> The practical solution is, of course, nuclear power

If you define practical like the rest of the world, that is, "cost effective", then this statement is demonstrably not true.

Modern nuclear plants have a CAPEX of about $8 and a CF around 90%. That is an effective production cost of $8.90

Modern wind turbines have a CAPEX of about $1.50 and a CF around 30%. That's an effective production cost of $5.00

So if your goal is to decarbonize the electrical supply, wind does it for a little over half the cost.

> Just wait until China and India

China's maximum planned buildout was to make about 1/2 the number of plants as the US to provide supply for four times the population. After the one-two punch of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake pointing out horrible safety violations in building and then Fukishima, these plans are on hold. Meanwhile, China installs more wind and solar than they ever planned for nuclear, about two to three times.

> For electricity generation, oil (the fuel oil portion) is only used for peaking units, and
> from what I've seen the cost is significantly higher than natural gas peaking units

Oil fueled plants cost about twice the cost of natural gas peaking units.

http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Version%208.0.pdf

Page 2. GCC plans are *way* less expensive, but even they don't compete with wind any more.

"Anectodal evidence is hardly evidence, but"

There's no "but".

"While, truth be told"

It's not truth.

"Wikimedia Foundation is a honest and decent entity"

Undemonstrated rhetorical jibe.

"let other careless people"

Which "others"? The sample of two who you now denigrate?

"we need your donations to survive!"

Which is, by definition as a charitable organization, demonstrably true.

"they don't really mean what you think they mean."

They mean precisely what the *say*.

"Is that ok with you?"

Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic

"Yet millions of people continue to contribute, seeming to think that Wikipedia will "go offline" if they aren't given more donations."

Says who?

"Yet as a new Wikipediocracy"

Oh. So then the first quoted sentence should actually read:

"We imagine that bunch of people we invented so we could complain about the Wikipedia, which is the entire reason for the existence of our site, might think that donating is a good idea, which it is. We didn't conduct any sort of study or analysis, because that would take time away from writing additional whiny articles."

News flash: slashdotter reads article about article, finds something to complain about, stops to post complaint, and never reads actual paper.

The world needs another sounding rocket for what purpose exactly?

If there was any money in this, Bristol Aerospace would be a household name.

Exactly.

The DOT budget in Cali is ~ $14 billion a year. This is a rounding error.

> 10 years should be the norm. That is a fact.

Or less. The value of materials older than that is limited. There are, of course, counterexamples, but they are the exceptions to the rule. Something like 99.9% of all songs that receive any income do so in the first 18 months, and that number continues to shrink as the companies churn out pop.

But forget music, what about snapshots? Every selfie you take is covered for 70 years after you die. Clearly there is something very wrong with that.

> Since we are paying retail rates for energy generated by NEM customers, it is shifting the burden of grid maintenance to the customers without PV.

Then fix THAT problem.

The problem isn't solar, the problem is that no one, no one, pays the actual cost of grid maintenance. If grid maintenance wasn't being partially(or completely) hidden in the $/kWh, the problem would disappear completely.

> I can state with great confidence that it was not in fact considered.

I can state with *perfect* confidence that it was. The 7% cap was written right into the language of the original REC system in Ontario, for instance, which was introduced in the early 2000s.

> This is because there are countries ... (Germany, Denmark, Australia)

Do you live in, installed PV in, or otherwise have anything to do with any of these three countries? Where does your great confidence come from exactly?

Here's the actual facts. Germany had a 5% cap on PV in any single branch, Italy set it at 7%, and most others have also selected 7, including most of Canada and the US. The exceptions have been ones that *raised* the cap to allow more PV, like Germany, California and Hawaii.

> Laws of physics

Ahhh, this is always a good start...

> That's why your phone can talk to base station a kilometer away, your WiFi will
> not carry over about 100m and bluetooth peripherals barely have 10m range.

With only very minor corrections, like the last 10 metres or so, all of these are due entirely to radiated power. The two corrections are near field effects, and building materials.

> 2. Meters long? AM receivers? What?

The limit for practical efficient antennas is about 1/4 wave. A 100 kHz AM signal is 3 km long. An efficient antenna for AM is about 750 meters long. The typical car antenna, at about a metre long, has a gain around -20 dB, around 1% efficiency. That is one of those "laws of physics" you claim to understand. The only reason you can hear anything on AM is because they broadcast tens of thousands of watts. Here, read something:

http://www.antenna-theory.com/basics/gain.php

> Because GPS sends on wave length that is relatively clear from other signals and
> that is able to carry the weak signal over the necessary distance

No, it's because the quarter wave antenna at 1575 MHz is about 5 cm, which fits quite nicely in a cell phone. While a car AM antenna has a gain around -20 dB (and a Walkman is probably down around -25 or less due to the antenna being the earphone which isn't exactly straight), the typical cell phone GPS antenna has a gain around -9 to -2 dB.

http://www.antenna-theory.com/design/gps.php

Recall that dB is logarithmic; this represents and improvement of two orders of magnitude, meaning that the ~250W of radiated power from the GPS is received at about the same power density as 25kW from AM. Actually more because of the physics of AM:

http://fas.org/man/dod-101/navy/docs/es310/AM.htm

There are minor adjustments throughout, but this is good to an order of mag, or better.

Really, you should make sure you know what you are actually talking about before you try to quote physics to the /. crowd.

> We looked at lasers for space-to-Earth power beaming, but it's less practical than you might think

Actually that's precisely why I asked. I recall this was offered up as a solution to the inefficiencies of microwave beaming, only to find that it was even worse.

Space power is a bad idea, but it refuses to die.

> Back when I was working on lasers for power beaming

Short or long haul? Down or up?