Electricity for $0.04 per KW wholesale.
I am a seventy-two-year retired man. I have done carpentry, arc welding, maintenance and repair on plumbing, boilers, heating and air conditioning, water and waste water plants. I hold a refrigeration contractor's license and have been certified to supervise any water, waste water plant or waste water lab.
I began looking for alternative energy sources several years ago while managing the utilities for a large mental hospital.
1) After running the numbers in 1983 I determined that it requires more energy (BTUs) to make a gallon of ethanol than you get out when it is burned in an automobile or anything else. Ethanol also has less energy than even regular gasoline and can reduce gas mileage up to 20% compared to gasoline. It is stupid to pour money into continuing production of ethanol from corn or any food until we have a process that can create more BTUs output than required BTUs input.
2) Windmills are not the answer. Check out what happened in England in December 2010 when it gets really cold there is very little wind. Their windmills produced very little electricity during the coldest weather they have had in years. Huge investment in infrastructure of little to no use, fossil fuel plants had to carry the load when demand was highest and reliability was foremost.
Several wind farms in the western US are in disrepair and producing very little power. Maintenance on a tower 150 or 200 feet off the ground with tons of equipment is no easy task. The oil for the gears to drive the generator breaks down and requires replacing the drive train -- this is is quite a problem. The fiberglass blades break creating replacement problem. They require power at all times to monitor and control and the speed of the blades. The blades must be reoriented to reduce speed when the wind is blows to fast. The blades kill many birds when they are functioning (environmental problem).
3) Solar panels are not the answer. They only work when the sun shines, and at present the efficiency is only 10%. Solar cells now in experimental labs are almost 20% efficient but it will be years before those units are available and costs may be prohibitive.
For 2 and 3 above:
a) They can not be placed near where the most power is needed (large Cities).
b) It is necessary to build huge additions to the current power grid.
c) Both of these options also require huge tracks of land.
I have found what I know is the most viable source for all of this nation's future electrical energy needs.
"The Liquid Fluoride Thorium reactor."
A proof-of-concept fluoride reactor (Aircraft Reactor Experiment) was built and operated in 1954 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). A 3 megawatt reactor was actually made small enough to be placed on a bomber and flown around Texas and New Mexico to test for shielding of the crew. They envisioned nuclear powered bombers until ballistic missiles made such plans obsolete.
The Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE), was built and operated by Oak Ridge National Labatory from 1965 to 1969. The Atomic Energy Commission moved to shut down all research on Molten-Salt liquid core reactors at ORNL in the mid-1970s, and the fluoride reactor team was disbanded and assigned to other projects. The reason for stopping further research was you cannot obtain bomb making materials from these Molten-Salt liquid core reactors.
a) These reactors will shut themselves down with no harm if there is a control power failure.
b) They cannot blow up or explode.
c) 100 Megawatt units can be manufactured in a factory and shipped on a tractor trailer truck for emergencies.
d) They can destroy spent nuclear fuel from other reactors.
e) The reactor operates at very low pressure (near atmospheric).
f) There is no need for a huge containment vessel.
g) One ton of Thorium fuel will produce a gigawatt of power for a year.
h) The US government already has over 330 tons of thorium stored in the Nevada desert.
i) Thorium is plentiful in the US and the world.
j) Fuel can be added while the unit is operation.
k) Fuel reprocessing is carried out while the reactor is in operation.
There is a wealth of information about this on the web.
The paper “THORIUM-FUELED UNDERGROUND POWER PLANT BASED ON MOLTEN SALT TECHNOLOGY” authored by Dr. Ralph W. Moir and Dr. Edward Teller, published by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2004, estimated a 1 gigawatt Molten Salt reactor to advance the technology developed at ORNL. The paper estimated that such a unit with the nuclear portions buried 10 meters below ground with all the conventional power plant portions above ground for about 1 billion dollars ($1,000,000,000) and operating expenses estimated at $100,000 per year Obama and his administration have already wasted over 60 billion dollars ($60,00,000,000) on “pie in the ski” solar and wind projects. We could have built 60 such units. That would have added 60 gigawatts of reliable 24 hours per day power to the national grid.
Below is a link to a short video about "The Liquid Fluoride Thorium reactor."
