On 11/28/91, LUZ, the solar-electricity company that had been extolled by Fortune (let alone the Worldwatch twerps) as the great alternative to nuclear power, filed bankruptcy petitions. Its chairman N. Becker blamed it all on a "lack of a coherent national energy policy" and "on-again off-again federal support," or in plain English, on lack of government subsidies.
This is not accidental. Solar energy is dilute, and a wonderful thing for conversion to the energy of atmospheric processes and biological energy (plant life including food). Where power re-quirements are small and connection to the net inconvenient (e.g., pocket calculators), it is also suitable, and there is particular hope for converting solar to chemical energy (see I. Dostrovsky, "Chemical fuels from the sun," Sci. Amer., Dec. 1991). But it can never become a feasible source for central electric power genera-tion. The reason is that the insolation at the surface of the earth amounts to only 900 W/m^2, of which at an optimistic 20% efficien-cy only 180 W are absorbed. For a spacing factor of 0.5 (collector to total area) that is reduced to 90 W, and above all, if you want 1 MW capacity (not just 1 MW peak power), that means supplying 1 MW whenever demanded, maybe at midnight. But the original 900 W/m^2 apply only to vertical incidence onto the collector in a cloudless sky. That necessarily means storage, which further reduced the 90 by a factor of at least 6, i.e., to 15 W/m^2 . For a 1,000 MW capacity you therefore need at least an area of 67 km^2 = 26 square miles. A nuclear plant of the same capacity needs no more than 25 acres including security areas. Now you may be able to get 25 square miles for this scam in the desert, where Luz had its plants (nine plants with a total peak power
¾not capacity!--of only 354 MW, obtained by mirrors heating a receiver boiler, not photo-electric conversion), but how about 26 square miles on fer-tile or other real estate? If LUZ went pfft in the desert, what would it go elsewhere?This is not a matter of opinion. Just use your pocket calculator.
This newsletter is proudly printed on UNRECYCLED PAPER made from the abundance of US trees grown for that purpose, not on the low quality, high- cost, politically correct "recycled" refuse. You can nevertheless help recycle it by making it available to the widest readership among your friends and co-workers.
Recycled paper is of lower quality and costs more than the real product. But the October Golf gives some other interesting statistics: There are more trees than there were 70 years ago; about 1,000 per person, with annual growth exceeding the harvest by thirty-one per cent per year. Most trees for magazine paper come from US tree farms where 2.7 billion new trees are planted each year. The only half-way cogent reason for recycling paper is saving landfill space, but here again, the Greens are at work not with market forces, but with legislative coercion: The House of Check-bouncers and Freeloaders is now considering reauthorization of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which would force printers to use paper containing 40% used fibers for magazines and 50% for newspapers or, presumably, they would be shut down.
I have been unable fully to verify the figures in the following table (21st Century, Fall 1991) on the annual production of atmos-pheric chlorine (allegedly destroying the ozone layer), but they seem in the ballpark. The amounts are in millions of tons of chlorine; the amount for seawater applies to the entire atmos-phere; only a part of it is raised into the stratosphere by hurricanes and other mechanisms.
Millions of tons of chlorine delivered to the atmosphere
Seawater 600
Volcanoes 36
Biomass burning 8.4
Ocean biota 5.0
Total natural sources: 649.4
Total Chlorine in CFCs 0.75
Released by the alleged
breakup of CFCs 0.0075
Everybody likes his ego stroked, so it was very pleasant to find that the weekly Economist, with its staff of hundreds, did not report the Danish temperature-sunspot relation until 3 weeks after the monthly AtE went out.
The same issue (11/30/91) also makes it look as if the Russians had discovered annealment of neutron-embrittled reactor vessels and were now teaching US experts. Their lousy material may make an- nealment necessary more often, and US scientists may go there to watch it, but it is a method that has long been known and has often been reported in these pages as a last-resort method to combat embrittlement of the reactor pressure vessel by neutron radiation In the same issue the "conservative" Economist also berates Dan Quayle, who was the man to insist on the Patriot missile (saving tens of thousands of lives in the Gulf War), who saw to it that the SDI was not completely scuttled, and who as head of the Council of Competitiveness has proved the only beneficial influence on the spineless spaghetti ball that calls itself President.
As for choosing between Economist, Time and Newsweek, it's a simple case of duck or take it.
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Vol. 19, No. 5
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Volume 19 Issue/No.: Vol. 19, No. 5 Date: January 01, 1992 09:50 AM Title: Articles of Impeachment
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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