Posted on 03/17/2016 10:34:02 PM PDT by doghorse
Shut it down. They can throw our money away, why can we not refuse to give it to them to waste?
Yuge.
Maybe they should reconfigure it so it simply beams an intense rainbow out far beyond the edge of our universe. That way anyone out there will know we’re a gay-friendly planet and they’ll stop hiding from us out of fear that we’re homophobes.
Did the Fedgov pour millions into the electrical power industry to get it off the ground? That’s sickening about the birds.
Under new management it can reopen as a Mojave Fried Chicken outlet.
The gov’t only put some money into it ($1.5 billion in loans).
The Diablo Canyon nuke plant puts out 2x as much energy as all of California’s solar plants combined. Diablo Canyon is what got me interested in my line of work (earth sciences related) 35 years ago!
The great solar epic fail of all time...so far.
Bump for later.
I thought in that word there must be something diabolical about it. Diablo means devil or devils.
But out of the box, other forms of energy production seemed to draw entrepreneurs who made money with it. Solar we are competing with China. Before we led the way in innovations, not just power.
I'd be more enthusiastic about nuke power if there was a better way to dispose of the spent fuel rods. I think I'm a luddite anyway. The first nuke plants I ever saw were on a trip to S. Ohio about 1967 or so. I saw some, and instinctively was put off by them, probably because of the nuclear threat of the Cold War.
If only we could blast all the waste nuclear material to the sun. It would be expensive but not too much at a time, well it would burn up before it ever reached the sun. Why can't we send it to the moon or Mars? I guess because we may need them for humans the way they are talking, and there's probably something else wrong with the idea. It won't happen and instead we will have more disasters through war, terrorism, weather or accidents.
I prefer to think of it as hilarious, but I know what you mean.
That thing wasn’t necessarily a bad thing in principle (although I wish a way existed to scare away the birds), but it was way too big and ambitious a project for a novel type of solar plant. 20 years and several smaller plants for engineering development would have been more sensible.
You're way out there, Aliska. Speaking objectively, the essence of NUCLEAR (N.B.) materials is in the nuclei, and although the sun does drive nuclear reactions in its core on a time scale of billions of years, radioactive nuclei would be largely unaffected by a transit and arrival at the sun. I suppose we might think of them as enjoying a Caribbean vacation in the upper solar atmosphere.
Very high density material with huge lift costs.
The possibility of a malfunction dumping it back over a large area or dispersing it in atmosphere.
Enough to put that idea on the shelf.
later
There is but politics gets in the way.
Well daa, if it’s killing birds like mad, then just SHUT OFF the mirrors when the birds fly past.
(that idea should be worth another $450M of federal funding)
If they only use the mirror at night, they won't harm any birds.
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