> Isn't it impossible for solar cells to melt significant snow?

Yes. Obviously if there is enough energy in the sunlight to melt the snow, the snow would melt already.

Heating snow to clear it is multiply-times less efficient than scraping it off with a snowplow.

This whole idea is the dumbest thing I've seen in years, designed by someone who knows nothing about solar power or road engineering. Ask anyone on the planet who's ever had a re-lay a cobblestone road surface how well they think this will work.

So HP has had to lay off 50,000 due to its race to the bottom with other PC vendors.

So their solution is to go as-low-as-possible in the new tablet market.

What could possibly go wrong?

> spend tens of billions more that we might be able make a major breakthrough

No, no, no. If we spend tens of billions more we get some incremental improvements. That is literally anyone is suggesting.

The press releases won't say that, of course, they'll talk about "breakthrough" and "unlimited energy". But when you go from 0.6 to 0.8 to 1.0 over two decades, I refuse to use the term "breakthrough".

In the meantime, if you want to see some nice exponential curves in action:

http://votesolar.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Lazard-June-11-Levelized-Cost-of-Energy-and-proj-to-2020-copy.pdf

Note the second chart. Lazard, those crazy long-hair greenies, are stating that commercial scale PV is 9 to 10 cents/kWh and wind is between 4 and 9 cents. Let me just put this out there: there is absolutely no way that any of the fusion devices being mention here will *ever* hit those price points.

> What about NIF? or is that DoD?

Nope, DoE all the way.

The reason the DoE stopped funding most fusion wasn't some sort of tokamak conspiracy, but the simple fact that it appeared highly likely *none* of them would work, so you might as well stick with the one that's most likely among the unlikely.

And so many years later (I had all my hair) it looks like that was a very wise decision. Not one of the alternative approaches being studied at that point panned out; all of them hit brick walls in their price/performance ratios at levels well below the tokamak.

Since then I've seen, literally, dozens of "great new ideas" come and go. Only a few years ago I was talking to people about "fast ignition" which was definitely totally for sure going to save ICF. It didn't.

I'm passingly familiar with the compact toroid concept, having written *that* article on the Wiki.

Generally speaking it appears the approach is unworkable. In spite of great interest in self-stable configurations, confinement time remained on the order of nano-to-micro seconds, and energy losses were higher than expected. It was not clear whether these could be solved, but it was clear that finding out would cost a lot more money. The apparent low-cost path to fusion did not appear to be so low-cost, and that seems to be the reason the funding was cut.

In the case of DPS it's not clear to me that anything new has been demonstrated. A quick look over the cites on various wiki pages show a very low level of development and nothing that could be considered any sort of non-linear progress. In the case of LPP, their announcement of a 1.8 billion degree plasma after 30 years is hardly encouraging, given how quickly progress had been prior to then.

More controversially, many of the claimed benefits of the design are supposed to come out of a never-before-seen interaction which remains undemonstrated. I remain skeptical that such a thing even exists, and certainly don't take Mr. Lerner's computer models as a reasonable argument - consider LASNEX.

It is worth mentioning that CT's form the basis of at least some MTF systems, and these *are* seeing a significant amount of development today. Whether this is the path to the moon or simply another finite tree remains to be seen. Some consider spherical tokamaks to be CT's (I am *not* one of those) so they add MAST and similar to the list, but these projects have also apparently hit their brick walls.

> FirstFusion is that not only does promise to be a small reactor

Yes... promises. Like "I won't raise your taxes" and "'till death do we part".

> People think about how this will change the world

Which presumes it works. It almost certainly won't. Wishes are not the same as generators, and if they were, I'd be wishing for a pink unicorn instead.

http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-will-never-happen/

"US$50 million to produce the working 5 MW prototype"

$50,000,000 / 5,000,000 W = $10/W.

Anything over about $5 will not get built. Period. Consider Levy County and Darlington B. And unlike this system, they actually worked.

> fired them for full mission duration burns 40-50 times

That doesn't mean it works economically, which is what this article is saying. The SSME could do the same thing, but doing so was extremely questionable. More to the point, the SRB's were recovered and refurbed, but doing so was almost certainly more expensive than simply building new ones.

Unlike NASA, SpaceX actually has to make money. So if we see them reusing their stages and engines, then they figured out how to make it work. As always, the proof is in the pudding.

Case in point:

I wanted to write an article on WWII British airborne radar systems. Found a source, oddly, on the IEEE. Reprint in PDF format is $39.95.

The economic value of this article is a number best represented as zero. The distribution cost is perhaps a few pennies. But they want to charge $40 because that's what they used to charge for a monkey to go and photocopy it and mail it to you, so why change now?

If the article had been 99 cents I would have purchased it no questions asked.

> 20 minutes of semi-conscious agony ending in a heart attack vs. breathing dirt

False dichotomy. Everyone reading this would not be effected by either, as long as he's behind bars.

Cue the madding crowds telling me why I'm wrong to hold my opinion

> All the NIMBY types and loud anti-nuke folks have made sure it's too expensive

So they're the ones to blame for Brown's Ferry and TMI, which basically trebled the cost of nukes in the US due to faulty engineering and operations? I guess they were also the reason that the turbine shafts at Darlington kept failing, that the fuel pod got stuck in the AVR, that Superphénix developed leaks in the cooling system, that the Magnox's all had to be dramatically upgraded to get rid of "shine" and that Soviet reactors have nasty positive void coefficients.

Do you really think ridiculous statements like this help the cause?

But that simply begs the question if nuclear power had to be developed without any help from the military side of things, would it have ever happened? The Manhattan Project was one of the most expensive single undertakings carried out by man up to that point. Consider all the infrastructure for mining, refining, supply, engineering and development that were built up for the program.

If none of that were available, all of those costs would be borne by the reactor program. I don't think that would have ended it outright, consider the fusion program for instance, but it seems highly unlikely we'd have seen any reactors in the 60's, if ever.

> it's still profitable for the companies paying it all though

Some companies. Some others, not so much. Ontario Hydro basically went bankrupt because of Darlington, for instance. As a result, we, the taxpayers, got to pay off $24 billion in stranded debt when they dismantled the company.

> Once society decides to place a nuclear plant (or a city) on a particular site then
> the best thing would be to permanently use that site for that purpose.

But that's not what the industry told us. They told us they could be returned to greenfield. So they built some of them on land that is, after 35 years, extremely valuable real estate. And now we're left holding the bag, again.

Google Maps Pickering Nuclear. That land is worth, literally, billions. If we're being told that we can never use that land, and that looks *highly* likely, then we would have never built it.

So let's pretend that didn't happen, and blame it on the "eco-friendly big city dwellers" in a wonderful example of everything that's wrong with public discourse.

> Also got to kill the stupid environmentalists (only the stupid kind

It's always funny watching the pro-nuke crowd try to find who to blame for the current market drought.

Anyone who has any experience in the power industry knows precisely why this is occurring. Overnight CAPEX is too high, there's a decided lack of long-term funding available, and lifecycle costs keep cropping up, as this article points out. Worse, as we learned the hard way in the early 1970s, building very large plants has the effect of depressing the local spot price for power, which screws with your economic projections. So when one runs the numbers, nukes are simply too expensive and risky in a market of cheap wind and natural gas, both of which cost anywhere from 1/4 to 1/2 less than even the newest plants, can scale out across several orders of magnitude, and go from paper to electrons in about two years.

The big engineering firms are well aware of this problem, of course, and have been trying to design their way out of it for a couple of decades now. Unfortunately, no one fully agrees on what that solution is. As we learned yesterday, B&W's gamble on small reactors has ended, there's basically no ongoing research on lifters or fast reactors, and so we're left with what are basically updated versions of the same machines that we put in in the 1960s. Safer? Yes. Easier to build? Likely. Cheaper? No, actually, they cost about *four times* what they used to.

And that's what's killing nukes.

But for the True Believers, its all someone else's fault. In spite of denigrating a group of people who's greatest contribution to public debate is the whiff of patchouli, apparently the "stupid environmentalists" are apparently so effective they can wipe out the combined efforts of some of the largest engineering companies in the world, the largest government in the world, and the largest power industry in the world. Wow! If that's the case, maybe you shouldn't be insulting them in public!

Of course others realize the utter ridiculousness of the argument that "stupid environmentalists" are the cause of the nuke industries woes. So the point fingers at everyone else, from the big banks, to wall street in general, to the EPA, to other forms of power. It's very common to see nuke supporters talking about how bad everything else is.

Look, here's the bottom line: no one wants this overpriced product. That's why it's not being built. End of story.