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Well well... Someone's afraid of going to Hell!

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  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Find an alternative. most of those products are not necessities anyhow.

    Of all crude oil production, how much goes to non-fuel processing? Crude oil's main use, ever since it widely became used in the early 20th century, was for power and energy.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Always a good idea to find an alternative first though, wouldn't you say?

    Until then Oil is a vital resource.
  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    kira wrote: »
    I disagree. It is the oil companies keeping back alternative forms of energy. Besides, nuclear power, wind power and wave power could sustain the UK alone.

    Where would we get the uranium..... There are only a few places in the world where it can be found and it is still a finite resource. Uranium will run out eventually, quite quickly too if we all started using it instead of oil. Wind/Solar power aren't viable, they're ok as local stopgaps but can't power a nation, leading onto.....
    In the long run, the solution to the world's energy problems is to litter the Sahara desert with solar panels. With the heat/sun present there, it would provide enough energy for the world to run on.

    Another alternative is to litter Antartica with solar panels. it may be cold there, but there is six months of unbroken sunshine.


    Few problems.
    Any ideas how much of a logisitical nightmare it would be to cover 9,000,000 sq/km of the Sahara with solar panels, how much it would cost, and how we would cope with the inevtiable erosion of the panels by the elements?
    Same goes for Antarctica which is a 139,000,000 sq/km in size. Once we've built the solar panels there, how do we get at the electricity? A network of underwater cables perhaps through South America, then across the pacific and Atlantic to Europe and Asia?
    And then of course you need to combat the elements there too. There's a reason why there is a handful of people in Antarctica, it is one of the most hostile environments known to man. It's ok for research but as with the Sahara, building anything of substance there is impossible.

    You've not really thought this through and as MOK has pointed out, oil is used in the manufacturing process of virtually everything on the planet, including solar panels.....

    The real solution to the planet's is Fusion power.

    The current energy consumption of the planet is around 15 terrawatts (15 trillion) per year.
    If we could harness 100% of the sun's solar resources we'd be able to gain about 89 petawatts (89 quadrillion). In order to do so we'd have to cover the Earth's surface with solar cells.
    If we could harness 100% of the wind we could utilise about 870 terrawatts. However as I pointed out there are huge difficulties in terms of cost and logistics.

    Fusion however, is the holy grail. A few months ago at the national ignition facility in the USA in a test lasting just over half a second they managed to record energy equivalent to about 3 terrawatts. Or enough to power Europe.

    Once we can harness the power of the sun here on Earth, the world's energy problems will vanish overnight.
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