World's Largest Solar Project Would Power 1 Million U.S. Homes

[sfsuphysics]

Coal is still cheap, we have trillions of metric tons of it and plants can and do use scrubbers to remove a huge amount of toxins, hell motor vehicles are probably spewing more garbage.

Another case in point, why should we the USA kill coal when China and India are using it more and more and they don't give a damn about pollution?

Until any green energy is as cheap, reliable and available as coal is it is simply not a viable option right now.

I still say that nuclear fusion is more the future if we could ever get it going and contain it.

Nothing puts out energy like a mini star.

Yes coal is cheap, and you know what else is cheap? Not using the local garbage company, and just throwing garbage on the street, yet for some reason we don't do that (well ok the well civilized of us don't do it). It's not always about cheap, it's cheap to use slaves instead of having to pay people, it's cheap to burn garbage rather than burying it, there's got to be a point where cheap is not the only consideration.

And yes, we shouldn't do something because China isn't doing it, perfect logic.

 

[Ducman69]

Clean coal is a myth spun up by the pro-coal industry lobby and think tank groups. No such thing ever has existed, no such thing exists today and no such thing ever will exist.

You act like its subjective. We can precisely measure the emissions of a power plant. And "clean coal" is a specifically different way of using the fuel that results in such drastically reduced emissions of NOx, sulfur, and heavy metals to negligible levels (and lately, to also capturing CO2).

There's no "myth" in comparing the massive pollution output of a 1970s coal plant with say a modern IGCC plant burning syngas today, which can help in oil extraction, produce drywall and dry ice, and help carbonate sodas as useful byproducts of their use. Look into the Texas Clean Energy project which is set to lead the world in a 90% efficiency ratio in carbon capture.

Now if your argument is that its only "very much cleaner" rather than "clean" coal, and expect it to be zero emissions, of course there's no such thing. However, there is no such thing in the entire product lifecycle of any energy source currently available, aside from perhaps hydro. But environmentalists hate hydro since you always end up with the extinction of numerous species that rely on a river ecosystem when you dam it.

And nuclear, for whatever reason we refuse to use French style nuclear waste recycling plants, and nobody wants a nuclear reactor in their town so they always end up being massively expensive and difficult to place.

The flipside would be to focus on reducing energy requirements, and people are doing that with energy efficient homes and the like, but the best way to require zero energy is to not be born. Studies show that people that are born consume infinitely more energy than people that are not born. People that aren't born have a zero carbon footprint as well. So if you want to completely stop the exponential pollution increase without even having to make any other changes, stabilize the population size of your country. Voila! We'd be a lot more comfortable if we got the world population to settle around 2 billion range from the 1950s than the 9.6 billion we are going to have by 2050.

 

[potency]

These things kill birds regularly, and the risk of a meltdown is very real. The environmental impact is not as minimal as it might seem.

 

[Ducman69]

These things kill birds regularly, and the risk of a meltdown is very real. The environmental impact is not as minimal as it might seem.

I don't think there are any safety concerns for anyone not at the facility, as the molten salt is a low pressure hot liquid, so its not going to explode and isn't radioactive or anything.

The biggest problems with them is that they take up a crapton of room, they aren't cheap, they are high maintenance keeping the mirrors clean, and often they don't perform as desired even when they are in an idyllic location known for getting lots of sun. Just having a week of cloudy weather can be enough to reduce the power output, which if relied upon, would result in brownouts or simply consuming massive amounts of natural gas, basically turning it into a less efficient and far more expensive traditional fossil fuel plant, which is kind of dumb.

Giant Ivanpah solar plant south of Las Vegas falls short

The operation of such plants is highly dependent on weather conditions, and predicting when and how strongly the sun will shine is not a perfect science.

A little bit of inefficiency with mirrors can translate into a loss of power output ranging from small to significant, said Neil Fromer, executive director of the Resnick Sustainability Institute at the California Institute of Technology.

Problems could include getting the thousands of mirrors pointed in precisely the right direction, especially in the cool early morning, or keeping them clean in the dusty Mojave Desert.

Operators initially expected to need steam from gas-powered boilers for an hour a day during startup. After operations began, they found they needed to keep boilers running more than four times longer — an average of 4½ hours a day.

State energy regulators in August approved the plant’s request to increase the natural gas it is allowed to burn by 60 percent.