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Originally Posted by Roflmao
Yeah microwave technology is cool, I'm just not sold on the efficiency of solar panels and the transfer of microwaves and then the possible effects it has on the environment (think about birds and stuff flying through those microwave beams, dude haha), at least thats how I understand it works? To me the end all solution is fusion, its much cleaner than anything we got and produces exponentially more power than anything we got as well. I remember reading things of how electromagnets were being used to try to contain the reactions (which were lasting something like 10 seconds?) instead of finding actual materials to withstand the heat, since a magnetic force can push everything far enough away to make the materials we do have able to withstand the heat, and that they were coming quite close, in scientific terms, to getting it to work. I would love to be working on stuff like that, I just can't go to school for that long.... bleh. Anyways, people vote for fusion, it worked in SimCity2000 and it can work for us too?!
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The premise for microwave power is basically a laser beam of microwave energy, as opposed to visible light. And while it might fry a few birds, every power plant that we make has some sort of detrimental effect on those poor creatures. Hydroelectric floods their homes, they get zapped by transmisison lines, someone has probably found that birds that nest at nuclear plants are mutated or sterile or something, wind turbines chop them up, they get cooked by solar thermal plants, and it just goes on.
As for the efficiency of solar panels in space, they work extremely well up there. For one thing they can be oriented towards the sun all day long making maximum use of the power. No light is difused in the atmosphere. Its said that they can collect up to 10x more power every day than a similar area of solar panels on earth.
As for the fusion reactors, yes they do use electromagnetic levitation to suspend the plasma. But that can only do so much. A fusion reactor would not generate nearly as much heat as the sun, but it would be generating the same temperatures (think of heat as flow rate from a hose, temperature as the pressure). So it would need to be on the order of millions of degrees. Unless you can levitate that plasma several miles away, its going to need something more than levitation. Thats where cold fusion comes in, but that's something that I know practically nothing about.
Oh, and I recomend going to school for this stuff -unless you are at a point in life where that is not practical. School is only 8 months at a time, and the time put in will pay off eventually. And if you don't want to go into nuclear phyiscs, thats fine. Take something like energy engineering. Little less exotic, but you would be designing things to get rid of nasty, disgusting coal power (clean coal is a concept up there with civil war, friendly fire and microsoft works, the two words should never be used together). There are other routes to go as well but you get the idea.
hmm, I seem to have been rambling.