Basstrap
ONE love, blood, life
- Joined
- Jul 6, 2000
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Maybe it's a little reactionary to start questioning the use of nuclear power at this point. But it does strike me as a good question to grapple with.
Should we not be placing all of our ingenuity and innovative energy into creating cheap energy alternatives to oil and nuclear power? The former has proven to be at the root of so much discord and instability, and the latter is fraught with danger. Too much danger, if you ask me.
The list of reasonable alternatives is short at this point. Solar power is probably our best bet, and the folks at ECD may be our best hope.
http://www.strategy-business.com/article/11111?gko=ddb47
Should we not be placing all of our ingenuity and innovative energy into creating cheap energy alternatives to oil and nuclear power? The former has proven to be at the root of so much discord and instability, and the latter is fraught with danger. Too much danger, if you ask me.
The list of reasonable alternatives is short at this point. Solar power is probably our best bet, and the folks at ECD may be our best hope.
http://www.strategy-business.com/article/11111?gko=ddb47
Increasing solar capacity requires improving the conversion efficiency of the semiconductor materials used or increasing the coating rate in production. It is presently impossible to have both high efficiency and high speed, and current manufacturing processes can be improved only incrementally.
Characteristically, Ovshinsky says he has found a way to push both parameters at once, and by significant amounts. “Our technology is a transformational advance in photovoltaics, combining higher conversion efficiency with 100-fold faster deposition rates,” he says. Indeed, his tiny pilot plant recently achieved this milestone, sustaining a deposition rate of more than 300 angstroms per second, compared with 1 to 5 angstroms per second in state-of-the-art commercial photovoltaic processes. That increase alone would allow the building of a 1-gigawatt capacity plant, but Ovshinsky says he will also soon announce a commensurate increase in conversion efficiency from the current level of about 10 percent.