Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

"Finally, a decent film about Thorium power and molten salt reactors."

You said it brother.

efficiency in heating water is no more or less efficient then current natural gas and nuclear tech

Solar is inefficient in the sense that it costs more money to produce per watt of energy. It takes 25 years for a solar facility to break even. That's 25 years of citizens paying bigger power bills to subsidize a questionable technology.

you would have seen they has solved the day night cycle problem by storing the heat

Molten salt heat storage has existed at least since the early 1980s. I remember watching an episode of NOVA as a kid talking about this. The Spain plant is the first one in the world to use salt thermal storage tanks to run the plant for between 6 to 8 hours without sunlight.

Even in ideal locations, sunlight is interrupted by weather, cloud cover, and normal day/night cycles. These all reduce power generation capacity. Heat storage is not enough to make up the gap unless you live in close proximity to a few very specific geographic locations. Solar plant in "non ideal" locations require a fossil fuel backup for 75% of their total capacity. Essentially, the solar plant you see is just a coal-fired plant that burns 25% less coal.

Of course that fact that there are no fuel cost or waste by products mean that solar towers and the like will have no harmful impacts on the future like every other method of providing electricity out there.

Well, I'd debate your language a bit on this. There are fuel costs in the sense that you have to buy solar cells, and so forth. They require rare earth metals and other materials. There is waste also because you have to replace those things every few years. Modern nuclear plants are just fine, as are most modern US coal plants (if they would just let them be built).

>> ^deathcow:

If you can focus that much with a single 2 meter paraboloid, wouldn't it be more efficient to heat water with power like that than to use solar panels?


That's the general idea behind thermal solar collection, though I think they molten salt instead of water since it won't boil at normal atmospheric pressures.