Let's decide once and for all. What is the future?

also which is more environment friendly

>lithium
good thing there's the sea then

Nuclear fucking sucks. You have to get a specialized workforce or government employees and then they end up unionizing which increases the babysitting costs every single year. Not that other power plants of the 20th century were better since they unionized but solar and wind doesn't require that.

Renewable, nuclear will come and go like the fad it is.

>183 μg/l
I'm not an expert in mining, but that doesn't seem much

sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0011747164900026

geothermal. Not conventional geothermal, deep geothermal. Tap the heat of the core by drilling miles into continental plates. Pair with what is essentially conventional closed loop steam turbine systems for effective perpetual energy at the cost of system upkeep. Zero pollution abundant energy.

retrofit the entire US power grid with the construction of these stations in every state for less than the cost of the 2008 bank bailout.

Build extra geothermal stations on the east and west coasts to purify sea water into drinking water and also to make hydrogen to replace conventional fossil fuel in internal combustion engines.

run human civilization off the heat of the planet until the sun goes supernova and never put an appreciable dent in the heat of the core.

fuck the shitty alternatives. Go big or go home. this is the way to do it.

I don't see why we can't have both.

Mass extinction
Another answer is completely delusional
Unless we get a global ecological-anarchist revolution we are completely fucked

Is uranium renewable?

+1 for geothermal clean energy

I summon communist nuclear scientist-kun

>wait until we get into space to use nuclear to its full potential
>he fell for the solar energy meme

Ah yes those white non-pollutant vapors off of nuclear plants sure looks dangerous.
Meanwhile look at those harmless black smoke that come off from coal factories. Looks safe to breathe in, yum yum.

its extremely unlikely humanity's energy needs won't drastically increase if technological advances continue

>hydrogen to replace conventional fossil fuel in internal combustion engines

Stopped reading right there.

Until we disrupt earth's magnetic field slightly. Then everyone goes ape shit and we're back where we started.

Actual nuclear engr and nuclear physicist here. Nuke power on earth is dieing and soon to be dead. As we increase our capacity to store plower we wond need anything other than geothermal and solar power. Nuke powers future is for when we colonize our solar system and furthur since the high amount of power needed in such short time periods

>future

Solar.

That's always the answer. You don't have to like it. I don't have to like it. Hell, you don't even need to believe it, but the sun will always be the primary power source for this solar system. Oh when Andromeda swings through and we mix with it we "might" gain other celestial bodies as power sources, but that won't occur during humanities life time and it may not occur at all.

Oh I see someone already posted what I was saying only more elegantly.

>but that's not that realistic is it?

It is the end game for this solar system if we don't stop growing in population. Then we will peak in that configuration, war to gain resources from each others swarm member until there's only one left. Hopefully, we evolve into something that learns how to reach equilibrium. Tossing out seed ships into the stars can occur in both scenarios.

Both. Nuclear for baseline. Solar, Hydro and Geothermal where available.
I'm all for geothermal, but its only possible in certain locations.

...

The logic lies left.

This is exceptionally stupid. As if you need lead batteries "to make a Solar Panel" as the headline reads.

Also most solar panels by far are silicon based. Gallium arsenide or cadmium mercury telluride or indium phosphide are specialised technologies for use in, say, satellites where weight must be minimized.

If you want power all the time everywhere, nuclear is the only option.

Renewables are more economically friendly so whether you like it or not, renewables will keep getting popular and nuclear will only ever happen if some socialist politician hell bent on nuclear fission makes it happen.

>Solar panels
>Renewable

...

ah, but the whole point of deep geothermal is you drill down until its hot no matter where you are on the globe. Granted thats a long way, but it is feasible.

>coal factories
>posts a smokestack from a 1911 ship that was decomissioned over 30 years ago
Coal is pretty clean, and still much cheaper than nuclear, when you do it right.

>I'm not an expert in mining, but that doesn't seem much
The concentration is low, but the total content is huge, so you can mine many times the resources on land without that concentration going down significantly.

See, you can do things like make ion exchange resins tuned to lithium, and you just leave them to soak in the ocean until they're full of the stuff, then you haul them up and wash the lithium out, and then leave them to soak again.

>I don't think the earth has that many lithium desu
Lithium isn't necessary. Sodium can be used for batteries in its place, or there are options for metal-free batteries.

Batteries are also not necessary. There are many options for energy storage, there just hasn't been a big enough difference in cost between the cheapest energy and energy available on demand (like hydroelectric or gas/oil peaking generators) to stimulate their development and deployment. Storage technology won't really take off until solar is maybe half the cost per joule of the next-cheapest energy source.

What did he mean by this?

So this... is the power... of green energy... Woah

They forgot the trucks and its component parts that ship these and the food the employees who install them eat and everything on the farms where the food comes from.

youtube.com/watch?v=QfuK8la0y6s
I trust this guys logic that unless you make amazing nuclear energy a dyson sphere is the way to go.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole
>is the result of a scientific drilling project of the Soviet Union in the Pechengsky District, on the Kola Peninsula. The project attempted to drill as deep as possible into the Earth's crust.
>Boreholes were drilled by branching from a central hole. The deepest, SG-3, reached 12,262 metres (40,230 ft) in 1989 and still is the deepest artificial point on Earth.[1] The borehole is 9 inches (23 cm) in diameter.[2]
>In terms of true depth, it is the deepest borehole in the world. For two decades it was also the world's longest borehole, in terms of measured depth along the well bore, until surpassed in 2008 by the 12,289-metre-long (40,318 ft) Al Shaheen oil well in Qatar, and in 2011 by 12,345-metre-long (40,502 ft) Sakhalin-I Odoptu OP-11 Well (offshore the Russian island Sakhalin).[3]

>The hole reached 12,262 m (40,230 ft) in 1989. In that year, the hole depth was expected to reach 13,500 m (44,300 ft) by the end of 1990 and 15,000 m (49,000 ft) by 1993.[6][7] However, because of higher-than-expected temperatures at this depth and location, 180 °C (356 °F) instead of expected 100 °C (212 °F)
>drilling deeper was deemed unfeasible and the drilling was stopped in 1992. With the projected further increase in temperature with increasing depth, drilling to 15,000 m (49,000 ft) would have meant working at a temperature of 300 °C (570 °F), where the drill bit would no longer work.

>Similar projects
>The KTB superdeep borehole (German Continental Deep Drilling Program, 1990–1994) at Windischeschenbach in northern Bavaria was drilled down to a depth of 9,101 m (29,859 ft) reaching temperatures of more than 260 °C (500 °F).

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Continental_Deep_Drilling_Programme
>was a scientific drilling project carried out from 1987 to 1995 near Windischeschenbach, Bavaria. The main superdeep borehole reached a depth of 9,101 metres in the Earth's continental crust.
>The borehole reached its target depth of 4,000 metres in April 1989. The results of this drilling were used as parameters for the main borehole - for example the temperature gradient was higher than originally expected. The drilling ended on 12 October 1994 at a depth of 9,101 metres showing a temperature of 265 °C. T

>The drill head was also designed to withstand temperatures between 250 and 300 °C. The original expectations had been that this temperature would be reached at a depth about 10 to 14 km. This is also the reason that the ZEV place was chosen - there was another location in the Black Forest that had been considered equal in the scientific interest level but it was expected to have a higher temperature gradient.
>For one thing the temperature rose much more quickly than expected which inflicted a reform of the theories about the temperature gradient at very deep drillholes.
>Quite unexpectedly however the rock layers were not solid at that depth and instead large amounts of fluid and gas were met pouring into the drillhole. Due to the heat and fluids the rock was of a dynamic nature which changes the way that the next superdeep drilling would be planned.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Rogers
>was an oil-exploratory hole drilled in Washita County, Oklahoma in 1974, and was formerly the world's deepest hole until in 1979 surpassed by the Kola Superdeep Borehole, dug by the USSR.
>reach 31,441 feet (9,583 m), a depth of almost six miles. During drilling, the well encountered enormous pressure – almost 25,000 psi (172,369 kPa). No commercial hydrocarbons were found before drilling hit a molten sulfur deposit (which melted the drill bit).

>people unironically fell for the solar power and/or wind power meme

>what i wish was the future

-Solar for residential and some commercial, no baseload
-Wind where it makes the most sense
-Geothermal where possible
-Hydro wherever feasible
-Nuclear as a universal baseload to keep everything smooth and give the heavy juice necessary for industry. Preferably thorium based, either two fluid reactors or once through burner designs with a reprocessing industry to back it up

>what will actually happen

-all the above but replace nuclear with a viciously complex, expensive, and unstable smart grid with a fuckload of horribly expensive grid battery backups, also attempting to make solar baseload meaning massive solar farms taking up shitloads of land and windfarms everywhere. Also natural gas as long as possible for necessity.

>renewable
Can we stop fucking calling it that?
It's not renewable. No part of it is renewable. There is no fuel being consumed that we then regenerate.

It is environmental energy, plain and simply, there is no fucking renewable process involved.

>but that's not that realistic is it?
dyson swarms aren't actually that difficult or outlandish. if you think about it from an automated manufacturing perspective, you don't "build" a dyson swarm, you design and build self assembling machines which basically colonize the asteroid belt and convert it into solar panels which then become the dyson swarm over time.

the hard part is getting that power back down to earth where we need it at the moment. microwave beam transmission is the definition of a death ray, just aimed at the right place

forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2015/10/27/hondas-new-hydrogen-powered-vehicle-feels-more-like-a-real-car/#67636c101017

Yes. Both seawater extraction (less sure about) and everyday rock extraction.
energyfromthorium.com/cubic-meter/

>Coal is pretty clean, and still much cheaper than nuclear, when you do it right.
Reality:
>Millions of people die every year from coal and other similar dirty fuels, 1/4 million alone in Europe from coal
> It's uncertain if a single person has ever died from radiation release from a civilian nuclear power plant or the waste from a civilian nuclear power plant.
> (Chernobyl was a military reactor, and even then reasonable estimates of total death count range from 300 to 4000.)

> Batteries are also not necessary. There are many options for energy storage,

And all of them suck so badly that it's not workable with current tech.

> Super expensive for relatively small amount of heat that dissipates over time.

Great plan. /s

Protip: Rock is a poor conductor of heat. These sorts of plans will "run dry" when the surrounding rock has its extractible heat harvested, and it takes a long time for them to heat up again.

As for super deep bore holes - super expensive for extremely small power.

Fossil, for at least another hundred years. Get over it.

Modern trucks are so fucking ugly, I hate that gross melty look.

Here's a beauty.

>The concentration is low, but the total content is huge, so you can mine many times the resources on land without that concentration going down significantly.
I wasn't woried about the total amount, but the cost/kg has to be high at such low concentration

Fusion. Just 20 more years.

>reasonable estimates of total death count range from 300 to 4000
I support nuclear energy until we can get a Dyson Swarm in orbit... but this is bullshit and you know it.

>implying Nuclear isn't renewable

No, I don't. 4000 is the internationally recognized estimate, such as by the World Health Organization. Even then, IIRC, that analysis depended on the bankrupt LNT model.

That is some creepy shit.

Compact fusion reactor that electrolyzes water for deuterium and tritium.

Nuclear is the future no matter how much you struggle with your baby green energies that just never work as well or as green as you'd hoped.

Nuclear wins. It will always win.

>Nuclear of renewable?

Restricting the options fallacy.

The real answer is fusion.

>One earthquake knocks a power plant out of commission for months

>Aren't actually that difficult or outlandish

>Magic swarm of magic solar panels magically sending energy back to earth
>Which somehow self assemble
>Which will cover a sphere larger than the sun
>feasible

Fusion is nuclear, moron.

>using the adjective "nuclear" like a noun

>Fossil, for at least another hundred years.
fucking lol

Cold fusion for both.

Fusion is a pipe dream, cold fusion is a fairytale

Why not both?

both

you need to generate 30 kwh a day to keep an american house powered during the summer.

the best you can do with current PV solar is 300 watts per square meter of panel.

5 square meters isn't that much bro

the hard part is designing a system able to self assemble using materials in the asteroid belt, which then assembles solar panels that fuck off to solar orbit

once that's designed, you build some of them, send them out, and wait a few years for them to do the rest.

and like i said, transmission to earth is....difficult.
my wet dream is to use a dyson swarm to generate kugelblitzes as mobile energy sources but that's a fuckin ways off

Nuclear IS renewable.

forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/03/24/is-nuclear-power-a-renewable-or-a-sustainable-energy-source/#4e3de9ae656e

ornl.gov/news/advances-extracting-uranium-seawater-announced-special-issue

There's so much uranium to be gained from seawater extraction that even it will outlast even the sun in spite of us massively scaling up power usage on this planet.

Also from everyday rock.
energyfromthorium.com/cubic-meter/
As far as I can tell, it's a much more certain and demonstrated source of cheap uranium and thorium, especially thorium.

4 square meters to get a kilowatt of generation.

if it has optimal sunlight the entire time.

two tesla power walls at $10,000 to store 30 kwh.

you still can't charge a car which ranges 30 to 100 kwh.

using an oven or a clothes dryer will suck a 15 kwh power wall dry in a hour.

trees, weather, location, building shadows, etc

...

>you could use seawater to make nukes

>implying an equally appealing penis proxy that makes you feel better about your small dick could'nt be as easily powered by hydrogen

And what the fuck do I care? Not like I have to eat that shit.

>truck small penis meme
Are you 12?
How can anyone not like trucks?

so the take away here is we need to convert all of New Mexico into a giant solar farm and kick out the retarded shits who live there because its stupid to live in a desert anyways.

small dick detected

/r9k/ says 7.5 inches is average.

>How can anyone not like trucks?
They're ugly, clunky, slow, dangerous and inefficient?

small nuclear where needed but regulated tightly/ clean coal and gas.

biomass,biogas,solar,wind,wave,hydro.

encourage people to add a panel to their homes, and businesses too.

this. its a multi pronged solution that doesn't do away with hydrocarbons entirely.

>Tesla powerwalls
How about you use a non-meme storage system, like what people who were interested in solar and off the grid storage before Musk shat autism all over it use?

>Ugly
Subjective
>Clunky
Be more descriptive
>Slow
Don't get one with a shit engine
>Dangerous
Don't buy a F-150 brodozer with the extended cab then
>Inefficient
Good luck hauling anything more than two and a half feet tall or 500 pounds in your sedan.

solar for the immediate future.

fusion later on.

if you buy american maybe.

Trucks are overrated . Everyone knows that traditional American landyachts are where it's at.

Imagine if one of the drivers of those cars were a woman...

F-150 is the only acceptable douche truck

Ford still isn't that great but GM and Dodge are fucking garbage

>dangerous
To whom?
The little old lady in the ladybug T-boning the truck?

More like the other way around. Solar is fucking abysmal.

damn, wonder if they ran into any cave systems with spiders and spooky skeletons while digging straight down