I wrote:
Perhaps a sensible plan would be to use a mixture of solar towers, wind turbines, next-generation nuclear plants, and gas-fired plants. . . . It would be awfully nice if the embodied energy in photovoltaic devices could be reduced, and the price per KW fell.
And as many experts have pointed out, a combination of renewable and nuclear sources like this *can* solve the energy crisis. As you can see from the numbers for wind turbines, PV, solar towers and so on there is enough renewable energy on earth, and it would not take up inordinate amounts of space. Also, as you see in the Lawrence Livermore graph I posted last month, it would take only a moderate increase in renewable energy to power all transportation as well as electricity, because any new system (hydrogen or electricity) would be far more efficient than conventional gasoline ICE. See:
http://lenr-canr.org/EnergyOverview.pdf
All the handwringing in the newspapers about the energy crisis is misguided. The New York Times claim that "energy independence is an unattainable goal" is ignorant nonsense. We could attain it in 20 years using conventional technology. If we had started 20 years ago, we would be independent already. In fact we would be a paid-up member of OPEC, busy exporting oil and possibly hydrogen to other countries.
The problem with all these schemes is not technical or engineering. The problem is that they would cost a terrific amount of money -- perhaps as much as the war in Iraq. At the drop of a hat, the US will spend $270 billion on a war in Iraq, or $110 billion on the Star Wars missile defense system (I think that is the latest estimate), but we will not spend that kind of money building solar towers, wind turbines, improved PV technology and so on.
Needless to say, one of the tremendous advantages cold fusion would have over these conventional systems is that it would cost thousands of times less to implement. It has many other advantages, described in my book.
When you talk about "solving" a technical problem you have to remember that some solutions are much better than others. Mainframe computers went a long way to solving many nagging data processing problems in the 1960s. If they had not come along, the airline reservation system and the stock market would have collapsed. But personal computers were a much better solution and they allow us to do far more data processing than anyone imagined in 1965.
- Jed
