Evaluating America's green energy options including astroelectricity (part 1)

[Judi Lynn]

SBSP
Space-based solar power can play a key role in the transition from fossil fuels to green energy sources. (credit: ESA/Andreas Treuer)

by Mike Snead
Monday, November 14, 2022

In 1959, American anthropologist Leslie White wrote “No culture can develop beyond the limits of its energy resources.” White based this observation on his studies of food energy production per person in ancient cultures. To grow and expand, the available food energy produced per unit of human effort had to be increased. The great Egyptian civilization created 4,000 years ago, exploiting the tremendous food producing potential of the Nile River, is a testimony to this truism.

We can now apply this truism to the industrial energy that feeds our technological culture. To continue to grow and expand—necessary to ensure that all of humanity achieves their inalienable right to freedom from want with prosperity—the environmentally acceptable sustainable (green) energy available per person must now be substantially increased to replace non-sustainable fossil carbon fuels (see “America’s moral obligation to develop astroelectricity”, The Space Review, February 14, 2022).

White’s full quotation is pertinent to this discussion of assessing America’s options of how to transition to green energy.

No culture can develop beyond the limits of its energy resources, and the cultures of primitive man would have been circumscribed by the boundary of human energy for ages without end had not some means been developed for augmenting energy resources for culture building by harnessing solar energy in a new way and in a new form. This was accomplished by the domestication of animals and by the cultivation of plants, especially the cereals. [Leslie A. White, The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1959. Emphasis added.]

More:
https://thespacereview.com/article/4481/1

[purr-rat beauty]

1. Tesla's vision will come one day...

...his brilliance will light our future

[NNadir]

2. This idea has been floating around since the 1960s.

It's always been a bad idea.

[hunter]

3. The difference between nuclear power and solar power beamed to earth from space...

... is that one of these is a well established seventy year old technology and the other is a science fiction fantasy.

On December 20, 1951, EBR-I, at the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho, became the first power plant to produce usable electricity through atomic fission. It powered four 200-watt lightbulbs and eventually generated enough electricity to light the entire facility.

This was a sodium-potassium metal cooled fast reactor.

The ancestor of today's light water reactors was the Borax-III, a boiling water reactor that generated enough electricity to power the small nearby town of Arco Idaho in 1955.

The first commercial nuclear reactor was the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania. That started producing power for the grid December 18th, 1957.

Modern nuclear power plants are safe compared to other sources of energy and we know what to do with the wastes. We still have no idea what to do with fossil fuel wastes, so we just dump them everywhere.

All these dreams of solar and wind power displacing fossil fuels entirely, which is something we must do, are only distractions that will prolong our dependence on fossil fuels, especially natural gas.

There's enough natural gas in the ground to destroy whatever is left of earth's natural environment as we humans have known it. We'd best leave that gas in the ground.

[Finishline42]

4. Too bad we didn't take the French approach to building and operating our nuclear power plants

We are stuck mostly with for profit utilities that operate on a 'run to fail' maintenance strategy. The result is that they push equipment closer to the operational limit to maximize profit.

From google - Run to failure is a maintenance strategy where maintenance is only performed when equipment has failed. Unlike unplanned & reactive maintenance, proper run-to-failure maintenance is a deliberate and considered strategy that is designed to minimize total maintenance costs.

Just as the managers that made decisions based on profit that ultimately caused the Deep Water Horizon disaster. The warning signs were there (rubber pieces of the blow out preventer in the mud), shortcuts were taken (2 plugs instead of 3 to seal the drill holes), etc

It's doesn't matter how right you might be - we aren't building 100 new nuclear reactors to take nuclear from 20% to 40% generation of our electricity.

[hunter]

5. I think you'll be astonished how quickly public opinion changes.

I don't know what will trigger it, but it probably won't be my rants on DU.

It'll probably happen like this:

One day you wake up and there's not much talk in the energy and environmental journals about wind and solar power, partly because they are ubiquitous, partly because your coffee that morning was heated by nuclear power.