>The US government got tricked into funding (2 Million do

>>8834511
>How can I trick the US or German Government into giving me money for free?

>he doesn't know about white mans welfare

get your buddies in the DoD or DoE to write off on your project and make sure to include them as """"project manager"""" for a sizable salary.

Democrats borrowing against money of our great grandchildren to "create jobs" by giving money to cronies.

>Government not willing to fund Fussion or Fission
>But willing to spend half a mil on this
We are doomed.

>>8834521
nuclear power is too politically hot.

>>8834511
>worried about the government spending 2 million dollars on r&d
>half the budget goes to making war stuff
>the fossil fuels, big AG, and commercial fishing industries, amoung many other deplorable agents, all get billions of dollars in subsidies every year
>cares about this when the world bank is giving loans for subcontracted genocide and ecological destruction all over the world with 75% US funding.
Unimportant bullshit that's been way oversimplified and attacked with bias at least they are trying to develop something productive.
And you need to have money before the nanny state will give you more money

>>8834511

2 million is peanuts. Risk vs reward.

>Lay down solar roadways
>Truck with muddy tires renders them inoperable

NO ONE COULD HAVE POSSIBLY FORSEEN THIS

>>8834511
LEDs and heating elements are retarded but having solar panels in driveways isn't.

>>8834526
Yeah, because the average citizen and politician is retarded.
>B-But nuclear is bad, it makes NUCLEAR WASTE
>Coal generates far more waste and increases smog and CO2 levels int he air
>That's perfectly fine
>Nuclear creates a relatively small amount of waste and doesn't add CO2 or smog
>IT'S LE BAD AND EVIL

>>8834532
>They are trying to produce something productive
You mean they are trying to scam retards. Anyone with a basic understanding of thermodynamics should be able to explain why solar roadways are retarded.

>>8834541
There is a good reason.
The government has done many completly retarded things with nuclear energy before the anti nuclear movement, and would otherwise still be doing them.
It's a quality control check really

>>8834520

Republicans do the same thing. Their cronies are just in the defense industry ($300M to kill 30 faggots in a hole, seriously)

>>8834540
Yes it is. If you lay a solar panel flat on the ground it can't generate nearly as much energy compared to facing it TOWARDS THE FUCKING SUN

>>8834547
There is a difference between funding nuclear energy and wanting 2 more bombs dropped on japan.

>>8834521

Nuclear power is dead. Don't fall for memes.

>>8834543
Yeah, they probably said something like that about humans flying too.
It's unimportant and it isn't completely fucking evil like the imporant things nanny state protects are.
Seems good to me.

>>8834549

If you run out of roof space, you don't have a choice unless you want to fuck up your lawn.

>>8834549
>facing it TOWARDS THE FUCKING SUN

Driveways face upward
Toward the sky
Where, you know, the sun is

>inb4 Lambert's cosine law

>>8834553
>Humans flying too
Except there is basic math and science explaining why Solar roadways wont ever work.
>>8834559
The low efficiency of putting it flat on the ground doesn't justify it's cost. Either put it on your roof, put it on a platform but never put it flat on the ground.

>>8834563
>
They're more efficient if they're angled.

>>8834563
Watch Op's video. They are basically useless unless angled.

>>8834569
>The low efficiency of putting it flat on the ground doesn't justify it's cost

So you only generate 1/3, big deal. Still worth it if you're in need of off the grid juice.

>>8834574
>Big deal
Watch the video idiot. It generates less than 10 cents of energy a day.
Why would you spend 20k on something that will make you 10 cents a day in return? Stop shilling for this shitty idea.

>>8834511
I'm all for Solar Energy, but this is ridiculous!

>>8834580
>Watch the video idiot. It generates less than 10 cents of energy a day.

Because many of the panels were broken.

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>>8834511
>tomahawk missiles launched into some syrian dirt
>59 x 1.4 million
TOUGH ON TERROR! The silent majority stands with TRUMP!

>>8834511
>How can I trick the US or German Government into giving me money for free?
Use the words "green" and "carbon" a lot.

>>8834589
No, even then it was trash.

>>8834580
If a patch like that is generating 10 cents worth of electricity per day, the panels were not built/designed properly.

>>8834574
what's with the solar roadways peoples fascination with installing inefficient solar panels? everytime these are criticized for not being efficient they say it's not the point

>>8834599
Nope, the introduced inefficiencies are because of suboptimal positioning and all of the crap you have to do to them to make them a useable surface.

>Idiots not understanding research
That's the whole point of it: Investing in innovations which may or may not have a decent ROI

>>8834543
>Anyone with a basic understanding of thermodynamics should be able to explain why solar roadways are retarded.
I don't have a basic understanding of thermodynamics, please explain it to me

>>8834550
Current nuclear energy tech isn't sufficient and needs to be devolped
Congress and exucutive agencies are literally too stupid to have the responsibility of nuclear energy r&d.
It needs to be done but not without civic reform

>>8834610
So what amazing new technology is being researched here? These are inefficient solar panels on the ground.

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>>8834547
Like fucking what? How could any of that be worse, or less useful than how they're blowing away boatloads of money with military research anyway? I'm not saying that DARPA hasn't made some cool shit, because it has. All I'm saying is that we should have two competing ways of blowing away two boatloads of money, with one of them being NUCLEAR RESEARCH.

>>8834610
The point of research isn't to throw resources away on "innovations" that are in no way innovations and we already know for a fact cannot work. I suppose you'd be in favor of feeding cancer patients a half pound of arsenic because it "might" cure cancer because that's the exact same kind of wankery that this is. It's not trying out some new concept, new materials, or new process. It's putting things together in a stupid way that we know can't work.

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>>8834610
2 of trump's syrian tomahawks cost more than this whole project but they don't care about that. It's obviously another /pol/bait thread, and full of their ilk. Reply if you must, but remember to sage.

>>8834520
?
Democrats intend to kill you long before any of your great grand children are around
Democrats are the party of white genocide.

>>8834627
>>8834610
>These shills

>>8834580
>10 cents of electricity a day
Do you not get the inherent flaw with using capital to value things?
Compared to what? The relative monetary value of natural gas fired power plants?
Money is only worth what was done to get it and holds no real world value. The practice of using monetary value and disregarding the ends and means is culturally aquired sociopathy.
Stop shilling for moral degeneracy

>>8834618
>So what amazing new technology is being researched here? These are inefficient solar panels on the ground.
How come you know beforehand that they are inefficient?

>>8834637
You know that calling someone a shill is not an argument, right?

>>8834648
Neither is bringing up unrelated politics.

>>8834548
300M was the cost of development, one bomb itself just costs 170,000.

I think the amount of money spent on the military industrial complex is dumb but let's not throw around incorrect stats.

>>8834648
>How come you know beforehand that they are inefficient?
They have to be covered up with a airfield surface to make them safe to drive on, this stops a lot of light from coming in.

Why not just put them next to the road?

>>8834648
>How come you know beforehand that they are inefficient?
Because we've researched the fuck out the very type of solar panels that are being used. These aren't magic fairy dust pV cells. We are /very/ familiar with what conditions these things work well in and which ones they work very poorly in. The only difference between these and the ones you are used to seeing is how they are housed because solar panels are generally very brittle so they have to be strengthened.

>>8834620
Like I said here >>8834617
I am in favor of nuclear r&d I just don't want illiterate people making the decisions.
That's how we got all of our previous catastrophes.
Your picture concerns me.
Where does the thermal pollution go?
The ocean?
That's an ecological disaster right there

>>8834511
2 million dollars is fucking fractions of pennies to the government, get some sense.

>>8834670
a waste is a waste

>>8834610
this isn't research, this is engineering

giving the solar roadways people money is like hiring an engineer to design a bridge for you because you think his design for a house made of canned cheese spread shows some interesting promise

>>8834645
capital is physical goods, not money

>>8834645
Fine, solar roadways will have a much lower output of clean energy than dost panels installed in a non-retarded fashion.

Clean energy being the entire point.

>>8834511
It's the new religion of the left: I call it green environmentalism. It's entirely fact free, and highly resistant to reasoned arguments to the contrary. That's more or less the clinical definition of delusion.

PS: This is distinct from being concerned about global warming. However, the proper response to fixing global warming is nuclear power, none of this bullshit solar and wind nonsense.

>>8834689
>Clean energy being the entire point.
EXCEPT IT'S NOT. You're replacing a road surface that can be made with recycled materials with something that can't be dwarfing regular asphalt or concrete's cost and carbon footprint while taking money away from fucking viable solutions for creating cleaner energy.

Fuck me people like you are dense. I bet you think that fucking requiring "clean diesel" is a good thing too.

>>8834617
>Current nuclear energy tech isn't sufficient and needs to be devolped
Wrong.

http://euanmearns.com/nuclear-capital-costs-three-mile-island-and-chernobyl/

It's quite fine right now. Next-gen are even better though.

>>8834664
>That's how we got all of our previous catastrophes.
Which killed less than 4000 people. exclude Chernobyl, and we're down to double or single digits. A single actual historical dam accident killed 10,000 +. Perspective.

>>8834674
do you stop and pick up pennies if you see them? a waste is only a waste if the thing you're throwing out has a value.

>>8834706
I wasn't even considering human deaths, just earth system consequences, which are severe and lasting.
The thermal pollution from Diablo canyon from example.
Chernobyl is still uninhabitable.
The ecological consequences of dams are comparable

>>8834731
There's a difference between throwing out something without value and throwing money that could be put to better use at something with no value.

>>8834741
except it couldn't because that wasn't what it was approved for and allocated to.

the money may as well not even have existed until it was given the purpose of building the solar roadway.

>>8834678
Then you know what I meant.
>>8834689
I still don't see the harm

>>8834748
The money most definitely existed and was diverted from other uses to do this.

You're more than kinda dumb.

>>8834697
I agree.
If we want to survive, Roads should be removed on a massive scale to restore landscape connectivity. People shouldn't use so much energy and personal automobiles are obsolete and need to go and would have went already if it wasn't for the nanny state protecting corporate interests

>>8834765
...wha-huh?

>>8834774
The US chamber of commerce and other industry backed think tanks and front groups lobby for state intervention in the economy to keep innovation like mass transit, high speed rail, and decent infrastructure out of the market in order to hold onto their power. Like why leaded gasoline was used over ethanol forever despite the far superior advantages of ethanol.
Loss of biodiversty and ecological connectivity are as great of a threat as climate change but get talked about even less, because the media is also corporate controlled.

>>8834759
wrong, let me know when you learn the basics of how the government and our funding works. fucking pajeet.

>>8834798
Oh, so the various levels of government don't have a fucking income base that they supplement via grants from higher levels of government and/or things like new taxes, the selling of bonds, and loans? You know, just fucking shifting money that already exists around? That money was allocated for this project does not imply it was "created" at the point of allocation nor does it somehow deny that the money could not have been put to another use. True enough after it was allocated, it's extraordinarily difficult and in some cases impossible to re-allocate it for a different purpose; however that's not the same thing as "durr, de monies were der before dey's allocated".

>>8834534
>2 million is peanuts. Risk vs reward.
This.

The Solar Roadways people are obviously lacking in competence, with their glass-topped box approach. But this token investment given to even a poor approach will attract effort toward more durable solar cell packaging.

There are already much better solar road cells: not thick glass-topped boxes, but thin, somewhat-flexible sheets to be glued down on new roads.

This kind of development effort will lead to things like tough all-solar roofs that can be walked on for maintenance without concern.

>>8834628
Lmao that doesn't even make sense

>>8834834
The fuck? This isn't spurring or funding any research that wasn't already happening. It just gave one retarded company that's doing basically nothing a bunch of money.

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>>8834854
wrong
now innovative people and companies know they have chance at receiving money and they're motivated.

next?

>>8834860
they are motivated to invest in lobby

>>8834860
Holy shit, they knew that already. Solar is one of the heaviest subsided industries in the world. If you've got a solar panel business or are researching solar power and can't get funding you are the least qualified person on the planet for any job.

>>8834511
Say you're a 10 year old trans gay refugee

>>8834854
http://www.solarroadways.com/Research/Research

>>8834860
*companies owned by family and close friends of government officials

>>8834854
>This isn't spurring
And how would you know that?

The significant thing about this team is that they were ready to go ahead and install real hardware in a public place. Funding it sends a message that developing deployable hardware will be rewarded.

The trouble with academics is that they're entirely willing to gobble up research funding without ever producing any practical results. The trouble with businesses is that, if possible, they'll soak up subsidies without doing anything new. Sometimes you have to fund something odd and seemingly impractical to make a point. In this case, the point is: "At least these jokers are doing something new that works in the real world, and no matter how clownish or inefficient they seem, they're better than any of the rest of you in that way."

>>8834511
>the average person is a retard
>people fall for le common man memes and vote for people like them (ie retards)
>the government ends up run by retards

>>8834873
>solar is one of the most heavily subsidized industries
Do you belive that?
It isn't even close to the subsides given for oil and gas pipelines.
Ffs the nanny state is why solar energy is non-competitive compared to fossil fuels.
The state literally suppresses the market for alternative energy so their FF constituents can keep making money.

>>8834891
You know what this is spurring? Other con artists to make something shitty that is provably not going to work to get a big wad of cash. Hell, let's throw a few million at one of those 300 mpg carburetors and a few more at a perpetual motion machine.

This shit isn't enlivening research, it's not spurring anyone to move in any directions that were not being moved in before. It's just taking money away from researchers who are working on viable solutions. It tells people that "fuck working on something that'll actually work, what you need is to be sparkly and attention getting if you want money".

I can definitely tell that you have done zero work in alternative power generation and I'm starting to suspect that you're terminally naive.

>>8834511
Because the technology is probably possible with the right research. Also thunderfoots debunking videos are unbearably cynical but actually point out most of the pitfalls we would have to overcome. I'm not saying however that the technology is worth actually putting in the ground however.

>>8834906
Oh, you're an idiot who doesn't know shit about energy. Gotcha. I'm done here.

>>8834511
Obama threw billions of dollars at companies that said that they were green, or were developing green technology.

>>8834913
Why tho?

>>8834569
>Except there is basic math and science explaining why Solar roadways wont ever work.
An experiment is worth more.

>>8834913
I guess you read that retarded German paper and now your an expert? Get ready to suck Apollos glorious solar cock you combustion loving dandy.

>>8834913
>>8834914
Ha.
That's just wrong, he did next to nothing for clean energy. He was Ronald Reagan the second.
subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/top-100-parents

>>8834906
>It isn't even close to the subsides given for oil and gas pipelines.
subsidies per unit of energy provided are several times higher for solar than they are for fossil fuels
http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/studies/energy-subsidies-study/

>>8834569
what is the static universe and 100,000 other things people thought were "basic math and science"

>>8834913
Why does a company called clean coal power solutions get $550,000,000/year, a comparative drop in an ocean compared to the subsidies the fossil fuels and automotive industry get in total?
Do you have any idea about energy subsides? These are facts I'm telling you.

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>>8834511
NUCLEAR POWER!!!
NUCLEAR POWER!!!
NUCLEAR POWER!!!

ONLY NUCLEAR POWER IS ANY GOOD THIS SUN BULLSHIT IS BALLS OUT JEW MEMES AIN'T NOTHING GOOD COMMIN FROM THE SUN NUCLEAR IS BETTER THAN ANY OTHER POWER AT ALL DON'T EVEN DOUBT

>>8834915
Because I don't have the time or energy to discuss with you how all of the political left bullshit conspiracies about Big Oil (protip: Big Oil is one of the biggest researchers in alternative energy: they're companies looking to be around for a long time making money for a long time and they know oil will end. They are trying to position themselves to be able to take advantage of whatever comes after) and Big Government keeping down alternative energy.

There's a running asston of problems with practically any alternative you care to name that makes it impossible to deploy in a large scale and that's without addressing the elephant in the room of energy storage (specifically the damage wrought by getting the materials for batteries and disposing of batteries, but that's slowly getting better), and I'm not talking about little "we can figure it out pretty soon", I'm talking huge fucking fatal issues to the ideas. There is no current nor near term replacement for fossil fuels. The technologies just are not there yet and it has nothing to do with suppression. We throw tons of money at amazing minds trying to figure this shit out but we're still talking at least a century before viable solutions for a first world nation.

We are on the clock and we don't have unlimited resources on any side of this, so it is a fucking travesty to waste money on bullshit like this. It's literally on the same goddamn level as sending a few million to research homeopathic treatments for cancer.

>>8834930
>Why does a company called clean coal power solutions
no such company exists
source: google

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>>8834925
nice try Myron ebell.
>per unit of energy provided.
Literally what I am saying, fossil fuels subsides are to keep alternative energy supressed in the market by allowing oil and gas to be produced for much less with the help of our tax dollars.

>>8834938
>Myron ebell.
who?
>Literally what I am saying, fossil fuels subsides are to keep alternative energy supressed in the market by allowing oil and gas to be produced for much less with the help of our tax dollars.
you do not understand what "per unit of energy" means.
>EIA data shows that solar energy was subsidized at $24.34 per megawatt hour and wind at $23.37 per megawatt hour for electricity generated in 2007. By contrast, coal received 44 cents, natural gas and petroleum received 25 cents, hydroelectric power 67 cents, and nuclear power $1.59 per megawatt hour.

>>8834936
Clean coal power operations
It was all in one subsidy from good ol Kentucky too

>>8834947
>nuclear power $1.59 per megawatt hour.
Fucking someone needs to break GE's monopoly on nuke.

>>8834947

>electricity generated in 2007
>2007
you fucking what mate

>>8834932
>the elephant in the room of energy storage
Ultracapacitors and flywheels for the grid and lead acid batteries for home use.
>impossible to deploy in a large scale
The grid may die and be replaced by local systems.

>>8834947
Do you have any idea how much more megawatt hours fossil fuels provides?
a misleading qualifier, the subsidies fossil fuels get are incomparable to solar energy In scale.

>>8834953
http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/eia-subsidy-report-solar-subsidies-increase-389-percent/
>At the request of Congress, the Energy Information Administration (EIA), an independent agency of the U.S. Department of Energy, evaluated the amount of subsidies that the federal government provides energy producers for fiscal year 2013, updating a study that it did for fiscal year 2010.[i] Over a 3-year period, from fiscal year 2010 through fiscal year 2013, total federal electricity-related subsidies increased from $11.7 billion to $16.1 billion, an increase of 38 percent over the 3-year period. The largest increases in federal energy subsidies were in electricity-related renewable energy, which increased 54 percent over the 3-year period, from $8.6 billion to $13.2 billion. Total fossil fuel subsidies declined by 15 percent, from $4.0 billion to $3.4 billion. Total federal energy subsidies declined 23 percent, from $38 billion to $29 billion due to the expiration of tax incentives for biofuels, the depletion of stimulus funds, and a decrease in energy assistance funds.

>>8834954
>Ultracapacitors and flywheels for the grid
Nothing even close to market ready
>and lead acid batteries for home use.
...your answer for being more clean is to massively increase the proliferation of lead and sulfuric acid
>The grid may die and be replaced by local systems.
There is no "the grid". It is already local systems. Power distribution has always been a problem and is the reason that covering a few square miles in Arizona with pv panels won't do us any good.

>>8834957
>federal
State governments need to be considered as they are the biggest protectors of fossil fuels

>>8834955
>Do you have any idea how much more megawatt hours fossil fuels provides?
>a misleading qualifier, the subsidies fossil fuels get are incomparable to solar energy In scale.
If I give $1000 to one person and $2000 to 1000 people, who is better off?

>>8834962
Post a source or gtfo faggot

>>8834960
>your answer for being more clean
I don't care about any green nonsense. Solar panels can work when their efficiency and life span are improved. Also properly designed lead acid batteries are more than enough to store our excess electrical power.

>>8834734
Why would you even include Chernobyl? That was a stupid design ran by stupid people? It was in place in exactly two cities.

The only concern with modern nuclear reactors is waste. Yucca Mountain was killed by the Obama administration.

>>8834972
>I don't care about any green nonsense.
Then why the fuck are you advocating for more expensive ways of generating power?
>Solar panels can work when their efficiency and life span are improved.
For parts of the country, yes. Others, nope. Insolation isn't uniform across the country or through the year.
>Also properly designed lead acid batteries are more than enough to store our excess electrical power.
I don't disagree there. I just shudder at the thought of large battery banks in every home.

>>8834765
>>8834789
Yes, because the US doesn't have over 300 million people spread out over about 10 million sq km. Don't like roads? Don't buy stuff.

>>8834983
>Then why the fuck are you advocating for more expensive ways of generating power?
I just want to see how far we can take the technology.

>>8834947
Myron ebell is a sociopath for hire that works for the competive enterprise institute, a dark money group, not unlike the website you linked, funded by corporate interests, that shills for fossil fuels, big pharma, tobacco, finance, even against the ESA.
Coincidentally he also lead the trump administrations EPA transition team.

>>8834924
>billions

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/27/obama-backed-green-energy-failures-leave-taxpayers/

>>8834970
Or how about this, you don't give money to the fossil fuels industry at all.
>energy giants are thousands of people
Are the 1000 people a threat to human survival?
Are you actually a paid shill?
subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/top-100-parents

>>8834955
>muh megawatt hours
The fuck kind of metric is that? Everyone who isn't retarded uses EROEI anyways.

Fossil fuels don't even top the list in terms of total energy output. 7 of the ten largest power plants in the US are nuclear.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stations_in_the_United_States

>>8834987
I don't buy anything I don't need to, I make my own or steal what I can.
Fuck off retard, high speed rail is far superior to roads.
Roads are an ecological disaster and disease vector that threaten our ability to survive as a species in the future compounded with the other plagues of the anthropocene.

>>8834995
I don't doubt the price, sorry I can see why you would think I did.
It was inconsequential and not even comparable to the hand outs the nanny state gives to fossil fuels

>"hurr investing in alternative energy is a waste"
>end up losing the solar power market to the Chinese
>falling behind in thorium power research
>all because of flyover coal fetishists

Brilliant fucking plan. Appalachia needs to be stripped of their electoral votes.

>>8835000
Ah, yes, and those high speed rail will be paid for by people who don't buy things, but steal.

>>8834998
It's the metric shills for fossil fuels use.
Read the thread you replied to, I also think it is completly retarded

>>8834996
How the fuck is this supposed to refute what I said?
>Or how about this, you don't give money to the fossil fuels industry at all.
That's not what the discussion is about you jackass. At no point did I mention anything about fossil fuel subsidies being good or bad, this is about the size of fossil fuel and renewable subsidies relative to the energy output of those industries.

>>8835002
"Obama threw billions of dollars at companies that said that they were green, or were developing green technology."

"Ha.
That's just wrong"

I guess I just expect a smarter poster on /sci. What time does the library kick you off the computer.

>>8835006
What? high speed rail could be built for a fraction of the amount of tax payer money that the nanny state gives to the automotive and "infrastructure" industries

>>8835014
Not in the US it couldn't.

>>8835018
Why?
Because corporate interests control devolpment and can't make the same money they can on cars with trains?
Other than that there are no serious barriers for much of its devolpment, except for some sight-specific problems

>>8835022
Did a mean corporation steal your girlfriend and push you into a locker? Did it give you a swirly?

Retard, HSR won't work in the US because of the way our population is spread out and the layout of our cities.

>>8835003
Fun story
We didn't subsidized energy panel production for export because that's an aggressive trading tactic. China spent a lot of money subsidizing their production and won in efficiency by a large margin.

>>8835010
That's my point, the fossil fuels industry is subsidized to remain overcompetitive with alternative energy.

>>8835025
As a biologist State-capitalism is working against the survival of everything I love and is fundamentally injust and authoritarian.
I'm not seeing any barriers, please explain.

>>8835030
It's literally the reason that mass transit sucks in most of the US: our cities are laid out for cars+with a small handful of examples no region has a dense enough population to support HSR without forcing it to stop often enough that you'd do away with the H and S parts of HSR.

>>8835034
Why I said we need to tear roads out instead of rebuilding them every 5 years and bailing out the auto manufacturers and subsidizing Boeing.
That is hardly a barrier, of course hsr isn't going to work everywhere but there are plenty of places it can be applied.
Put dirt on top of old roads, we are losing soil at an alarming rate and global food supply is plummeting, while global food production goes up.

>>8835018
>>8835022
>>8835030
>>8835034

red staters detected. virtually all the up and coming blue state cities have light/commuter rail either in the works or already being constructed.

>>8834511
>british accent
I instantly stopped watching at the first 2 seconds.

>>8834910

you are defending a complete scam

>>8835043
I'm talking about interstate transport bud, and yeah it's happening, but is still being repressed by the nanny state

>>8835047
our interstate rail system isn't even bad. are you talking about moving away from diesel locomotives?

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>>8834593
>uses $700 rifle and kills more people
Boots on the ground when?

>>8835054
Eh, actually our rail system is shit. We have to truck more goods than we really should.

>>8835065
that has little to do with the physical infrastructure and more to do with the rail industries shit tier logistical prowess. trying to get a single container sent by rail is a nightmare of paperwork/red tape compared to just having some dude with a peterbilt and some meth come pick it up.

>>8835059
let me know when your rifle can take down buildings which is what the tomahawks were designed and deployed for.

>>8835070
>that has little to do with the physical infrastructure
lolno.

You literally have no clue what you're talking about if you don't know that for around the last 35 years we've been systematically ripping up railway in the US.

>>8835074
Give the grunt a $40 sledge hammer too.

>>8835078
a hammer with shotgun shells taped to it too for extra striking power.

>>8834908
>provably not going to work
You're one of these monkeys who watches Thunderf00t's whole video each time he goes off on this, and believes every word uncritically, aren't you?

He's really not analysing this stuff competently. These aren't practical installations, which should be cost-effective, they're still research projects to gain information on what kinds of problems arise when you put this stuff in the real world.

PV panel costs keep dropping, and it's going to reach a point where using the minimum amount of panels is completely the wrong thing to optimize for. Rather, finding space to put the panels, where it's close to where the power is used, where it's not an eyesore or detracting from nature or farmland, and where it might be integrated with systems that provide additional value, will be what counts.

Road surfaces are already no prettier than PV panels. They could benefit from structural and functional upgrades and automated maintenance rather than being stuck in the 1950s forever. They represent a huge amount of surface area, which is more or less in proportion to the nearby population density, and which connects between communities. It's an interesting idea to explore, certainly to the extent of spending a few million dollars on it.

Saying it's "provably not going to work" is demonstrating some serious misunderstanding, ignorance, and lack of imagination. It's like saying that nobody's going to have a computer at home, because replacing the vacuum tubes is too costly. The current implementation doesn't look great, but you have to be a real moron to dismiss the potential.

>>8834511
The world is run by C students. Nobody intelligent has ever said the words "I want to become a politician".

>>8835138
>Saying it's "provably not going to work" is demonstrating some serious misunderstanding, ignorance, and lack of imagination. It's like saying that nobody's going to have a computer at home, because replacing the vacuum tubes is too costly. The current implementation doesn't look great, but you have to be a real moron to dismiss the potential.
No you fool, as I've hinted at in this thread already, I actually work in this field and am probably the most knowledgeable person on /sci/ about it. Damn sure the most knowledgeable in this thread. Fuck, I just wrapped up a feasibility study for a 150 MW facility (incidentally, it's looking like almost a full 3/4 of the cost will be footed by taxpayers in some way shape or form). This idea, with current technology, is beyond fuckstupid. It only managed to get traction because idiots like you have hopes unconstrained by reality which makes you a perfect mark for sketchballs combined with absolutely zero understanding of the actual energy budgets (much less the technologies and what directions that they can go) involved.

Absolutely, we have to do things differently than we are now. However, that doesn't mean latch onto any idea that seems neat. Like you want to know what a far, far better use for that $2 million would have been? Get a bunch of unsexy, regular old pv panels and put them on roofs.

>>8835160
>as I've hinted at in this thread already, I actually work in this field and am probably the most knowledgeable person on /sci/ about it.
100% guaranteed worthless opinions.

>Like you want to know what a far, far better use for that $2 million would have been? Get a bunch of unsexy, regular old pv panels and put them on roofs.
Oh yeah, brilliant. Let's not research, let's throw more money at prematurely deploying immature technology, and promote the growth of companies that specialize in sucking up subsidy money. Like they're not already getting so much that it makes $2 million look like a rounding error.

>>8834511
>2 Million dollars
Chump change, even in the private sector.

>>8835180
>100% guaranteed worthless opinions.
>/sci/ where actually knowing what your talking about means you don't know what you're talking about
>Oh yeah, brilliant. Let's not research, let's throw more money at prematurely deploying immature technology, and promote the growth of companies that specialize in sucking up subsidy money. Like they're not already getting so much that it makes $2 million look like a rounding error.
I, at no point, said anything about stopping research. This money isn't going to research. It's going to shit out some shitty plastic coated panels that operate in the exact same way as every other panel on the planet. Outdoor outfitters are doing a better job of advancing solar cell technology than this company is. Goddamn, did you invest your life savings in this company?

>>8835195
>This money isn't going to research. It's going to shit out some shitty plastic coated panels that operate in the exact same way as every other panel on the planet.
This is what I'm talking about: 100% guaranteed worthless opinions.

No, it's not research into the semiconductor fabrication aspect, but it's research into methods packaging and installation. They're putting this out in the real world, out in the weather, for people to walk on, ride over, and drag things across, to see what happens.

>>8835204
Goddamn you're amazingly dense. We know how these materials wear (you know materials engineers make a living figuring out what the most suitable substance is for an application, right?). Putting them out in public will tell us absolutely nothing we do not know about these things. I don't know of any other ways to try to fit this idea into your head. There is nothing novel or of interest to the industry about this installation. Most importantly it's not even showing them anything about their next iteration of designs (which if you bothered actually looking into, you'd learn that they're now pursuing an entirely different strategy to provide robustness).

>>8834511
what exactly is gained by making solar roadways instead of just building regular solar panels? sounds like some flying cars-tier retardation that people support because it sounds cool and high-tech without bothering to think about how practical it is.

>>8835224
>We know how these materials wear (you know materials engineers make a living figuring out what the most suitable substance is for an application, right?). Putting them out in public will tell us absolutely nothing we do not know about these things

>Actual field testing is pointless. All things are known prior to experience. Nothing is more or less than the sum of its parts.

>I'm not an engineer, but I pretend to be one on 4chan.
Not very convincingly.

>>8835245
>>Actual field testing is pointless. All things are known prior to experience. Nothing is more or less than the sum of its parts.
I designed a bullet proof vest made out of 1" thick styrofoam, want to test it in the real world under real conditions for me?
>>I'm not an engineer, but I pretend to be one on 4chan.
>Not very convincingly.
I don't give a shit if you believe me or not. I find it hilarious though that you think we don't know the wear properties of the materials chosen for this though.

>>8835138
Get on my level pleb I didn't even click the link and have been a prolific poster ITT

>>8835227
>what exactly is gained by making solar roadways
Area to put the solar panels. Opportunities to incorporate other functionality into the road surface, such as sensors and signals, at reduced additional cost.

The current problem with solar panels is that they're too expensive for what they do. Except for limited installations to offset air conditioning costs in hot, sunny places or remote areas unconnected to the power grid, they're still uneconomical and installing them on any scale is economic self-harm. The future problem will be that we need to put a lot of them somewhere.

We can dedicate space exclusively to solar panels, but then we lose that space for other purposes. We can put it on buildings, but that'll have to be approved on an owner-by-owner basis, and we have to accept the appearance of it.

Roads, walkways, parking lots, playing fields, and other surfaces to be travelled over represent a huge sunlit area that won't be diminished in value by incorporating solar collectors into it.

Whether this will ever be the right thing to do is still in question, but it's worth exploring.

>>8835256
>I designed a bullet proof vest made out of 1" thick styrofoam, want to test it in the real world under real conditions for me?
So are you claiming now that this installation is actually not working? Not generating power? Crumbling instantly under real-world conditions?

This analogy is idiotic. The problem with this isn't "doesn't work", it's "too expensive". But guess what? So are all other solar collectors! It's still an uneconomical, subsidy-dependent technology. And the batteries and fuel-synthesis tech we'll need to go all-solar isn't ready either. It would be ruinous to try to switch our society over to solar power now. Your internship where you fetch coffee for people planning a 3/4-subsidy solar plant isn't honest quasi-employment, it's a byproduct of some backroom deal to line a politician's friends' pockets with taxpayer cash.

The only reason we're fucking around with any version of solar technology is the assumption that costs will come down in the future. So what's interesting to study today isn't just what's the least uneconomical right now, it's what might be worth doing when the costs come down far enough.

>>8835291
>when the costs come down far enough
IF the costs come down far enough.

>>8835309
There's no "if" about it. There's no process in manufacturing and deploying solar cells that can't be automated, they can be made of abundant materials, and they can produce the energy that's needed for the manufacture of more solar cells.

We have in nature the example of the dandelion seed, which uses only sunlight and local raw materials to grow into a mature plant in two months and produce a hundred seeds, then carry on producing thousands of seeds over its lifetime, with no input of human labor. Under ideal conditions, one tiny seed, too light to feel the weight of on your finger tip, could make a trillion plants in a year, covering ten thousand square kilometers.

That's what nature reveals to us about the potential of solar power. We need to achieve only a tiny fraction of nature's competence at deploying solar collectors for our costs to become negligible, and for the question to become one of where we'll allow them to be.

>>8835360
>There's no process in manufacturing and deploying solar cells that can't be automated, they can be made of abundant materials, and they can produce the energy that's needed for the manufacture of more solar cells.
Sounds fantastic, but if that's all really the case then what exactly is preventing solar from being cheap enough today?

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>>8835003
I live in Appalachia cunt. We are more responsible for alternative energy than you think.

>>8835389
Don't bother. Not worth your effort.

>say you have super genius thing that will solve massive first world problem (ie: energy)
>get a bunch of faggot engineers from MIT to back it up
>make ted talk on it
>write grant proposal
>take money and run

>>8835380
>if that's all really the case then what exactly is preventing solar from being cheap enough today?
Insufficient technological competence.

It's like how we know from theoretical studies that computers can still get about a thousand times faster at serial execution and a billion times more energy efficient, but we haven't worked out the implementation details yet. We'll get there, but it'll take a while.

>>8835389
more like Appagaychia

>>8834656
the bombs were also already made. they weren't made specific for that mission.

>>8834734
>Chernobyl is still uninhabitable.
Tell that to the people who have been living there with no discernable health effects. I'm sure that they'll be surprised to know that they're supposed to be dead, or have lots of cancers, or something.

>>8834906
>Ffs the nanny state is why solar energy is non-competitive compared to fossil fuels.
No, it's due to the intermittency and the lack of a cheap scalable energy storage tech.

>>8834950
>Fucking someone needs to break GE's monopoly on nuke.
It's not that at all. It's the ridiculous governmental regulations and imposed costs and risks that are the big problem.

Not all regulations are bad. Some nuclear oversight is needed. The current regs are obscene.

>>8834954
>lead acid batteries for home use.
Not even lead for the amount of needed batteries by at least a factor of 100x, assuming perfectly efficient lead acid batteries, when they only use about 1/4 of the lead ions to store charge.

>>8834954
> Ultracapacitors and flywheels
Now you're just doing a gish gallop. It takes me pages and dozens of citations to refute every single one of your asinine, unsourced claims. And yes, I am going to site that German paper.

https://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/

>>8834954
>The grid may die and be replaced by local systems.
Then we'll need even more storage, which is already an impossible task.

>>8834532
Russian shill detected

>>8834511
>Le camera footage disproves how alkali metals react man
Sure the roadway is bullshit but Thunderbrainlet is worse.

>>8834972
Back of napkin calculations.

Worldwide electricity demand is about 2.5 TW. If we move all industrial heat and transport to electricity, it could easily be 10 TW. 2.1 eV for common lead-acid batteries. (2.1 eV) (1) is the amount of energy that can be stored by by 1 lead ion. 207 atomic mass units for a single lead ion.

1 kg of lead can store an amount of energy equal to:
= (1 kg lead)(1000 g / kg) (6.02e23 ions lead / 207 grams lead) (1 eV stored energy / 1 ion lead)
= (1)(1000) (6.02e23 / 207) (1 eV / 1)
= 4.66e5 joules

If we're serious, we'll need about 7 days of storage for the grid:
7 days demand = (7 days)(10 TW) = 6.05e18 joules

The amount of lead needed for this perfectly efficient battery is:
(6.05e18 joules)(1 kg lead / 4.66e5 joules) = 1.30e13 kg lead

Wolrdwide reserves of lead are around: 7.26e10

Only short by 2 orders of magnitude.

This doesn't even address the contamination and pollution that would happen with something this scale. Whatever price you think that lead-acid batteries cost, it's going to be a lot more if we try this. Finally, you can also look at the energy costs of building these batteries, and together with the solar panels, it's almost true that it costs more energy as input compared to the entire energy output of the system over the lifetime of the system. That's the point of the German paper.

https://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/

>>8834978
Personally, I think scientifically speaking, waste is a complete non-issue that entirely a political invention. It's a myth.

Whereas, contamination of surrounding land in case of an accident at the reactor, including melt-downs, that's the only real serious concern.

That are maybe nuclear weapons proliferation.

>>8834520
>The democratic state of Idaho

>>8835138
>Saying it's "provably not going to work" is demonstrating some serious misunderstanding, ignorance, and lack of imagination.
You could make the argument for perpetual motion machines.

Back in reality, the energy costs of the batteries plus the intermittency of solar and wind means that solar and wind cannot power our society.

https://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/

>>8834511

You know 2 million dollars is like 3 engineers, and a construction crew for a year, right?

>>8835224
~feels~
I have great sympathy for you.

>>8835774
>That *and* maybe nuclear weapons proliferation.

Fixed.

>>8834627
Ur gay

>>8834627
>trump's syrian tomahawks
Hillary wanted a no-fly zone, and Obama was the first president to be at war every single day of his 8 yar presidency. Neoliberals have shown themselves every bit as hawkish as the "really right wing."
The problems go far deeper than which of the two parties you happen to vote into office. Mostly it's because the state is a device of class rule and exists to defend the bourgeoisie and pursue its interests at home and abroad. Get everybody to vote Democrat and you get the same neocon shenanigans, just in the way that makes late night TV hosts softball their perpetrators out of spite for "the other side."

>>8835765
>Thunderbrainlet is worse.
Seriously? How so?

>>8834607

Because someone's roof space is a finite resource that can be exhaust. Once you run out of prime locations, you move on to inferior secondary locations.

>>8834597

Didn't you watch the EEV videos? They broke in the ovens because they did it in the last minute.

>>8834520
I think that 2 million was signed off by a republican, unless I'm thinking of a similar incident. Anyways He fell for the "muh American dream, the underdog innovating!!!" Meme. Even though it's 2017 where humanity's knowledge of science is so advanced it is getting more and more difficult to give out Nobel prizes, because it takes massive teams of scientist's brain power for cutting edge science.

>>8834620
>placing a nuclear reactor directly into the ocean
wew lad it's like you WANT to have another Fukishima incident

>>8836556
literally nobody has died due to radiation from fukushima.

Does anyone have more information on alternative energy, such as MSR and the like?

>>8834518
>>white mans welfare
>only white people are in position to be crony capitalists
>therefore crony capitalism is a white thing

Mate fuck off

>>8834563
With a panel that faces the sun you can get upwards of 70% energy converted

With a stationary but still facing the sun you get about 50

With one flat on the ground not facing the sun you only get 30

These things so far have made about 10 cents of electricity per day average. They're garbage

>>8836624
>With a panel that faces the sun you can get upwards of 70% energy converted
HAHA, no. The best of the best in ideal conditions gets you less than 50%.

>>8836564

No one has died directly but the cost at the civil and financial level is still high.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/10/japan-fukushima-nuclear-disaster-evacuees-forced-return-home-radiation

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/04/01/national/real-cost-fukushima-disaster-will-reach-¥70-trillion-triple-governments-estimate-think-tank/#.WPYp45EpDqA

Ironically it would have been cheaper if they had died and the site was abandoned.

>>8834511
>surprised that the state is incompetent

Really Nigga? All the money they spend isn't somebody else's money. You can't expect them to give a shit.

>>8836659
...*is* somebody else's...

>>8836624
Also they still can't light up and toy still can't drive in them

Retards are going to put this shit in a parking lot, cars are going to cover the solar panels and you're going to make zero electricity

Not only that but the demo that was put up broke when people walked on it then it caught fire when it rained

>>8836637
A panel that faces the sun on a motorized turnstiles to keep it pointing towards the sun at all times

>>8836673
Will still give you below 50% conversion. Notice how I said ideal conditions? That includes not only tracking but also concentration.

>>8834689
It's not clean energy. The amount of resources used to create this useless thing makes it the exact opposite of green.

>>8834734
Nuclear pollution can be contained, this isn't true for CO2 emissions.

>>8834552
>>8834526
>muh nuclear roads
>muh nuclear cars
>one accident
>KABOOOM

am i to smart for sci ?

>Putting solar cells ON the road
>Where they will be driven over every single day
>Where every scratch on the glass covering them reduces efficiency
>Instead of putting them right next to the road

>>8836795
What if we made the sidewalks the solarcells and the road a big induction charger for EVs?

>>8834521
>>8834526
Not sure about the US, but fusion has been getting some funding here by simply calling it fusion energy rather than nuclear fusion.

>>8835781
>>Saying it's "provably not going to work" is demonstrating some serious misunderstanding, ignorance, and lack of imagination.
>You could make the argument for perpetual motion machines.
No, you can't, you complete fucking idiot. Solar collectors on road surfaces demonstrably work. The argument against them is a matter of cost-efficiency, which makes it a guessing game of how the technology will advance over time. Perpetual motion machines don't work, and there are excellent fundamental physical arguments that they never will.

>https://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/
Oh my god, you fucking mentally ill garbage. How can you keep reposting this wrong, stupid shit time after time? You're like a human spambot.

>>8834526
>>8834552
>>8834521
Why can't we just fling it into outer space?
We could have a really big nuclear waste trebuchet (the superior siege weapon)

>>8834511
Study the "Hype" thing from vidya, apply it to a concept based on green energy, disregard feasability or even if it's actually "greener" than the conventional technology, just say lots of time it is. You don't intend to release a finished produict anyway.
Then study "SJW" rethoric and apply it against scientists who'll comes whith some maths proving you are a fraud.
The longer you are able to keep the hype alive the more you'll get paid.
Protip: leftists are the most guilible idiots, they should be your target audience, play with things that tingle their feefee (africa, racemix , immigration are good starting points).

>>8834511
Not asking questions like that publicly would be a fantastic start.

Then again, if you had any charisma at all you probably wouldn't be here to begin with.

>>8836893
>Solar collectors on road surfaces demonstrably work.
No they dont

The few that exist barely function, have caught fire, haven't had any cars driven on them, don't make any electricity worth their cost, can't light up bright enough to matter, oh yea and caught fire when it rained

>>8836893
>No, you can't, you complete fucking idiot. Solar collectors on road surfaces demonstrably work. The argument against them is a matter of cost-efficiency
These are mutually exclusive ideas. In an application such as this, not being cost effective (orders of magnitude of inefficiency, btw) is literally it not "working". To your point we already know that
1) putting a pv panel some place where it gets some amount of light above the minimum required to create a flow of electricity will create a flow of electricity
2) Putting a transparent layer above this so long as it allows through enough light such that the luminance is above the minimum threshold will do this.
3) The wear properties of the materials involved.
4) how to calculate the amount of current any given configuration at any given orientation at any given geographic location will provide within acceptable tolerances
5) The kind of wear and occlusions that wear would create given any kind of traffic it will experience
6) How these occlusions will affect the amount of electricity the panels will produce

All without spending $2 million. You can literally go figure this shit out yourself with information you find online. You'll invariably figure a higher amount of electricity than is possible because I doubt you can manage the modeling involved to get a high level of precision, but you'll still be able to ballpark it well enough to discover it's a retarded idea to waste $2 million on implementing.
>how the technology will advance over time.
Spending $2 million on extant and unworkable under any conditions technology does literally nothing to advancing the technologies involved. If anything it retards advancement through loss of opportunities to better use that money and through having this company waste its time and resources producing and supporting something that everyone who knows jack shit knows it won't work.

>>8836893
>Perpetual motion machines don't work, and there are excellent fundamental physical arguments that they never will.
JUST AS THERE ARE MOUNTAINS OF FUNDAMENTAL PHYSICAL "ARGUMENTS" THAT SHOW THAT THIS PARTICULAR IMPLEMENTATION IS POINTLESS AND WASTEFUL.

You have denied over and over again the exact same kinds of science that you now are appealing to.

>>8836659
>He doesn't stop to question whether what he's saying makes sense
The "other people's money" dichotomy exists only in the chicken heads of useful idiots. In reality, once a department has been budgeted money, it is "their" money, just like in any private enterprise, which also gets its money from the people it serves. If you're going to talk about government inefficiency, at least provide a sensible reason like the lack of profit motive or something.

>>8835875
>BRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAP

>>8836929
>>Solar collectors on road surfaces demonstrably work.
>No they dont
>The few that exist barely function
>The few that exist function
>They don't work, they function.
>Tell my wife I'm an orangutan.

>>8836942
>not being cost effective (orders of magnitude of inefficiency, btw) is literally it not "working"
Okay, that's great. Now you're ready to agree that no solar power "works".

>Spending $2 million on extant and unworkable under any conditions technology does literally nothing to advancing the technologies involved.
Exact same argument applies to all deployments of solar power. Wrong and stupid, but applies equally.

You've got to put this shit in perspective. People have been trying out solar deployments since the cost was $200+ per watt, and they were saying all of this stuff about it then. Now they're down to, "Okay, so it got a hundred times cheaper with no signs of slowing down, but what kind of BATTERIES are you going to use if you intend for it to COMPLETELY replace all fossil fuels?"

Solar installations on roads, walkways, and roof surfaces you can walk on will get cheaper and better quickly, as long as someone out there is willing to throw at least few million dollars per year at the best available option, no matter how shitty.

>>8836950
>FUNDAMENTAL PHYSICAL "ARGUMENTS"
>THIS PARTICULAR IMPLEMENTATION
Absolutely chimp-tier.

>>8837430
>"Okay, so it got a hundred times cheaper with no signs of slowing down, but what kind of BATTERIES are you going to use if you intend for it to COMPLETELY replace all fossil fuels?"
This pretty much, and now Goodenough is about to blow these faggots out of the water yet again. The fossil shills on /sci/ are already on suicide watch over the new paper, it's glorious.

>>8837430
>Okay, that's great. Now you're ready to agree that no solar power "works".
I would never disagree with that statement.

>Exact same argument applies to all deployments of solar power. Wrong and stupid, but applies equally.
No it doesn't. Let's say I have a position where I'm to allocate $200 to fight hunger. Is it a better use of the money to give one guy a fancy $200 meal or 40 people a $5 meal? Neither moves the needle much in terms of global hunger but one is far more effective than the other.
>You've got to put this shit in perspective [snip], "Okay, so it got a hundred times cheaper with no signs of slowing down, but what kind of BATTERIES are you going to use if you intend for it to COMPLETELY replace all fossil fuels?"
Only people who have no understanding of the technology. Sorry but solar is just not globally viable as the primary energy source even if you posit near perfect conversion. True enough the more efficient you get the more viable it can become nearer to the poles, but that's speculating on great, massive leaps in efficiency that there's no reason to think will happen any time soon.
>Solar installations on roads, walkways, and roof surfaces you can walk on will get cheaper and better quickly, as long as someone out there is willing to throw at least few million dollars per year at the best available option, no matter how shitty.
You're still far better off just going to companies that are actively researching this than a company that's ready to shit out something that everyone knows won't work by any realistic measure.

>chimp-tier
Nope. And it's telling that you can't refute it.

>>8837564
>True enough the more efficient you get the more viable it can become nearer to the poles, but that's speculating on great, massive leaps in efficiency that there's no reason to think will happen any time soon.
Oh, you're one of these guys that thinks conversion efficiency is the main issue for PV technology, rather than watts/$.

There's a hard ceiling on conversion efficiency, but none on watts/$. That's why we got up around 10-20% efficiency pretty easily and mostly hung around there (with higher-efficiency cells remaining rather exotic), but the watts/$ has improved by orders of magnitude with no end in sight.

I made the example of dandelions earlier in the thread: under ideal conditions, one dandelion seed can make a trillion dandelion seeds in one year, using only sun, wind, and common local materials, with no input of labor. Things are going to start getting crazy shortly after you first hear of a solar power system fully repaying the energy of its own manufacture in under a year, because we know from nature's example that that ride doesn't stop until it's a under a day.

You'll see the day when you can buy rolls of all-weather solar collector at retail for $1/kilowatt. You'll see solar shingles side-by-side with regular shingles at comparable prices, and the same for siding. And yes, there'll be solar road surface, and they won't even hesitate to paint markings on it.

>Sorry but solar is just not globally viable as the primary energy source
The thing about "globally" is that the world is a big place, and that kilowatt per square meter for full-on sunlight really adds up. More solar energy falls on the surface of the Earth in *one day* than that released by all of the fossil fuels burned through history. Only a few of the highest-population countries would struggle to find enough area for energy self-sufficiency with 10% efficient collectors.

>>8834511
That's really not a lot in terms of the US budget and pretty much the minimum you would need to spend to get an idea what a viable scale project would look like

>>8834532
Could of just spent the money roofed solar panels instead.

>>8835760
What?

give me a quick rundown of this thread

>>8837837
>Oh, you're one of these guys that thinks conversion efficiency is the main issue for PV technology, rather than watts/$.
Wow, you can't think more than one step beyond your incomplete reasoning which is amazing because you even address what the main contributing factor to watt/$ will be going forward: land. A 20% less efficient panel requires using 20% more (actually a little more than 20% but that's not worth bothering with for this conversation) panels covering 20% more area to get the same production. It doesn't matter if you get the install and maintenance cost down to $0.000000001/watt if you don't have any place to put them, or what's more likely the case only have adoption in such a way that cannot fully power the entire grid (and I'm talking about realistic grids that don't pretend that transmission losses aren't a huge deal).

As for your whole "PV PANELS EVERYWHERE", dude, you can't raise a fucking flagpole in many neighborhoods. The adoption rate will not in the next hundred years or so be anywhere near what you think they'll be. I do agree that solar will one day be an almost ubiquitous technology, but you and I will be long dead before that day.

>fully repaying the energy of its own manufacture in a year
Can you even come close to fathoming how far away that is (and how it's pretty damn close to impossible at your "10% efficiency" in many latitudes).
>kw/m^2 for full-on sunlight
which a very limited area actually gets for even a significant portion of the year. Seriously, go look up insolation values for different latitudes.

Let some realism into your life. You're pretending that there will be no competition for land usage. You're pretending people won't chose aesthetics over a slightly cheaper power bill. You're pretending that the sun strikes the surface of the earth uniformly and have posited an "all weather solar collector" which I'm supposing will magically make useful amounts of electricity in overcast/foggy conditions..

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>>8834511
Come to Brazil, our health ministry funds and supports homeopathy shit and has been looking into supporting alternative medicine

>>8837909
I tried to write "alternative" medicine with full-width characters but it got converted into normal ones. Oh well.

>>8834511
Today I just learned that my country (Canada) is funding a relief group in Syria working in Al Qaeda territory.

5 million dollars blown in the air like that. Brits pay 32 million euros. Do you expect our governments to be anything but retarded?

>>8837891
>>fully repaying the energy of its own manufacture in a year
>Can you even come close to fathoming how far away that is
Actually, it happened a while ago in good areas. In poorish areas, I think it's still hanging around 2 years.

>It doesn't matter if you get the install and maintenance cost down to $0.000000001/watt if you don't have any place to put them
This is exactly why we're in a thread discussing solar collectors on roads and walkways: one customer can approve installation on a huge area and there would be little objection on aesthetic grounds.

But let's say we're only getting a round-the-clock average of 10 watts per square meter (10% of 100 watts insolation, just about the minimum for places where a reasonable number of people live). The average lot size for a single-family home is about 800 square meters. If half of that (roof, siding, fence, driveway, walkway) is covered with solar collectors, that's 4 kilowatts, more than enough to run the household and charge two cars for typical daily driving, with low-efficiency collectors in poor conditions.

The world is, of course, a big place, and very little of it is dedicated to housing. And as you go further north, you get lower population densities and more wasteland to put solar farms on. I think there's likely to be a trend of country homes with large PV-shaded yards, as a simple way to make extra money.

>an "all weather solar collector" which I'm supposing will magically make useful amounts of electricity in overcast/foggy conditions..
First of all, ordinary solar panels already make useful amounts of electricity in overcast conditions: 10-25% of what they do when the sun isn't obstructed, and they make it in more places (i.e. on cloudy days, the shady side of the house can actually produce more power, offsetting the loss). Secondly, what I meant by "all weather" is that you can leave it outside and the weather won't ruin it right away.

>>8837932
the cause is good, but the money should be coming from USA, I agree

>>8836624
>With a panel that faces the sun you can get upwards of 70% energy converted

My ass. What, with some super special one-of-a-kind lab demo? Real cells get 15% conversion.

>>8836735
No one is suggesting nuclear cars. That's just silly. And impossible. The shielding alone would mean you're driving around massive, massive tanks, not cars. The shielding has a minimum thickness of heavy material, i.e. steel, concrete.

>>8836893
>Oh my god, you fucking mentally ill garbage. How can you keep reposting this wrong, stupid shit time after time? You're like a human spambot.

No, I'm just convinced of my positions, and you've done nothing to dissuade me.

The German paper shows that even pumped water storage is inadequate, and current batteries are a magnitude worse on the ESOI / EROEI measure.

>>8837837
>More solar energy falls on the surface of the Earth in *one day* than that released by all of the fossil fuels burned through history.

The problem is the amount. Well, land would become a problem, and raw materials would become a problem, but there are bigger problems: intermittency and energy costs. It's like having the ground covered in pennies. For many people, it's not worth your time to pick up a penny, if you could only pick up one at a time. There might be limitless resources there, but they're not dense enough and easy enough to obtain to be noteworthy.

That's what solar is and wind is because of intermittency and because of the lack of battery tech that can solve the intermittency.

>>8838004
>First of all, ordinary solar panels already make useful amounts of electricity in overcast conditions: 10-25% of what they do when the sun isn't obstructed, and they make it in more places (i.e. on cloudy days, the shady side of the house can actually produce more power, offsetting the loss). Secondly, what I meant by "all weather" is that you can leave it outside and the weather won't ruin it right away.

Only because they're mooching off the grid for reliable power during the night, during winter, and during cloudy weather. Otherwise they would quickly find that the "value" of those solar panels is substantially less than what they think it is.

>>8838646
>land would become a problem, and raw materials would become a problem
No, you fucking chimp, neither is a problem. No scarce materials are needed, nor is there anything like a shortage of suitable land to meet our power needs.

>there are bigger problems: intermittency and energy costs
You don't understand the first thing about "energy costs". Solar panels are already strongly energy-positive. In good areas, they pay back their energy in the first year. In poorer areas, it's 2-3 years. Then they last 20+ years. That means once the initial base is installed, they can easily pay their own replacement costs with a small percentage of production.

Solar temporarily has trouble competing with fossil fuels. The technology is already fully adequate, if fossil fuels weren't an option, to support modern industrial society (given reasonable time to deploy it). However, it's going to keep advancing and getting cheaper until fossil fuels look pointless by comparison.

As for intermittency, that has many solutions. The simplest one is electrolysis. That's about 70% efficient, and you can store hydrogen underground, like natural gas, in naturally-occurring geological features which offer essentially unlimited capacity. Burn it in big turbines, and you're looking at about 50% round-trip efficiency from intermittent solar electricity to on-demand electricity. You can also pipe it around to homes for heating and cooking. React it with nitrogen from air, you have ammonia, a workable dense fuel for cars and aircraft. React it with CO2 (more expensive to capture than nitrogen, but doable), and you have methanol, your starting point for synthetic organic chemistry.

So this is the baseline, the worst case if you've never heard of a battery: you make hydrogen in sunny places, pipe it to cold places, and it's basically like having natural gas. This is workable. Not competitive with our current supply of natural gas, but the cost increase wouldn't ruin it all.

>>8838693
>As for intermittency, that has many solutions.
Not a single one that has been shown to work. It's all "pie in the sky", including your hydrogen synthesis / fuel cell storage plan.

There is a reason that pumped water storage is the only storage used at "grid scales". It's because the rest of the tech is ridiculously speculative and downright bad.

>No, you fucking chimp, neither is a problem. No scarce materials are needed, nor is there anything like a shortage of suitable land to meet our power needs.
Target 10 billion people, at the European standard of living, moving all fossil fuel usage to electricity. You get about 50 TW, maybe 100 TW. At 15% conversion efficiency, at yearly average solar radiation surface values in the Sahara desert, that's the entire Sahara desert, depending on exactly how you slice the numbers. For non-Sahara solar radiation, that's most of the entire South American continent.

Sahara Desert 9.2 million km2
South America 17.84 million km2

(100 TW) (sq meter / 200 W [Sahara desert, generous number]) (1 / 15% conversion efficiency)
= approx 3.33 million km2

I haven't taken into account interverter losses (about 5%), the need to solve for the average winter day because there is no season-scale storage (which means about 50% more land needed for tropical regions), transmission losses (variable, but significant), round-trip energy losses for whatever battery scheme you're proposing (30% to 200% more, depending), and so forth.

Land area is a serious problem when you start seriously facing the scale of the problem.

>>8838706
Why invent some arbitrary fantasy demand for energy that doesn't exist and will never exist.

>>8838009
Funding for terrorists is not a good cause

>>8838727
>Why invent some arbitrary fantasy demand for energy that doesn't exist and will never exist.

What? Are you going to kill 9 billion people in the next 50 years? Are you going to militarily dominate their country and prevent them from burning coal? Or are you going to actually solve global warming? This is what solving global warming entails.

>>8838706
>200 W [Sahara desert, generous number]
That's not generous, you trash. A real-world measurement is 265 watts. Don't pick favorable numbers for your argument and try to pass them off as "generous" to the opposition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
>The IEA estimates that, in 2013, total world energy consumption was 9,301 Mtoe, or 3.89 × 1020 joules, equal to an average power consumption of 12.3 terawatts.

>Target 10 billion people, at the European standard of living, moving all fossil fuel usage to electricity. You get about 50 TW, maybe 100 TW.
>Sahara Desert 9.2 million km2
>(100 TW) (sq meter / 200 W [Sahara desert, generous number]) (1 / 15% conversion efficiency)
>= approx 3.33 million km2

Okay, so assume we're making eight times as much as humanity's current total, all-sources energy production. Then assume we have to put it all together in one place on Earth, to try and make it seem excessively huge. Then assume low-efficiency cells. Then assume the sun makes about 25% less light than it actually does.

...and it still all fits in one third of one worthless desert. And you still have the gall to call that a problem.

>there is no season-scale storage
I just explained season-scale storage with hydrogen, and you've more than accounted for the losses with your ridiculous fudging to try and make an argument.

Stop posting on this topic. You have nothing to contribute.

>>8838730
>fits in one third

Can't you at least read my posts and be honest please? I cited several other factors that I did not include in the calculation, which easily doubles or triples the requirement.

>>8838730
>That's not generous, you trash. A real-world measurement is 265 watts.
We have to deal with yearly average, not daily average, for this sort of argument, which I admit IIRC is 220 W, right? Sue me for being imprecise.

>>8838730
>Okay, so assume we're making eight times as much as humanity's current total,

Again, are you going to kill 9 billion people, or militarily dominate their country to ban them from burning coal? Because if you're not, then this is what is going to happen with coal, unless you provide an alternative that is cost competitive.

>all-sources energy production.

I'm interested in other approaches. I'm interested in discussing mixed approaches. However, you made the bold claim that land and raw materials are not an issue. I noted that it would require /substantial/ amounts of land. Paving over the Sahara desert is an ecological disaster of unmitigated proportions. You don't care about desert ecosystems apparently.

>Then assume low-efficiency cells.

When we're paving over an entire continent (i.e. the South America example), yes, I'm going to assume economically competitive solar cells, and not lab tech demos, and that means polycrystal silicon.

>>8838730
>I just explained season-scale storage with hydrogen, and you've more than accounted for the losses with your ridiculous fudging to try and make an argument.

It doesn't exist. It's a pipedream. It's completely unsubstantiated. No one is looking at doing this. If there was a good chance that it would work, it would be massively valuable in places like Germany, where that could earn you a lot of money, even for covering daily and weekly shortages and variability.

The only prudent thing to do is to go with the tech that we have now. EROEI says current solar and wind and storage won't work, so that means building lots of AP-1000s. We might have already passed several serious global warming tipping points. We need to be solving this now. There is no time to delay taking action to wait for further nebulous research.

However, the prudent thing to do also means doing lots more research concurrent with a massive rollout of nuclear power plants. This includes research and demos of IFR, several MSRs like ThorCon, and also your asinine ideas of making hydrogen from water, pumping it in a cave, and burning it later (whether air combustion or fuel cell).

PS: You cited mighty high numbers for round-trip efficiencies. Are you using platinum perchance?
http://e360.yale.edu/features/a_scarcity_of_rare_metals_is_hindering_green_technologies
You might not have heard, but platinum is quite rare, and expensive. You also might not have heard that air combustion of hydrogen gas in a heat engine is much less efficient, maybe 30-45% efficiency to electricity in a heat engine.

>>8834637
Fuck off T_D faggot. Trump's a trick, and this is coming from a hardcore /pol/ack

>>8838743
>Paving over the Sahara desert is an ecological disaster of unmitigated proportions. You don't care about desert ecosystems apparently.

>unmitigated proportions
You are unmitigated trash.

Nobody's going to build the whole world's power supply in one location. Humanity already uses 50 million square kilometers to grow food. With your unreasonably unfavorable assumptions, you've estimated we'd meet our needs through solar would take 3.33 million square kilometers, under 10% of the agricultural-use area.

>>8838744
>>I just explained season-scale storage with hydrogen, and you've more than accounted for the losses with your ridiculous fudging to try and make an argument.
>No one is looking at doing this.
Oh really? You've never heard of the "hydrogen economy"? People have been looking at doing this for decades. It's been thoroughly analysed.

You just take a position and make stuff up to support it.

>EROEI says current solar and wind and storage won't work
Delusional idiots say this. Sane people point out that most of the world is too corrupt and incompetent to be trusted with nuclear power.

If you want to do napkin math, how about this? Currently the total world nuclear power output is about 300 GW. To make your 100 TW, over 300 nuclear power plants have to be built for every one currently existing. Adverse events that currently occur once per year will occur once per day. There will be a screwup as bad as Chernobyl or Fukushima every month, not even accounting for the reduced competence and integrity of available personnel, or sneaky attempts to make nuclear weapons.

There's no way nuclear power is going to get expanded so much.

>You also might not have heard that air combustion of hydrogen gas in a heat engine is much less efficient, maybe 30-45% efficiency to electricity in a heat engine.
New gas turbine generators are doing about 60% efficiency, and much of the world's energy consumption is for heating or chemical reactions.

>>8839747
>you've estimated we'd meet our needs through solar would take 3.33 million square kilometers, under 10% of the agricultural-use area.

So no, you're not actually going to engage honestly. Gotcha.

>>8839747
>Oh really? You've never heard of the "hydrogen economy"? People have been looking at doing this for decades. It's been thoroughly analysed.

That's like trying to run the grid on gasoline. Do you understand how wasteful and impractical that would be? Hydrogen might work for cars, because we can afford to waste a shitton of energy for transport. Powering the grid is way different.

>Delusional idiots say this. Sane people point out that most of the world is too corrupt and incompetent to be trusted with nuclear power.
One is based on facts, and the other is contradiction to all known facts. In this "corrupt" and "incompetent" world, nuclear has killed less people (per joule) than any other source, including solar, wind, and hydro.

> If you want to do napkin math, how about this? Currently the total world nuclear power output is about 300 GW. To make your 100 TW, over 300 nuclear power plants have to be built for every one currently existing. Adverse events that currently occur once per year will occur once per day. There will be a screwup as bad as Chernobyl or Fukushima every month, not even accounting for the reduced competence and integrity of available personnel,

Chernobyl won't happen again, because we won't build a nuclear power plant as bad as Chernobyl ever again. In the west, including Japan and South Korea, we have never built a nuclear reactor that is as dangerous as Chernobyl. There are vast and radical differences in safety between different reactor designs, and Chernobyl is the worst that has ever been built. It had a positive reactivity coefficient for fucks sake.

As for Fukushima, the other nuclear power plants on Japan survived the accident just fine. In fact, several other reactors at the same site survived just fine. This was a once in a century tsunami. I dispute your method of statistics.

Further, the AP-1000 is much safer than the Fukushima reactor. Fukushima is like a 40 year old design. The AP-1000 would have survived the scenario without a problem at all, and it would have been back to full operation as soon as the grid was ready.

I agree with you that tech expertise is going to go down when we're not dealing with ex US navy operators, but there are safer designs still than even the AP-1000 such as ThorCon. This is also why I really like the ThorCon design: The design is built to be "idiot-proof". There is no valve that the operator can fail to open. There is no valve that the operator is required to open. The thing is entire safe with zero operator intervention, and there is zero operator intervention that can break it. You can have loss of grid, loss of power, loss of coolant flow, and even loss of coolant, and the thing is safe with zero intervention required for months (or indefinitely for a little more cash for a little more water in the cooling pool plus a concrete chimney).

But again, I'll take the proven track record of nuclear over solar, wind, and hydro any day. History shows that it kills less people (per joule). Even assuming you can get around the EROEI problem, and you cannot, solar, wind, and hydro would still kill more people than nuclear would, and it would by more than an order of magnitude.

> or sneaky attempts to make nuclear weapons.

No one has ever used a civilian nuclear power plant to make weapons material. It's cheaper and easier to make a dedicated custom-purpose plant to get plutonium, or to build a bunch of centrifuges to get U-235. The genie is already out of the bottle, and any country that wants to do so, can do so, and expanding nuclear power won't change that. Look at North Korea for all of the proof that you need. The link between "nuclear power plant spread" and "nuclear weapons proliferation" is tenuous at best, and largely a myth.

>>8839904
I will grant that we do want to make reactors that cannot be easily repurposed to make nuclear weapons. This is a difficult discussion, where we want real trained experts. We want IAEA input, and IAEA monitors everywhere.

But having said that, it is true that conventional light water reactors are not good for making weapons, and to use them to make plutonium, everyone knows, because of the drastic changes that have to be done, and that's why every country that has ever built a bomb has done so with dedicated non-civilian purpose-built reactors, or with a bunch of centrifuges, and everyone already knows how to do that, and already having nuclear power in your country doesn't really make it that much easier to build a bunch of centrifuges or a special design reactor.

Why do people even support solar roadways?

Such a flawed idea even from the conceptual level.

Just invest on normal green energy sources.

Eolic farms are having great success and lowering their prices along with PV.

It just enrages me that people fall for this meme just because it sounds "cool"

>>8839897
>Chernobyl won't happen again, because we won't build a nuclear power plant as bad as Chernobyl ever again. In the west, including Japan and South Korea, we have never built a nuclear reactor that is as dangerous as Chernobyl. There are vast and radical differences in safety between different reactor designs, and Chernobyl is the worst that has ever been built. It had a positive reactivity coefficient for fucks sake.
That wasn't the issue with Chernobyl. They had a positive reactivity coefficient but they also turned off the cooling system without pre-revving up the diesel generator to take over in an emergency situation while having absolutely not Nuclear engineers in the control rooms and having disabled the computer system which controls the control rods.

Also a bunch of flaws in everything else you say too, but I'm too lazy to go into math is disproven your stuff about energy efficiency of Solar.

>>8835962
Oh I'm sorry I didn't raise that every fucking roof in America is made of solar panels

>>8836897
>Why don't we just dispose of it the most expensive and dangerous way possible?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKUz5ZUPqM8
Nuclear is expensive as fuck, that's why fuck all has been invested on it for decades.

>>8840542
>trebuchets are dangerous and expensive

>>8839916
>conventional light water reactors are not good for making weapons, and to use them to make plutonium, everyone knows, because of the drastic changes that have to be done
False.

Spent fuel rods from conventional light water reactors contain large amounts of plutonium. It's less desirable than what you can make in a dedicated isotope-production reactor due to the presence of unwanted isotopes, but it's still much easier to purify the ~70% Pu239 than to extract the <1% U235 from natural uranium, and Pu239 is a far superior material to U235 for the primary.

>every country that has ever built a bomb has done so with dedicated non-civilian purpose-built reactors, or with a bunch of centrifuges
Most of them have also made bombs from spent fuel rods.

Most of the nuclear club got started when nuclear power wasn't a thing.

Of the roughly 200 countries in the world, 20 countries have or had nuclear weapons (either from their own domestic programs or through weapon-sharing agreements), and two more have or had known nuclear weapon programs which didn't (yet) result in known weapons (Iraq, Iran), and one is known to be "merely the turn of a screwdriver" from having nuclear weapons (Japan). 31 countries have or had nuclear power plants.

Nuclear power is basically impossible to separate from the option of having nuclear weapons. The minority of nuclear power states that aren't nuclear weapon states have almost all chosen not to have nuclear weapons. The rest inherited their nuclear power plants from considerably more competent previous regimes which didn't want nuclear weapons, and their current governments certainly wouldn't be trusted with nuclear power today.

To enforce antiproliferation rules against a country with nuclear industry, you have to be willing to invade immediately when there's any irregularity with the monitoring. The Peaceful Atom was a mistake.

>>8840365
I'm sorry for not writing more, considering I already wrote 3 posts in response.

/sarcasm

Fucking shitter. You're going to pretend to take me to task because i didn't give a full expose on the problems of Chernobyl, in the given context? Seriously? Fuck you.

>>8840792
I put it to you like this: Suppose a foreign country starts developing nuclear weapon capability from scratch? Is that reason enough to use military force to stop them? Suppose they get "close". Is that reason enough to use military force to stop them? Suppose they test some bombs, like North Korea. Is that reason enough to use military force to stop them? Is it ever justified using military force to stop the development of nuclear weapons and destroy those already created?

These questions need to be answered no matter whether some other country, i.e. my country, the US, decides to use more nuclear power. These questions needs to be answered in the general, independent of the use of nuclear power.

What a nuclear power capability can do is decrease the time from detection until nuclear weapons are manufactured and ready.

I hope you're with me thus far.

So, the next important question is: How much does that civilian nuclear power capability affect the time from "detection" until "available nuclear weapons"?

That question also has to be answered for other technologies that don't use U-235 nor Pu, such as the LFTR which uses the Th U-233 fuel cycle.

Then these answers and the associated risks and costs have to be weighed against the relative risks and costs of global warming, climate change, and ocean acidification.

I'm much more hopeful that these proliferation answers can have satisfactory answers compared to the alternatives.

No matter your attacks on nuclear power, it still remains evidently clear that solar, wind, and the rest of the green tech cannot solve it. At worst, if your analysis and value judgments are correct, we're just doomed. Proving my plan unworkable doesn't make your green pipedream plan workable.

>>8841074
>What a nuclear power capability can do is decrease the time from detection until nuclear weapons are manufactured and ready.
...and reduce the cost. ...and ensure access to necessary materials. ...and make it far easier for non-state entities to get nuclear weapons. In other words, a nuclear power program can put nuclear weapons within the reach of people who would fail *entirely* otherwise.

Also, this "time from detection" is ridiculous. There's no guarantee of detection before nuclear weapons are ready to use.

The only practical antiproliferation plan is to treat all nuclear technology as a nuclear weapons program.

>it still remains evidently clear that solar, wind, and the rest of the green tech cannot solve it.
The depths of your delusion continue to astound me. Your idiotic arguments in support of this claim have been refuted repeatedly, to no effect.

Either you're being paid to astroturf for nuclear, or you're a mentally ill shut-in who decided to make himself feel relevant by crusading for a technology he doesn't understand, and can't face the reality that he's spouting inaccuracies, irrelevancies, and nonsense.

>>8841111
That's not an answer to my questions. What do you do if a country says "fuck you and fuck the NPT", and starts making nuclear weapons. Worse, what if a country tries to do so clandestinely.

Do you support military action in any case to prevent other non-weapon states from gaining nuclear weapons? What about countries that are not part of the NPT?

PS:
I'm entirely unimpressed by your undemonstrated hydrogen tech, for already stated and obvious reasons. Primarily: it's unclear if it can even compete with electrochemical batteries for cars and gasoline engines for cars, and that's roughly 3x to 10x easier than competing on the grid, due to the different value of electricity vs gasoline. Reductio ad absurdum: if it was as easy and as obvious as you say for the grid, then we would have hydrogen cars already.

>>8841111
More concretely: What good would one country, or most countries, shunning civilian nuclear power do, in light of a country like North Korea? Not much, as far as I can tell.

Plausibly, the only way forward for civilization, with or without nuclear power, is an international framework of mandatory inspections for nuclear material.

>>8841111
>>8841122
And in that context, the only benefit of globally banning civilian nuclear power plants is to increase the time between detections of violations of the terms of the international framework and the obtaining of a nuclear weapon.

And therefore, in that context, we need to evaluate how much that window is decreased by readily available nuclear power tech, and we need to make that on a reactor by reactor basis, because some very important differences between light water reactors and heavy water reactors, and sodium metal fast breeder reactors, and molten salt reactors.

>>8835947
He asserts shit about fields he knows nothing about and doesn't know any form of refutation asides from insults.