THE GREAT SOLAR EPIC FAIL OF ALL TIME?

Power Line ^ | March 17, 2016

[doghorse]

A federally backed, $2.2 billion solar project in the California desert isn’t producing the electricity it is contractually required to deliver to PG&E Corp., which says the solar plant may be forced to shut down if it doesn’t receive a break Thursday from state regulators.

[BobL]

Sorry, only $12M for that idea, as using it at night would require the installation of HUGE FLOODLIGHTS to be able to produce any effective power.

Hmmm...maybe not such a bad idea after all.

[Ken H]

All that's needed is a federal court to use the All Writs Act to order PG&E to make it work properly and jail company personnel who fail to do so.

/s

[PIF]

Fried bird is off the menu

[catfish1957]

Speaking of birds and alternative entergy boondogles. I always like to bring up the damn issue of these stinking wind turbine monstrosities.

Maybe the biggest fact the evirowhackos faction likes to keep quiet is the significant amount of birds that are dying by getting whacked by turbine blades.

[PIF]

Dead bird count in the millions - dead bat count not recorded but higher than bird count - counts not made of dead birds over the property line ...

California with its huge wind power farms, for one, does not need any Golden Eagles and in a few years won’t have any.

Birds? Who needs stinking birds? /s

[Hotlanta Mike]

California again...how’s that bullet train going?

[SZonian]

Bald Eagles, Red Tailed Hawks, and many other species get whacked by the turbines as well...

The owner/operators get a pass on these...

But don’t YOU dare to pick up an Eagle feather!

[PIF]

unless you are a member of a Treaty Tribe, then you can pick up all you want and sell them to other tribal members. And FWIW if you are a Makah you can legally hunt, kill, and sell a whale ... They are legally our Special Masters you know.

[zek157]

The future of nuclear power is Liquid fluoride thorium reactors. They run at higher temps, consume waste and cannot melt down as the reaction cannot go critical (it slows down before overheating).

We have known about LFTR for decades, but went to breeder reactors to support DOE nuclear materiel requirements supporting weapons programs.

The science is out there, but the illiterate masses have condemned all nuclear power with the same brush.

[Stosh]

Spot on - unfortunately, everything the public knows about reactors comes from “The China Syndrome” movie, and venal politicians are happy to throw away money we don’t have on windmills and solar plants that make no economic sense. Meanwhile the Chicoms are investing in pebble bed reactors (and coal plants).

[sphinx]

I'd be more enthusiastic about nuke power if there was a better way to dispose of the spent fuel rods.

What's wrong with burying it? I'd recycle it first, of course.

[IYAS9YAS]

unless you are a member of a Treaty Tribe, then you can pick up all you want and sell them to other tribal members. And FWIW if you are a Makah you can legally hunt, kill, and sell a whale ... They are legally our Special Masters you know.

So much for being equal under the law...

[PIF]

Worse yet: Only Treaty Tribes have Rights guaranteed by the Constitution, all other have mere privileges which can be revoked at any given time - SCOTUS three time ruling.

[zeugma]

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.

In addition, economic viability without subsidies would have been nice. The thing about these types of projects, is that actual economic viability is never considered because to the supporters that is secondary or perhaps tertiary to making them feel good about themselves.

[Aliska]

As you can tell, I’m one of those illiterate masses. I would be in favor of the alternative you mentioned and if it is as you say which I have no reason to doubt, wonder why we aren’t phasing into it.

[Ozark Tom]

Already accomplished in Spain. The feed-in tariff incentive for solar was sufficiently generous that money could be made at night with diesel generators feeding the system instead of sunlight. That is, until someone noticed the outsized productive time.

[Clay Moore]

We had a way to reprocess spent fuel rods but Jimmy Carter, in his infinite wisdom, shut it down and it was sold to Japan, I think, for pennies on the dollar.

Then we started on the Yucca Mountain Waste Repository in Nevada but Harry Reed and his ilk put up every road block they could imagine to stop it.

It was essentially a series of tunnels with holes in the floor where the spent fuel rods would be placed inside stainless steel canisters. Each would be mapped and cataloged as to where it came from and what it was.

The thought was that it could be then reprocessed and would end up being more of a holding and distribution point than a grave yard.

Of course the news and Reed et-al portrayed it as a “dump” as if they were just digging a big hole and pushing it all in with a D-10 dozer.

[Aliska]

So there is no ideal way to dispose of waste. I can now understand why my idea was worse than I thought. Until Fukushima, I didn't realize that if they even touched two rods together, it could start a meltdown.

I figured cost would be a huge factor. And the sun won't even burn them up? Wow! I guess we have to wait for them to deplete naturally. Or if they could be reprocessed enough, burn them out.

How much uranium do we have left after Hillary sold 1/5 to the Russians?

[Clay Moore]

We do not need to dispose of it, we need to reprocess it. We have the technology and had the facilities to do it.

The fuel rods still have something like 95% of their energy left when they are pulled because the daughter elements are “consuming” the gamma radiation that would have been released as heat.

In the olden days, the spent fuel rods were pulled out, sent for reprocessing and then shipped back.

Now they end up just taking up space.