I know about it, read about it years ago in Popular Science. See how well that power gets to middle America.
Fracking is a good bit of fun a lot of the time Running tens of thousands of horsepower putting dirt in the ground, you are welcome modern humanity...
I am disinterested when people try to turn a scientic and rational issue into a moral one. It is simply a matter of what is the cleanest most efficient way to produce power. It isn't about what energy is tainted and sinful. Making it immoral to consider nuclear limits the discussion, hides our minds from the truth, and keeps us from new possibilities.
To be fair -& I'm a proponent of Nuclear energy- it's not really "Cleanest"... Considering the waste can kill, in a relatively short amount of time.... For quite some time.
I never know what fracking gets out of the ground. Whenever it's mentioned here in this loony-bin we're told one minute that it's oil, and the next they tell us it's gas? Can't be both can it?
Yeah, pretty much every well that gets drilled these days gets fracked.. Oil, gas, and condensates (in between).. All we really do is put sand in the ground because liquids and gasses can flow through sand better than the rock that is down there.. Pump a sand/water slurrey down there, it branches out like tree roots, stop pumping and a lot of the water comes back out, oil and gas flows through the sand and up the well.. Pretty simple..
Looks like they are trying to develop several ways to do it but have a ways to go yet. The molten salt sounds similar to the thorium reactors, but while the reactors will keep the salt molten constantly, the solar plant can only do it with less than 10 hours of no sunlight, the cost also appears to be high compared to natural gas plants, at least for now. Since these techs appear to be making progress, there appears to be no need to force a carbon tax on the public in order to subsidize them.
I believe his point, is that these DO create power 24/7.... with the exception of Solar.... But yes, storage of that electricity is always a problem.
Nice link. A lot of those technologies are existent today, in industrial plants across the United States. One example is Compressed Air. I'm a Controls Engineer, and I can say that all automated facilities use compressed air. I'm surprised the article didn't mention Pumped Water Storage. It has an 85% efficiency, and is used all over the world. Although the terrain cannot be flat, it can be achieved in hills, in more areas than one might think. The end result is hydroelectric power, the most demand-responsive electricity generation scheme on the planet. http://energystorage.org/energy-storage/technologies/pumped-hydroelectric-storage
Because of plentiful oil and gas. Certainly not renewables. They represent a very small fraction of energy.
Renewables are the fastest growing energy source in the US, and on the planet. In the last 8-9 years, wind has gone from providing less than 1% of US power to over 7%. By 2020, it will provide over 10%. Your rhetoric is just that - RHETORIC.
I'm not going to name sources, but I've heard rumors that someone made a breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion technology. Now I guess it hasn't been decided whether it's going to be for civy use or not, but if it is then in the next 10 years there could be fusion power plants across the USA and perhaps the world.
I hope the rumors prove true. For the sake of the Trump supporters - Current nuclear plants are fission - splitting the atom. Fusion produces WAY more energy - it combines 2 atoms - it is what powers the sun - think Hiroshima atomic bomb versus Hydrogen megaton bombs - but for peaceful power.
"Called the ST40, the reactor was constructed by Tokamak Energy, one of the leading private fusion energy companies in the world. The company was founded in 2009 with the express purpose of designing and developing small fusion reactors to introduce fusion power into the grid by 2030." https://futurism.com/a-world-first-fusion-reactor-just-created-its-first-plasma/
