The guy who made this does some interesting experiments. Not that this would be a substitute for nuclear power or anything on that scale, but if you scaled this up, I wonder how effective at producing power it would be?
(EDIT: This vid could equally go into the Oddworld Spotting topic. It uses the same music as that diving vid in said topic at 1:02. I wonder where the music is from and how it relates to Oddworld, if at all.)
Unless I missed something, I really don't think a mirror aimed at a pipe of water can heat it up to boiling point. And like he said, this needs unblocked sun to work. The second it even disappears behind a cloud partially the entire process shuts down.
He's using a parabolic trough - And as you can see in the vid, the water in the pipe gets hot enough to shoot steam out of one end and run that tiny steam engine from it.
This goes back to what I said earlier about this far-fetched idea of putting solar panels/other solar energy collectors on the moon, using the material already on the moon to manufacture them, then beaming back the energy to earth using microwaves. Might be just as much of a hurdle (if not slightly less of one in the long-term because you wouldn't need to blast as much material into space) as using satellites to do the same job.
You wouldn't need to blast any material anywhere if we had a space elevator. Which would as a by-product make several African, South American and South Asian countries very rich.
Running the numbers for fusion power, if fusion could match the global energy output of 1995, current Lithium reserves (for lithium fusion, obviously) would last 3000 years. Lithium extracted from sea water would last 60 million years. Deuterium (Hydrogen-2) extracted from sea water, for the complicated Deuterium only fuel cycle, would last 150 billion years. To put that in perspective, over ten times the age of the universe and 30 times the remaining lifespan of the sun. This is a potential non-renewable resource that could theoretically outlast, by an order of magnitude, so-called "renewable" energy sources.
I once heard a talk from the guy who invented the pacemaker in which he talked about many things, including nuclear fusion. He said that there was a particular isotope (I forget of which atom, it might have been Deuterium in a molecule with something else) that is fairly rare on earth because it is produced when the common molecule is hit by solar rays that are filtered by our atmosphere. There's a solid supply on the Moon, which may seem like a lost cause. However, he suggested that (if the technological hurdles in actually using fusion were ironed out) the cost of setting up the infrastructure for moon missions, sending men to the moon, mining, bringing the stuff back... would still result in less cost per energy unit than oil. And that was 1999 oil prices.
__________________
:
Spending as long as I do here, it's easy to forget that Oddworld has actual fans.
The only thing I can think of produced in the atmosphere by solar rays is Carbon-14, from Nitrogen. And the only nuclear fuel source on the moon I can think of is Helium-3, which is emitted by the sun in the solar wind but obviously gets caught out by our atmosphere and magnetosphere.
Did that fellow factor in a space elevator, or was it all rockets?
Actually, I think it might have been Helium-3. But what is a noble gas doing on the surface of the moon?
It was rockets all the way.
EDIT: Looking at Wikipedia, I'm questioning the accuracy of those calculations. Turns out that one researcher claimed that only 3 missions a year would be necessary to supply energy to the entire world, but a more accurate value would be closer to one a week. I just don't know which set of calculations the guy who told me about it was referring to.
__________________
:
Spending as long as I do here, it's easy to forget that Oddworld has actual fans.
