Below fallows an "open brain" conversation I just had with myself regarding this thread: Please don't expect it to be linear or even make much sense, it is after all the after effects and unprocessed effects of random neuro-chemical firing in my head:
Allright, From the top:
Gizmodo can bite our collective asses, we already have better pictures of NIF in the PL user gallery courtesy of Yadda. It is a sight to behold, in all respects. Seriously. Check out that YAG rock. NIF as I understand it is a tripler to get "buckets of watts" of non ionizing UV radiation.
http://www.photonlexicon.com/gallery...rance/album09/
For a funny outlook on LHC check this out:
http://xkcd.com/401/
The LHC is a beautiful piece of machinery however I personally have higher hopes for NIF in the fact that their "end goal" is to exceed what has classically been calculated to be "just how much energy" you can shoe-horn into any given piece of three dimensional space. Think about that for a second: The first full power shot *will* exceed our collective understanding of E=MC^2. Who knows what will happen. Quantum Physics and Thermodynamics be damned to hell.
Doomsday scenarios aside, creating a star in a bottle is terribly sexy. As to whether or not we should try to create the star before understanding what processes govern the star formation or not... Thats not for me, you, or anyone to understand just yet. I say: "Well, Lets find out." I do feel confident there is not a framework and lattice structure holding the sun together and by proxy would be primarily held together by poorly understood gravitational constants. It is, as evidenced by solar spectrography 97ish percent hydrogen... at least on the surface. That, to my piteous brain, is a mindbogglingly large amount of gravity. There was an interesting "thought experiment" on the idea a decade ago, I can't remember the source for the life of me but it basically goes as fallows: Something like LHC is turned on. Tiny little black holes *may* be created and they would gravitationally be attracted to the core of this planet. Eventually they would dance around until one day two of these infinitesimally small black holes would collide causing all sorts of "neat stuff(Tm) that is the computer science equivalent of dividing by zero *and* getting the right answer. While I don't put too much stock in stable black holes being produced by any Terran method it is damn interesting brain exercise to think about much akin to electrons in orbit colliding.
D2O is easy to produce just terribly expensive when energy costs are calculated given Mostly due to the electronegativity of H2O bonds. Still, its viable. Another neat thing about D2O: seeds refuse to germinate in it. Why? Maybe the plants prefer Evian. Though I think it has something to do with osmotic transfer through cellular membranes and the relative viscosity of Dt
Fuck Tokamak reactors: We have billions of fusion containment devices in the known universe and none of them happen to be toroidal in design. Gravatational constants being what they are, we as piteous little humans will always be looking at ways to use the small percentage of "trash" that is produced from them. IE: Solar. Brayton cycle heat loops. Thermo couplers.
In short: "Skip the middleman: Go Nuclear."(Tm)
Hydrogen is all over the fucking place and easy to confine, once again just expensive. If what I read a million years ago in college is correct the easiest "net positive" collection method is compressing and super cooling a volume of air into its liquid state then skimming it off the top. Literally.
Current theory suggests that hydrogen is an after effect of low level nuclear collision. Check the upper atmosphere, buckets of hydrogen up there, mostly to molecular bombardment of heavier items slamming into lighter items till we are left with hydrogen at the bottom of the food chain, so to speak.
There are, and this is a technical term, Metric Shitloads(One order of magnitude below "Metric Fucktons" and one order of magnitude above "Ultra buckets" as measured on the scale of speed where R13 is clearly way too fast) of gold in the worlds oceans in addition to Deuterium. Problem once again is net output. Read an article a while ago that stated to get 1 troy ounce of gold out of the ocean one would have to process, vaporize, and reconstitute 60 million gallons of water... Thats some expensive shit. Just the pumping of that water would be way more expensive than whatever the current $X per T oz". I imagine the process for collecting Dt would be similar.
Now if anyone wants to make Billions of useless US currency: Find a cheap way of pulling non ferrous metals out of the water. Think magnetics for non ferrous material.
Speaking of Billions of dollars: Devulcanization of rubber. That sulphur bond is a bitch.
Oil is used because it is a cheap net positive energy source. Thats it. Period. As Buffo stated, Net output/input is 30-40:1. Shale and "rock oil" is is amazingly more abundant however the suits only get 5ish:1 on their investment, thus making it, and I am sure you have all heard this before: "Not cost effective".
Fuel prices are a joke. Prices are currently outrageous yet at the same time Oil cracking companies (Look up Oil Hydro Carbon Cracking) have once again exceeded the threshold for windfall profits and the US reserves are as higher than ever. Its a cheap ass carnival trick and we are stuffing dollars into the slot machine.
Ethanol is also a fucking joke: The *only* reason it is being called cheap is because the process used to produce it is economically cheap *when* combined with corn subsidies. Remove the subsidies and look at that, its terribly expensive again. All that aside: Its definitive roll is food. Diverting corn stock into fuel further tightens the noose on this food supply problem we have been butting heads with for years.
Tocket: Gold production from these open pit mines is far far cheaper. Now $450ish a troy ounce, Used to be far cheaper when there were actual veins of gold in the dirt, though all known supplies of that has been exhausted. Current "tech" does the fallowing: 10 tons of "bearing rock and soil" are pulverized and then it is rolled and sprayed with cyanide which will dissolve the gold in the dirt. The slurry produced is then evaporated at atmosphere and burned off leaving relatively pure particulate gold behind. Yep, Cyanide. Check out the Rand refinery in South Africa.
Solar cells are promising because they are "clean" and have a positive image associated with the "source" of energy. But once again you are just harnessing the waste of a rather large and untapped reactor that is both simultaneously super critical *and* self moderating. Nuclear reactors get a bad rep because the word nuclear itself is mentally associated with the picture of a nuclear bomb and all that shit that goes with it. Damn shame too. Please see my just made up (Tm) above.
Another interesting trinket about Nuclear reactors: They produce infinitely less radiation than Coal burning plants. Coal burners are terribly nasty places.
Solar energy is a lot better than it used to be, the costs of "oil" has risen to the point where its now economically viable to research it. I consider the "machine" that publicly trades oil futures to be a perfect example of "Bureaucromancy" in action. That word should surely be be self explanatory... All joking aside, Current monolithic solar cells combined with an optical concentrator are a good example of new exciting tech. A lot of the current energy of solar is tied up in thermal properties... To extract all of it would require some rather neat and not-yet-existent heat-exchange technology, though for the time being photons slamming into electro voltaic panels that shit out electrons is more than adequate, Just need to get more of those photons entangled in the cell. For what its worth, I believe that the current research cycle is broken... How many times, in our short time on this planet have we seen phenomenal research and development *halted* the exact second a high profit consumer application is found? Way too many.
Ive got a few oddball energy production ideas buried in the back of my head. Don't worry though my fellow citizens: I'm not one of those insane Free-Energy cretins who believes that "big oil" runs the world. As a matter of fact: I believe that any change from an oil based economic engine would be welcomed by society at large. Hell, look what cheap "plentiful" Oil(energy) got us in the first place: The industrial revolution. I hope I live long enough to see the next one.