blurr91 :
OK, where are they? Efficient power source means money. Evil and greedy capitalists like money. Where are these solar technologies being used?
Yes, it can. However it is very sporatic and power grids don't like that. The efficiency lost in unpredictable power offsets any savings from "free" power.
Spent fuel will be reprocessed and reused. Theoretically there is no such thing as nuclear waste. Nuclear "waste" also doesn't stay radioactive for "billions of years." Chernobyl recovered much faster than what "scientists" thought it would. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are doing fine right now. You are buying too much into the scare tactics put out by the greenies.
You may want to re-examine your conspiracy theory. Oil companies aren't just oil companies. They are energy companies out to make a profit. They will sell any form of energy that makes money. I'm serious. Take a look at all the electric cars that came to the market over the last 20 years. They went away because the consumers don't like them. They are expensive, short ranged, and inconvenient to refuel. GM EV1; Honda Insight (the original); Chevy Volt. Not many people bought them, and Volt isn't exactly an electric car, yet still no one bought it.
Solar is very maintenance intensive. Any dust on the panels will kill efficiency. Someone, most likely an expensive union labor, will have to constantly clean the panels (or reflectors) to make sure they operate at peak efficiency. Any type of overcast will also kill efficiency. We know for a fact solar doesn't work at night, so there goes at least 50% of our generator time. Really you are getting less than 30% of your return on investment: 50% down time due to night and 20% down time with maintenance and inclement weather.
Yes, greedy people like money, but never forget that they are often short-sighted. For example, media companies use DRM and scare tactics to try to stop piracy (in vain, I might add) instead of trying to work with or around it to make even more money. They don't just like money, they like power, and to have power they want other people to lose money.
It is true that solar can be high-maintenance, but there are definitely ways around that. Dust is easy to clean off and this cleaning can be automated cheaply. Of course, if something were to become damaged then human action may be necessary, but the same is true for any other power source.
I'm not being a conspiracy theorist by telling you what some companies have done. We all know that many companies, especially large companies, will engage in questionable and sometimes even illegal practices to try to get their way, often successfully. Would I be a conspiracy theorist for giving you a report on what all of the tech companies did to get where they are? For example, Bill Gates bought DOS from someone else for a few hundred dollars or so and then used it as a base to make himself a millionaire, then a billionaire later on.
How many technology companies have been ground into dust when they had products that would challenge larger companies? How about how after IBM came out with their computers so many decades ago, Compaq reverse-engineered them to make a complete clone of IBM's technology? And how many other companies did the same thing after Compaq opened the flood-gates to this practice until it was declared illegal? This crap goes on all the time. Acknowledging events that have been proven to have happened, regardless of how unsatisfactory they are, does not make me a conspiracy theorist.
We see less of this now, but it still goes on. We have smaller companies like AMD (whom was once part of IBM) for several reasons, not the least important of which are anti-trust laws and other things against having monopolies. AMD isn't innocent either, I'm just using it as an example.
Yes, the cars you listed suck. They use the same technology that some car manufacturers had back in the 70s and earlier, without many changes at all and that's part of why they can't work right and part of why they haven't been stopped by other companies. Tesla Motors has an electric vehicle that can go around 600 miles on a single charge, 300 miles per battery and you can have two batteries stacked to get 600 miles. That's not even the only good electric car to have been built, there were others that were stopped by car/oil companies. Sometimes electric motor technology was stopped even during conceptual stages in development.
Granted, there are problems right now such as very few charging stations, but that's not a fault of the technologies themselves.
As for reusing spent nuclear fuel, no... That doesn't work. After a few years of use, nuclear fuel (mostly uranium now, used to be plutonium) loses a majority of it's usable energy. Once it becomes less efficient to use the fuel it gets replaced with new fuel. This happens because of something called a half-life. That's the amount of time t takes for half of a sample of radioactive material to emit it's radiation and split into other elements. if it takes half an hour for half a sample of say, Uranium, to do this (it actually takes billions of years), then it takes the same amount of time for half of the remaining radioactive uranium to radiate, and so on.
Eventually the purity of the uranium fuel drops to the point where the amount of energy released in a given time is considered unacceptably low and it's replaced with purer fuel. A fission reactor speeds up the half life of radioactive material by injecting particles that impact radioactive elements and force them to radiate instead of waiting for their natural amount of time it would take to do this to come by. I'm not buying into eco-nuts propaganda, this is the truth. Most eco-nuts probably don't even know how this all works anyway, they just assume it's bad out of a lack of understanding. I studied nuclear fission and fusion for a while, I even went to an event at Fermi-lab and talked with nuclear physicists. They were pretty nice people, good at explaining this stuff.
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