http://www.hindu.com/seta/2005/02/03/stories/2005020300431600.htm


This hooked up to a hydrogen generator could supply electricity to your home and make fuel for your car.


http://www.google.com/url?sa=l&q=ht...4EtouJB_64jgqY4sUroICxAQgAEAEYASgCOABIpTnIAQE

 

solar could work in the sunny areas like southern US,
there was an article in www.evworld.com where someone in Ca. put bunch of photovoltaic panels on the roof of their house and uses that to charge his electric car.
I dont see why more people couldnt do this?

imo hydrogen would be the best alernative to oil as its clean and most plentiful element in the universe.
and can be extracted from water for example by simple electrolysis.
of course with US goverment being dominated by the Big Oil corps I dont see that happening any time soon.

or how about something like this;
cars powered by air www.theaircar.com

 

Anything and everything that can spin a wheel. That is where all electricity consumed by man comes from. I don't see why that will change.

 

Of course you don't. That is something for scientists and progressive thinkers to see.

The hydrogen and solar energy is really coming along.
Can that hydrogen tank be put in your ome, and plugged into your plumbing system?
Ergo, no more dealings with the electric company.

 

Yes.

 

Halleluja!

 

I wonder if it will power tower city: http://www.caliditta.com/citydesign/towercity.htm.
Just set up a plumbing system, and power whichever apartment or building with a hydropower unit.

 

Just hook it up to the solar power system and just sit back and wait for your hydrogen to be made then load it into cylinders inside your car to fuel it also. It does take some time to convert the water to hydrogen though.

 

The primary reservation I have with the concept of nuclear energy (and perhaps with certain other proposed forms of energy) - even if they can be made safe (they probably can be - I'm just not very knowledgeable on the subject) - is the centralised manner in which I suspect they would have to be made available.
As someone of the libertarian ilk, I find this somewhat non-ideal. Will it not give governments another excuse to raise taxes and perhaps interfere in citizen's lives even further? At least with solar and wind power delivered in your back garden (or on your rooftop), you are relatively de-centralised.
Anyone agree? Feel free to enlighten/correct me!

 

solar cells and windmills will never be fully up to the task. not as long as nuclear is in the back of our minds. nuclear is the Holy Grail, we get something for nothing basically.

I am confident that sustainable fusion (probably plasma fusion) will be achieved in my lifetime. how much better can it get than fusion? I mean, you turn mass directly into energy (E=mc^2) and you have all the fuel you will ever need right here in earths water (deuterium), and you can breed more tritium (also needed for productive fusion power) with the same reactor in which you burn it. It’s like having a coal power plant that produces coal as a byproduct of burning coal =].

I think we should invest in fission plants heavily until fusion plants can replace them. Fission is no longer the threat it once was, they can use pellets of uranium and carbon (I think) to avoid the possibility of ever having a melt down. Even if everything went wrong in a pellet fission reactor there is still no way for it to blow up.

p.s. what is wrong with it being centralized? if you don’t want cheap fusion power of the future you can always move to some other country and construct windmill/solar arrays to make power. the problem is that you are trying to have your cake and eat it to. you want the upsides (prospering economy) of cheap grid power, and yet have the upsides of being self-supporting. if there were a way to produce energy in my back yard that was better than hooking up to a grid I would do it. however, I don’t think fusion (which will eventually trump every other kind of power) CANNOT be small/safe enough to put on your own property. (I don’t mean to imply that fusion is not safe, I simply refer to the machinery associated with it, such as dynamos/steam/strong magnetic fields/ect.)

 

...which is precisely what a cake is for, I trust you realise - i.e. eating.:bugeye:

Asides from that ... yeah, fair enough I suppose. I might come back and argue later.