Pascal Schmidt wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

 PS> Hi Roy! :-)

 RJT> Sure,  and it's seriously inefficient all over the place.  And 
 RJT> hardly economical.

 PS> Well, both are really seperate issues. Inefficiency is no problem
 PS> in this case, I would say, since we get the sunlight for free. So
 PS> it doesn't matter if we only get 5% of the possible power out of
 PS> it. It's not like we're running out of it if our solar cells are
 PS> inefficient.

True,  but the efficiency also has to be considered in terms of what you're
getting out of it,  in terms of power,  and what you're putting into it, 
in terms of the investment to set it up in the first place.

 RJT> I remember reading an article quite some time ago entitled "The 
 RJT> Hydrogen Economy" or something pretty close to that,  and none of 
 RJT> it has come to pass at all.

 PS> Yep, investing into that kind of technology doesn't make sense
 PS> econimically as long as cheaper alternatives exist.

Heh.  This almost echos what I said above...  :-)

 RJT> I saw some serious windmills in both Western PA and in West Virginia 
 RJT> this past summer on a couple of trips we took,  though I didn't get 
 RJT> much info on either of them.  Those things were *huge*,  and 
 RJT> probably subsidized all to heck.

 PS> Those around here are rather small installation and I don't think 
 PS> they're being subsidized much. The government did run a few 
 PS> experimental windmills in the 80s, but those were huge things which
 PS> didn't turn out to work well compared with the cost of maintaining
 PS> them. I think after that fiasco, the government preferred to stay
 PS> well clear of the matter.

I think that's the lesson that's still being learned in the case of the
ones I saw,  somebody's pet theory got some funding,  from tax dollars
either directly or indirectly.  I can't recall the ones in PA real clearly
but the ones in WV were pretty huge.

 RJT> It's not "a few" though,  it's a lot more than that.  If
there was 
 RJT> some way to do this economically it would be happening on its own.  

 PS> Well, economy does not take long-term effects into account. If 
 PS> nuclear power stays cheaper than wind power, for example, there is
 PS> no way the economy will ever favour wind power, no matter what
 PS> future costs nuclear power may cause. I don't think that all
 PS> impulses for new technology should come from the economy. It's also
 PS> a social problem - do we want future generations to have to deal
 PS> with nuclear waste material or do we want to invest in cleaner ways
 PS> of generating electricity?

That would require some long-term perspective on the part of those who are
ultimately making the decisions on such issues,  and unfortunately their
typical behaviors have been short-sighted to the point of not looking past
the next election or the next quarterly reports.  Which is of course what
the electorate and the stockholders want,  apparently.

 RJT> The only way it seems to be happening now is when individuals choose 
 RJT> to do it (and pay for it out of their own pocket) on a small scale,  
 RJT> or when government money is used to subsidize it on a somewhat 
 RJT> bigger scale.  Neither approach offers much longer term viability.

 PS> I think small-scale employment of alternative technology can be a
 PS> start, at least it gets the equipment tested and initial problems
 PS> get resolved.

Yes,  and it allows ideas to be tested.



 RJT> They even got all fired up about NASA's RTGs (Radioisotope 
 RJT> Thermoelectric Generators) which are basically a bit of plutonium 
 RJT> or other isotope embedded in a solid block of ceramic material.  
 RJT> Those things are designed to survive reentry and crash 
 RJT> scenarios...

 PS> They are. But then there was one russian spy satellite that crashed
 PS> and that also had a nuclear power source of that kind, and I think
 PS> there was quite a stirrup because radioactive material was set free
 PS> a few kilometers around the crash site. I don't remember the
 PS> details, though.

I think I remember hearing about that.  And also hearing about something
fairly recently where there was radioactive material of some sort found by
a couple of woodcutters?  These guys felt pretty warm,  sleeping next to
that stuff,  but didn't feel too good after that,  I'm not sure they
survived the experience.  Apparently russia did quite a bit of different
things with all sorts of radioactive materials,  and there's a lot of it
around still.

 RJT> What I've read on it was more on the level of speculation,  ideas 
 RJT> getting tossed out and such,  nothing that was seriously considered 
 RJT> to be implemented.

 PS> Oh well, so we have the waste material, but we have no idea whether
 PS> or long-term storage will work for the time it needs to work.

Yep.

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