I stand partially corrected. Maybe I'm thinking of attempts to utilize chlorophyll analogues in artificial photosynthetic cells.

Regardless, my main points about stability versus efficiency remain. Long-term stabilization of photoactive materials is one of the primary problems that has to be addressed for further commercialization of solar cells. Fortunately, there are many people working on it, and the future is bright. :smile:

I won't believe that green solar panels are of any use. Except that they look nice. My understanding is that the panels must be totally black, to retain all the radiation (energy), and not reflect it back.

Green panels being more efficient than black panels, this is bullshit.

Plants are not efficient.

These things (like Calvin Cycle, etc) are very well known and understood. Plants are not efficient. Full stop. They do what they can. Same as humans. That is actually my main argument against creationism: only a completely idiot god would design such imperfect and inefficient thing like a human being.

Now, about switching to solar energy to reduce global warming, c'mon! this is another silly idea. On long term, actually, this is a bad idea... Most solar panels are black, or dark in color, exactly from the reasons explained, and using more and more of them (beside of the fact that they pollute the earth the same way as the batteries, or coal, just think about what you will do with, and where and how you will deposit all this stuff, when it will be out of life - tones and tones of batteries and solar cell materials, that are produced daily, and they are not bio-degradable, otherwise your solar panel will not last too long, they are made to last for years, and still can last thousands of years after being disaffected), so, beside of it, using more and more dark panels will actually make the Earth retain [U]more[/U] solar energy. It decreases the "[URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo"]albedo[/URL]" of the planet. So, instead of reflecting back to space the solar energy, and staying cool, the Earth will retain this energy, getting hot (i.e. changing it in electricity, which later, one way or another, becomes heat).

The best way to keep the planet cool is actually burning methane. Do you remember my pledge about CNG cars? :razz:

Future is not electric. Future is CNG.

[QUOTE=LaurV;467034]The best way to keep the planet cool is actually burning methane.[/QUOTE]Erm, burning something keeps us cool? :confused:

Anyhow, why not nuclear energy? Maybe not using uranium, but thorium. Molten salt reactors using thorium can be made intrinsically safe; if something breaks the reaction simply stops. Also, you can make them small. Only large enough to power one house; bury it in the back yard. So there is no concentration of fuel all in one place, it is distributed everywhere. After ten years when it is spent, dig it up and put in a new one. And you can paint them green if you want to, for the aesthetics.

[QUOTE=LaurV;467034]I won't believe that green solar panels are of any use. Except that they look nice. My understanding is that the panels must be totally black, to retain all the radiation (energy), and not reflect it back. Green panels being more efficient than black panels, this is bullshit.[/QUOTE]

Completely agree. As everyone /should/ know, the amount of energy in a photon is a function of its frequency (to humans: its colour). [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum"]Electromagnetic spectrum[/URL] -- there is approximately two orders of magnitude (base 10) difference in the energy between Near ultraviolet and Near infrared; green is roughly midway.

[QUOTE=LaurV;467034]Earth will retain this energy, getting hot (i.e. changing it in electricity, which later, one way or another, becomes heat).[/QUOTE]

I understand, but disagree, with your premise.

Lowering the planet's albedo does indeed increase the amount of heat retained in the system. But it would take a tiny amount of the earth's surface turned black (with solar collectors of one form or another) to power our entire civilization. And earth is not a closed system.

[QUOTE=retina;467041]Anyhow, why not nuclear energy? Maybe not using uranium, but thorium. Molten salt reactors using thorium can be made intrinsically safe; if something breaks the reaction simply stops.[/QUOTE]

I resonate with what you say here. But thorium reactors need to be started with a fissile charge (such as U-233 or U-235), since thorium is only fertile.

Rather than having a thorium reactor in every backyard, why not use the fusion reactor most of us find for half of the day in the sky?

[QUOTE=chalsall;467085]Rather than having a thorium reactor in every backyard, why not use the fusion reactor most of us we find for half the day in the sky?[/QUOTE]We can have both. But access to the big ball of fire in the sky isn't reliable, we need to have alternatives to fill the gaps.

[QUOTE=retina;467086]We can have both. But access to the big ball of fire in the sky isn't reliable, we need to have alternatives to fill the gaps.[/QUOTE]

Yeah. Battery storage. Pumping water up hills. Windmills.

Holding one's breath....

Do you honestly think it makes sense to burn hydrocarbons???

[QUOTE=chalsall;467092]Do you honestly think it makes sense to burn hydrocarbons???[/QUOTE]You asking me? I suggested nuclear, not burning stuff.

[QUOTE=retina;467093]You asking me? I suggested nuclear, not burning stuff.[/QUOTE]

OK. But I also pointed out that it took rare radioactive Uranium isotopes to charge a Thorium reactor.

[QUOTE=chalsall;467094]OK. But I also pointed out that it took rare radioactive Uranium isotopes to charge a Thorium reactor.[/QUOTE]
[STRIKE]Is the Uranium charge a one-time thing?[/STRIKE]
OK. I see there are many variables and many designs with different intentions. I think I understand that some thorium setups can end up with reduced waste products. There does seem to be a lot of separation and reprocessing required, but I guess that is true of most fission processes.
[url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle[/url]

[QUOTE=retina;467041]Erm, burning something keeps us cool? :confused:

Anyhow, why not nuclear energy? Maybe not using uranium, but thorium. Molten salt reactors using thorium can be made intrinsically safe; if something breaks the reaction simply stops. Also, you can make them small. Only large enough to power one house; bury it in the back yard. So there is no concentration of fuel all in one place, it is distributed everywhere. After ten years when it is spent, dig it up and put in a new one. And you can paint them green if you want to, for the aesthetics.[/QUOTE]

Say, I don't know much about thorium, I would like to have a bucket of it in my yard and I will paint it green every day, knowing it can run my GPU farm for free.... but [U]YES[/U], burning methane actually [U]does[/U] keep the planet cool.

The explanation stays in the capacity of different atmospheric "garbage" to function as a greenhouse shell. When sun heats the earth, the surface of the earth gets hot. That is why down is hotter than up. The atmosphere does not get hot. The heat from the ground level travels up with the mass of the air, but the most of the heat (solar radiation) is actually reflected back into space. However, when it goes back, it meets the upper layers of the atmosphere, which act as the glass of a glasshouse, reflecting back the radiation.

This is what causes the heating of the planet. The "garbage" existent in the air, like freons, carbon dioxide, methane, water vapors, etc. If no atmosphere, then we would be hot like hell in the day, and cold like Mars in the night. And dead, because we could not breath... hehe...

Now, the water comes down as rains, the carbon dioxide is gulped by the plants and lots of little guys in the oceans called plankton, we don't make much freons anymore, but the methane is there to stay.

People make so much fuss about producing carbon dioxide. Producing carbon dioxide is no bother. Some volcano deciding to erupt somewhere is just producing carbon dioxide and sulphur stuff in five minutes in the same amount that it was produced by humanity in centuries. We are not so significant as we think we are, you know? All the carbon dioxide we produce in an year is gulped by few cubic kilometers of plankton in few weeks. Well, many cubic kilometers, but they are a lot, oceans are filled with them, actually, they are few hundred times more than necessary...

So, we make of carbon dioxide, so what? This just keeps plants and plankton happy. They gulp the carbon dioxide and thrive. Then they die. And when they die, they rot. If other things do not eat them. But generally, they have the bad habit to rot, directly, or indirectly, like the cow that ate the plants and the tiger that ate the cow... they all rot.

And when they rot and decay, they also have the bad habit to fall to the bottom of the ponds, Atlantic pond, Pacific Pond, etc, and transform into methane. Especially tigers, see the life of 3.14159...

Coal and gasoline will sooner or later end, because they need millions of years and lots of pressure to be made. But methane, well... any swamp is gurgling of it, because any leaf and any shoe, and any organic material that falls into it becomes methane in few years.

Which raises in the atmosphere, with water vapors, carbon dioxide, flying pigs, farts, and other garbage.

And from all the mentioned chemicals, guess which has one of the highest greenhouse effects?

Replacing few gigatones of methane with few gigatones of CO2 and water vapours, actually [U]will[/U] make the planet colder. Not much, but it will. Do this repeatedly...

In fact, this can be calculated, methane is about [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Global_warming_potential"]10 to 80 times[/URL] more effective in heating the planet than the carbon dioxide is, for a given time horizon of 20 to 100 years (depending on the pressure, and on its combination with water). We are talking here about "few Celsius degrees cooler", not about "few hundreds of a degree", as environmentalists complain the planet is hotter..

Wake up people!

BTW, the methane can also be very easily produced, for example in bacteria farms - there are bacteria that actually produce methane from water and carbon dioxide, releasing the oxygen into the atmosphere, and they can be "cultivated" in "methane farms", in case we "run out of methane" for our cars.

What stopped the (for example) automobile industry to adopt the CNG was the same reason which stopped it to become electric: impossibility (with actual technology) to store enough amount of energy in a given volume (comparable with the volume of a gasoline/diesel tank).

Fill in a gasoline tank and you go 600 kilometers. A lot of autonomy. If you ask me to refuel my tank every 50 km, you lost me, I would not buy your car.

Making a car battery to last 600km, with a reasonable volume, was not possible until very recently, and it is still prohibitive in price, and extremely pollutant (think about disposing aged batteries), and making a steel tank able to store so much methane, is not possible yet. If you find a way to store methane efficiently, you will be a billionaire next day.

Opposite to water and LPG, which have "polar" molecules and can be easily liquefied, methane (CNG) can not. It has a sturdy tetrahedral molecule, with hydrogens in all directions, which repel each other. Compressing is like putting millions of soap balloons that do not break and do not stick to each-other, in a triangular plastic bag.

But this is another subject I was repeatedly talking about...

Electric cars will never became so numerous, or at least, not in the near future, because is the physics that opposes, and not the administration. You can not "refill" the battery fast as you refill a gasoline tank, the actual materials do not allow it, new materials are needed. And even so, imagine you find the magic battery that you can charge in minutes, you need to put a lot of energy into it, to keep your car moving 600km, therefore imagine the thickness of the conductors when millions of cars are coming to the "pumps", nation-wide, during the "rush hours". They have to support millions and millions of amperes and be "yards" in diameters. Or a system of exchanging batteries must be invented, and supported by insurance companies, etc, that would not require me to give you my new battery because it is discharged, and get another one charged, but old. Car owners won't go for that, unless they do not own the battery at all.

Etc...

Need to go home... 6 PM here.