I absolutely agree with this. I'm always looking into the cost effectiveness of a private heat & power generator, but it really needs to be on a community level like they do in some of the colder parts of the world.

electricity distrubution is actually quite inefficient:

We have something that gives out heat energy which makes water hot.
We convert that to high pressure steam.
We convert that into kinetic energy with an engine.
We convert that into electrical energy with a generator.
We convert that into a high voltage suitable for transmission with a transformer.
We carry the current through many thousands of miles of cables with resistive and electromagnetic losses
We convert it down to 240v through another series of transformers
We then convert it back into heat in our shower unit, to make water hot.

Any guesses what the total conversion loss is..?

I love the idea of transmitting power as hydrogen gas. In theory it could have minuscule losses.

ISTR >%80 losses but that's off the top of my head.

BTW we use 230V in the UK

Time to find a multimeter.

Yup, how long is it since the Industrial Revolution and yet, even with nuclear power, we still just heat up water and create steam generally. We're still in the steam powered age for the most part.

Thorium reactors seem the most obvious solution to create the amount of energy needed at low cost that we need. It's not a final answer though.

As for the water vapour thingy, it is supposed to have contributed a third of the global warming in the 90's. How reliable that is and if it was actually an affect of rather than cause of global warming is a different matter.

Anyway, in the meantime we need a relatively cheap, relatively clean and safe energy production system and I can only see the quantities needed being generated by Thorium reactors.

Long term though we do need to move away from Thomas the Tank Engine power. The future no doubt lays with nanotechnology.

Very possibly in all sorts of ways, but I don't honestly see a way that nanotechnology will be able to contribute to power generation/dispersal. If you want a 'currently scifi' technology that's actually somewhat near to hand but will revolutionize that part of our lives, you're much more looking at room temperature superconductors. Once we have those we'll be able to transfer power over long distances with virtually no loss at all, plus many electronic devices will instantly become much more efficient plus it will immediately leap motor and dynamo technology forward a generation.

Jon

IF we get to “hot” superconductors then that makes things like geothermal energy viable. Just drill a small hole down – stick a superconductor down it and it will transmit the heat to the surface with no loss (The top end will be the same temperature as the bottom end) . Stick that end in a “bath” and it will boil it ---steam for turbine

According to our local newspaper, there is to be an enquiry/discussion/meeting/whatever regarding the building of a new reactor at Wylfa on Anglesey, in light of what is happening in Japan.

Yeah, because we have non-stop magnitude 9.0 earthquakes here in north Wales.

I am not exactly pro-nuclear, but I cannot support the ongoing attempt to rely massively on largely unreliable, expensive wind-power and foreign gas. More nuclear power stations, I say.

Yup but it would be wiser and cheaper to build them working on fuel (Thorium) that is more readily available (approx 3 to 4 times) and that doesn't pose a meltdown risk.

You can also throw it into the security issue as Thorium reactors cannot produce weapons grade material and it would be less damaging if something went wrong, be it an accident or terrorist attack.

CERN reckon they would be 3 to 4 times cheaper to run than coal powered stations and if you activate the process with a particle accelerator you effectively have an on/off switch.

Sure, the waste still has a radioactive life of 500years but at least it would be a cheaper, safer and practical step in the right direction.

There's also a pebble bed nuclear reactor, the Chinese have a prototype I think, but I'd have to read up on that.

There are options though...

Flower power

And there was me thinking I was writing a lot of hippy BS!

My other thoughts on this would be that micro generation would make it harder for anyone with the desire to bring the power grid down in one hit. You would have to target a LOT of them to cause a major problem.

A few years ago, one of the substations here blew up. It knocked out the town centre, my side of the town and the hospital (which has back up generators). If there were micro generation plants around the place, then that problem would not have arisen, certainly not on the scale it did (assuming a micro generator broke down).

What we could really do with is an efficient direct thermo-electric converter (like a super thermocouple, something that can convert heat directly into electrical power.
Cutting out the intermediate stages in electricity generation from heat would net enormous savings fuel, construction costs and complexity.

We have Peltier devices. You can buy them quite cheaply on a small scale. Problem is the efficiency; they're about the same as solar cells - rubbish.

There's a reason they use steam turbines: they're the most efficient method we have on a large scale.

That was rather the point. We need an efficient, large scale, direct converter.
I must confess I'd forgotten about Peltier devices as I associate them with cooling (and consuming power) rather than operating them in 'reverse'.
A photovoltaic that could use x-rays or gamma would be interesting as well.

Err.. yeah. Me, I wouldn't want to work at or live near a power station that somehow generated electricity from gamma radiation.

Jon

Could be very useful in space. Lots of radiation from our local star.