----- Original Message ----- From: "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Brin-L" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, February 17, 2002 6:06 PM Subject: Re: SCOUTED: nuclear waste storage in Nevada L3
> > Finally, lets consider the alternatives for the next 100 years. The > > real alternatives are natural gas, oil, and coal. We can argue why > > alternative energy sources don't work, but the fact of the matter is > > that they cannot be counted on. Its my strong opinion that they don't > > work because they require technologies that are very difficult to mass > > produces at reasonable expense. I've given long arguments on this in > > the past, and will probably be likely to do so again if temped with a > > rebuttal. :-) > > Arguing that no one can find a way to mass produce something cheaply in > the future is an argument that will be surely proven wrong eventually. Well, I reread my post to see if I argued that and I'm very grateful to see that I didn't. What I argued is that alternatives cannot be counted on and that I didn't think it would happen in the next 100 years. I do think it can eventually happen, but that the physics underlying things like solar and thermal and wind energy shows that it is a tremendously hard problem. > Rebutt if you want, but I think you will have a hard time with > this argument. There are so many examples of things that seemed > impossible to produce cheaply in the past that we now mass produce > cheaply. I've learned never to underestimate the ingenuity of engineers > and capitalists. But, at the same time, we are not magicians. There are times when the physics continually shows that its a very difficult problem. An example of this is space flight. I chatted with a customer who was with NASA in the good old days. He was the guy who signed off on the Saturn I tests, as I thought I mentioned. He mentioned an old boy who was very bright and was given the chore of developing cheap boosters by Wernher Von Braun back in the late 60s/early 70s. After years of fervently pursuing that, he concluded that it was impossible for the time being. If you look at boost costs, they have not dropped. Private companies have come an gone trying. My view is that the fundamentals of throwing things into orbit keep it expensive. My friends who were in the business guess that NASA bureaucracy adds a factor of 2, but that's about it. BTW, it is private enterprise that designs and builds the rockets, the government just pays for it. Lets now go to aircraft. 30 years ago, supersonic travel was the next step. It still isn't economically feasible. There are fundamental reasons of physics involved in that. Capitalism and innovative engineering cannot overcome basic physics. So, supersonic transport is extremely expensive, even after massive government subsidies. Indeed, I'd argue that the difficulties in making either space or supersonic transport economical dictate governmental involvement, not the reverse. If you look at the price of solar power over the last 30 years, the time when economical solar power has been just around the corner, you will see that not much improvement has happened. > On the other hand, if you are talking about arguing that it will be > a very long time before there is a reason to figure out how to mass > produce alternative energy devices cheaply, then I will not argue with > you! OK, that's exactly what I am talking about. Also, with solar power, the basic physics has been demonstrated for 100 years. Two examples of giant 20th century engineering projects that I am > familiar with, silicon integrated circuits and fiber optics, had utterly > tremendous advances despite the naysayers, but it took millions of man > hours and billions of dollars. This was a good investment since there > were no closely equivalent technologies. If there is an alternative > technology, then it may not make economic sense to expend so much > resources developing the new technology. If one looks at silicon used for computation, one sees steady advances from the time the basic physics was determined. Just think of how computers have advanced from the first tube computers. Maybe you are too young to remember, but the original computers were not very powerful at all. I remember running my bubble chamber measurements through one of the early transistor computers...built in the '50s. As far back as I can remember, the rule of a factor of 2 every 18 months or so has been true. So where is the big question? Fiber optics did have a competitor: copper cables. It didn't take long to find applications that paid for themselves. Solar power is not like that. It has been supported with billions upon billions of subsidies, as has wind energy. Heck, wind power has been around for centuries. Yet, its been overtaken. In short, some technologies are ripe for exploiting, and some aren't. The basic science, in the case of energy physics, determines what is ripe and what it not ripe. The efforts in the areas of solar and wind energy over the last 30+ years have indicated to me that they are not ripe for exploitation. They are important enough to still subsidize. But, I'd argue that basic physics and material science is the best thing to subsidize, not engineering of inadequate science. Dan M.
