@Nick1 The tech is here he just needs to build enough
Molten-salt reactors

@Gibbon Thankyou very much for that!

I am not totally anti-"green", and the whole debate does miss one vital question, but I do think many of their ideas very naive. I wonder if some of the most exciteable do not even understand the difference between power and energy, nor that raw petroluem is a "fossil" but is not "fuel".

I believe we have no choice but to use nuclear power, and the debate comes down to the best form of it and how to ensure it is safe. It does frighten many people, but that comes down to the anti-nuclear campaigners continually citing the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters without bothering about how they happened so how to prevent repeats..


Slightly off-track my local paper recently reported how our County Council, which is already replacing Diesel vans with electric ones, is going over to using fuel made from waste vegetable oil in its heavier vehicles. The report said some operators use a blend of vegetable oil and Diesel oil but what the Council is using, is processed entirely from waste cooking oil. Apparently it is manufactured so the engine does not need modifying.

The "vital question"? Although we cannot say new deposits will not continue to be found for some time to come, sooner or later we will stop using petroleum, either by policy or by depletion. Err, then what, bearing in mind fuels are a fraction of the mineral's total range of products? I have heard or read little discussion on that - plenty about "fossil fuels", but not about all the bulk chemicals for other uses.

@ArishMell There are so many products that require oil for their manufacture if we end it's use 100% tomorrow consumers all around the world go nuts because they couldn't obtain the products they depend on in their daily lives.

@Gibbon Indeed, and even if the products themselves don't contain materials made from petroleum derivatives, the processing quite likely involves them in one way or another.

Possibly, the first products to disappear as materials become scarcer and costlier, will be the goods we do not need: the toys, the luxuries, the ephemera. There is though the vast swathe of goods that are vital, and alternatives to their present forms will need be found.

I can't predict by more than sweeping generalising what the future holds for our great-grandchildren's generation, but It does not seem very hopeful....

@Gibbon Well going for it big style in the much smaller UK I'm sure this would work somewhere out there. I mean there's Death Valley, that's worth exploiting surely.

@GeniUs I believe this is the best current tech to solve everyone's energy problems.
Molten-salt reactors.

@Bang5luts I ended up hitting my belly hard too and unknowingly bruised my spleen.
The next day at school I was feeling bad and released from class I passed out in the hall. I woke up in the hospital with my dad standing beside me in a bed and a doctor on the other side of me my bare belly covered in road rash. My face didn't get as much as it could have just small cheek spot and edge of nose.

@Bang5luts Yeah. Imagine your running down a fairly steep paved hill and your legs are running like hell and you can't slow down. You now need to go faster and your mind is panicking and you're body is suddenly going faster than your legs can keep up. Your knees collapse and it's oh sh-t time. As you're hitting the pavement your mind is still going over when you came off the back and your legs were bookin and you thought you were going to make it and as! body stops sliding on the street you realize your legs need to go at least twice as fast as they were. I never should have gotten on the back of that bike.

@come2gether That may be so but is a red(!) herring. The argument there is whether to use solar panels, not what some potentially hostile country might put in the ones it makes. Besides, if any such switches can be found, they can be removed or disabled.

The original point is about whether the USA can produce enough electricity to power itself, with a growing need for air-conditioning and growing number of electric cars (any plans to change the main railways to electric traction?); though I suspect the discussion around the cars may be influenced by a romantic idea that the car is king and that king must dine only ever on the finest petrol or Diesel-oil. Though at least the absurdly inefficient "gas-guzzler" of the 1950s is now alongside the coal-fired steam railway locomotive: nice to see working examples in preservation, but obsolete for everyday use.

That problem of demand possibly outstripping supply is common to many countries, and trying to use it as an excuse not to develop more and better electrically-powered the equipment is as pointless as the childish insults some aim at anyone who dares worry about human-driven climate-change. The answer is to improve the electricity supply both in quantity and in distribution systems; but these require a lot of investment.

In the end there is no such thing as an easy answer to any major problem; only the answer that give the best results practicable technically and financially, with the least unintended bad consequences.

@ArishMell I'm one to argue with some of your biased banter here but I won't. I honestly believe our best current tech that can be scaled for different areas kept affordable and mostly likely safer than anything other than hydro is Molten-salt reactors. And they could be built easily if the competition and government aholes would get the hell out of the way.