Cosmic Log has the details.
Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu
Comments
In Reinventing the Solar Power Satellite Geoffrey Landis explores how space-based solar power could be switched on demand from one city to a higher-bidding one thousands of km away. The beams have to fly six to seven Earth radii anyway.
This long flight also makes it impossible to focus them very tightly. The antenna farms have to be big. Aggressive sharers of ignorance are always talking about weaponizability and cooked geese. It's a waste of time to try to correct them, but good to know that these issues were dealt with long ago. No geese will be cooked by SPS, except maybe in kitchen ovens powered by it.
--- G.R.L. Cowan, boron car fan
Internal combustion without exhaust gas
Nuclear, solar, hydro, and wind can power our civilization for centuries at far lower cost.
SpaceX might ultimately reduce launch costs by an order of magnitude, but to do better something radically new will probably be needed.
There are some vaguely feasible ideas to do so, but none of them have been demonstrated, and would take a lot of time and money to bring to fruition.
But until that occurs, space solar power is a very expensive pipedream.
But, like many other things, it takes time and effort to discover this. At first glance, huge space-based arrays collecting unlimited solar energy seem much more attractive than "dirty old fission."