A ray of hope
Its pretty gloomy in the power business if you believe that a.
burning coal is not viable long term since we will make the world
pretty much a hot house disaster and b. using uranium to power
fission reactors today is only slightly less risky than just having a
thermonuclear war tomorrow. But there is always hope eternal that the
money currently waxing fat on conventional power plants will see the
light of day and turn to the most obvious solution, solar.
Its abundant. It everywhere. Its free, and therein lies the problem.
No-one has a vested interest in sunshine, its not owned by microsoft
or general motors or GE. Governments can’t tax it, people can’t
package it up in neat little boxes and sell it, other than as a
holiday destination which doesn’t count because most people shouldn’t
have time for holidays in the sun. So no-one other than a few mad
scientists have really bothered to get interested in solar because to
date, there’s been no money in it. Coal’s been cheap, nuclear has
been a path to government subsidiaries so who is going to bother with
alternatives. The problem is, neither of the big money power
generation schemes are viable long term, and the longer we go on the
more apparent are their shortcomings.
Perhaps some enlightened souls have seen this which might explain why
E7F2-99DF-3253ADDFDBEC8D41&chanID=sa001" onclick="javascript:urchinTracker('/outbound/www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=1FC8E87E-_br_/_E7F2-99DF-3253ADDFDBEC8D41_amp_chanID=sa001');">this article is getting
exposure. On the other hand it might be just another hot air balloon
being floated, more “let’s talk a lot about solar (since talk is
cheap) - but put keep putting our money into coal and nukes”. It’s
been done before.