From: everything-list@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of LizR
Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2014 3:42 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On 28 February 2014 06:43, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 4:50 PM, LizR <lizj...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Why bother with all these other power sources when you have a fusion
reactor in the astronomical backyard?
Because the energy density decreases with the square of the distance and the
fusion reactor is 93 million miles away, and because the energy drops to
zero for at least half the time.
It still delivers thousands of times more energy to earth than human
civilisation uses. Let's do a quick back of the envelope calculation.
Human civilisation uses approx 150 x 10^15 watt/hours per year according to
wikipedia
The Sun delivers about 1000 W/m^2 on average at Earth's orbital distance
(1360 actually but obviously some is scattered, etc) So treating the Earth
as a disc for purposes of intercepting sunlight, the total possible
insolation available is around 40 x 10^15 W
Or around 320 x 10^18 watt/hours per year
That's about 2000 times the energy requirements of our civilisation. It can
be knocked down a lot by clouds, falling on the sea, running the weather,
inefficiencies in collection, etc, of course, but I'd say there's still a
bit of room for ramping up how much solar we use.
Besides which, solar is and will be part of a mix of energy sources. Energy
supply will never be provided from a single source. So the argument that
unless it "could" provide 100% of all of the energy needed it is of zero
value and interest is specious.
Chris
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