New way of producing electricity...

[Starving Steve]

Re: New way of producing electricity...

So what is your solution Starving Steve? Are you saying there is a better use for my $30,000 than a nice solar array on my roof? what is it?

If I were you--- and remember that I am a moron so be careful about my advice--- I would put some $ into gold coins, junk silver coins, real silver-silverware to eat off of, some in high dividend stocks especially Cdn high dividend stocks like Bank of Nova Scotia, GE in the USA because of its brains and common sense, Duke Energy Co, Southern Co, maybe Inter Pipelines in Canada, maybe Vermillion Energy Trust, and for sure: the home that you live in. So, in the case of your home, increasing its insulation would be a better investment than making new electricity from solar power.

The only solar that makes sense to me is solar hot-water heating if you live in a sub-tropical desert climate. Morocco and Isreal would be great for solar hot-water, of course.

Another excellent use of money would be to buy homes and rent them out, especially in nice areas of California.

S.S. ;)

[Starving Steve]

Re: New way of producing electricity...

So, uh, is 3.4E-11 Joule (8.2E-12 gram-calorie) nearly ZERO as well?

The average energy yield from splitting the U-235 nucleus is about 0.000000000034 Joule (215 MeV x 1.602E-19 Coulomb).

In your system of math, where is the dividing line for rounding small numbers down to zero, so that later when you multiply by a large number, you still get zero? Obviously, in the case of nuclear fission, a very small amount of energy times a very very large number of nuclei equals a large amount of energy... so much energy that you regard nuclear power as a viable energy source.

If you didn't already know that nuclear works, would you look at the energy yield per fission and conclude it wouldn't? (Maybe not, because you probably know something about how many U-235 nuclei can fit into a smallish lump of metal.) But it seems to me that it's not much work, what with modern calculators and all, to actually work the products and see if the amounts of energy discussed in this forum are worth the effort or no. Rounding small numbers down to zero and then multiplying "zero" by a large number doesn't make your point very effectively. Showing that a small amount of energy times a reasonable multiplier based upon some physical constraint (such as surface area or weight or something) doesn't give a satisfactorily large product would be more effective.

Tapping into a small amount of energy per atom and multiplying that by the billions of atoms which you are about to fission does release a tremendous amount of energy. And this is NOT the same as using new silicon chips to harness solar power which has almost ZERO power in its energy flux. (One can not make something out of nothing.)

Billions of pennies does make a considerable amount of money. But if one has to hunt and peck for pennies--- expend energy to retrieve pennies----then the game is over. It doesn't pay.

Fission pays because the energy is compact. Solar-electric is a loser because the energy is too dispersed.

Picking-up a billion pennies in one heap is a winning proposition. Picking-up a billion pennies sprinkled all over the continent is a losing proposition. Best to bury the thought.

S.S.