Thats a good post Relative. You seem to know what you are talking about (unlike some here). I've never heard of He3 nuclear reactions though. How do you gather the He3 on earth enough to "burn" in a reactor?
Surely the more practical answer is fusion using deuterium from sea water. That really is almost unlimited.
All renewables are surely ok, including from biomass, providing its carbon neutral.
The problem it seems to me is not one of technology but one of having the political courage to drive through change. Oil and gas is just such an easy source of energy. Its just too tempting. What politician is going to say "you are going to experience 20 or 30 years of static or declining living standards for the long term good of the planet if you vote for me". Its not going to happen if you ask me.
The long term answer is the hydrogen economy, based on a pipe system of hydrogen, electricity and local fuel cells. Hydrogen from renewables, nuclear, some oil and gas, and maybe some exotic energy source like solar from the moon or something. But will we have the wisdom to set this up and get ourselves off the hydrocarbon habit before we cause the planet serious harm? I doubt it.
The consensus is we can have Helium 3 fusion power plants in a few years, if we have a source of helium 3. It may take another 50 years to get a practical deuterium fusion power plant.
My guess is helium 3 is a few parts per billion in moon dust, so we need to carefully (otherwise most of the helium 3 will escape into the vacuum) process a lot of moon dust to get the ton of helium 3 that could make a decade's supply of energy for 6 large cities.
I think waste heat from fossil fuels is only about one millionth of the energy the sun delivers to Earth's surface. Carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels reduces Earth's heat loss to space by about the same amount. Both are seriously over-rated, but some of the pollutants are serious and there are other bad consequences to running out of oil, such as the plastics industry. We should do pilot programs with each renewable (alternative/conservation) type of energy that seems even semi promising. We may be pleasantly surprised that one or more are more practical than we think at present. Many of them are ready to take the bold jump from research/studies to pilot plant.
I concede that there may be a few things that can only be done by big government or big corporations, but that does not change the general rule that big is bad.
Can anyone cite examples of city bus systems that operate more efficiently than the privatised systems with or without massive government oversight. Can we confirm that a city bus system is as marvelous as they claim? Likely there are some examples from 1/2 century ago, before big government began micro-managing small units of government. Neil
