Bill, We are a wash in energy. It is all around us but the power density is so low that it takes very large antennas to collect enough energy to be practical. Such large antennas aren't practical. The same way that the solar and wind people want to shut off all of the hydroelectric, coal, oil, gas, and fission power plants and only use geo, wind, and solar. It can't be done. Well it can but you would have to plant the whole continent from coast to coast to coast with solar or with wind or some combination there of. But then where are you going to put the cities, towns, villages, farms, industries, commercial buildings, and all of the other things that a modern civilization needs to function. We need to quit building gas power plants. We need that gas for our petrochemical, glass, and pharmaceutical industries. We can now build coal plants with the emissions going to special algae farms that capture the CO2 and turn it in to a plant that can easily be converted to oil, gasoline, and diesel. We should also be on a major fission power plant building program. We should also build a new reprocessing plant at Oakridge and build a second one out in the Nevada desert where they proposing to bury the waste from our existing plants. What most people don't realize is that fission fuel is not like coal or oil or other carbon and hydrogen based fuels they don't burn up they just become more diluted. When the concentration drops to 90 percent of what it was when the fuel was originally placed in service it has to be replaced with new fuel that has the proper concentration. Well right now they are proposing to take this fuel and go bury it in the ground. This is really stupid. It would be like taking 90 percent of our oil, coal, and gas and burying it in the ground and then telling people that it is off limits for the next 10,000 years or so. What happens when our civilization falls and a new people discover this buried radioactive junk. And it is hubris to think that our civilization will last for ten or twenty thousand years, It might but I doubt it. So you send the fuel to a reprocessing plant. The plant then recovers the 90 percent that is still good. So instead of having 10,000 tons of it to dispose of you now only have 1000 tons. You can put this into those concrete, steel, and lead caskets as before but instead of burying it in the ground you take it out to the Marianas Trench. You then drop these 10 ton caskets in to the trench. We don't even have the ability to recover these caskets let alone any terrorists. It is gone. In a million years or so after having been ground up as the ocean floor is consumed it will pop back up out of a volcano but don't worry for by then it will be no more radioactive then the planet that we live on. A nice clean, somewhat easy, and a much cheaper and safer way to dispose of the waste from our reactors. Now don't kid yourselves about fusion reactors. They generate radiation and the components around the reactor and close to the reactor will become radioactive you just don't end up with the very heavy radioactive particles that take tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years to decay to a point that they are safe to handle without special precautions. So you will still have a radioactive waste disposal problem but most of the radiation will decay to a safe level in a few thousand or even a few hundred years. Another problem with fusion is that we just don't know when. There could be a break through tomorrow or it could be another hundred years or maybe it just can't be done at earth normal gravity levels. We just don't know. Meanwhile back at the reprocessing plants you now have the 90 percent that was left over. So you add enough new material to bring back it up to the full 100 percent and you can put it back in to a reactor. If we build breeding reactors we can have a unlimited amount of power for almost forever. It doesn't mean that we should give up on fusion. It is worth while to keep trying and it would be better than fission. And yes we should keep building solar, wind, geo, and hydro but this should all be part of an overall energy plan. If we could get the cost of electricity back down to four or five cents a kilowatt hour we could beat the socks off of any other country out there in productivity. Remember that the level of a civilization is based on how much energy it can harness. All of the civilizations up to the modern era did it with slaves. It was why slaves were so popular. And please don't yell at me for telling the truth here but the main driving force for ending slavery was the harnessing of electricity. Don't take me wrong on this, slavery is wrong. No people have the right to enslave any other people. But with out electricity slavery probably would not have ended. The cost of electricity where I live is almost 12 cents a kilowatt hour. I know that a lot of places in CA are now above 20 cents a kilowatt hour. This is ridiculous and as the cost of electricity goes up the price of everything else goes up and I mean everything.// It is the poor that are hurt the most as the cost of electricity goes up. The rich don't even feel. It effects the upper middle class a little bit, the middle class and lower middle class feel it even more but it is the poor who are really effected. The only reason that electricity is so expensive is because this group doesn't want fission plants and this group doesn't want coal, and this group over here doesn't want hydro and this group doesn't want any new refineries. Tell you what I'll start supporting these groups when they get rid of their SUVs, pickups that only see a gravel road when they pull in to their own driveway because they are too cheap to have it paved and when all these people in all of these groups start living in wigwams and cooking and heating with cow dung. I.E. they have to give up all of the luxuries that they like so much and that they want to deny to the rest of us. So with plenty of fission plants supplying our base loads, with geo being used where it is practical which in this case I mean active geothermal sites and there aren't a lot of them in the continental US. But there is another geo form that is way under tapped and that is geothermal heating and cooling. I.E. ground source heat pumps. If every home, commercial building, government building, and industrial building(where it is practical to do so) had ground source heat pumps it would cut the demand for electricity in the US by almost half. Also the demand for oil and gas for heating would go away. It would drop to almost zero. And the demand for coal would drop by almost 10 percent. It would make a huge difference in the amount of energy that this country would demand. And think about the amount of CO2 and SOx that would no longer be generated. We would become the greenest country on the planet except for maybe Iceland. Cool, huh? Thanks, rich! P.S. If you want I can write more on what we can do to become productive again. Thanks, rich! On 6/27/2014 2:44 AM, RussellMc wrote: > On 27 June 2014 16:22, William "Chops" Westfield wrote: > >> On top of that, you have all these semiconductor companies trying to sel= l >> "energy harvesting solutions", and none of them are claiming to be able = to >> blink an LED every 15 minutes from RF energy harvesting (which is about = the >> sort of power we're talking about, as far as I can tell.) >> >> Just a data point. > On 1 uW stored I can give you a 15 lumen x 10 mS flash every 15 minutes. > > 1 uW x 15mins x 60 s/min =3D 900 uW.s > Say 1 mW.s. > At 150 lumen/Watt you get 0.15 lumen second. > So 15 lumen for 0.01s. > > You can easily get 150 l/W LEDs (from about 10 cents US.) > 20 l/W is harder but available. > Cree have achieved around 350 l/W 'in the lab'. > > > > Russell -- http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .