"Wayne.B" wrote in message
...

On Wed, 12 Sep 2012 17:14:57 -0400, Sarah Ehrett
wrote:

When someone can successfully power a medium sized US city 24/7 using
solar
and wind then I'll be impressed.

That might be possible right now using energy storage technology. It
would not be cost justified at this time however.

Until then we're tied to oil, coal, and
natural gas because the environmental nutters are against nuclear
power.

There are some very real issues with nuclear power. Fusion is the
big pie in the sky if someone can figure that out.

--------------------------------------------------

I spent a good amount of time during my working career in programs
supporting efforts to achieve nuclear fusion from deuterium, highly
compressed in enormously high powered, multiple beamed lasers. This
technology has been in development for many decades ... going back to
the 50's and 60's. Progress has been made, but unity gain was only
recently achieved ... meaning as much energy was used as produced.
The lasers only fire for a nanosecond before the power supplies that
power them have to be recharged.

It's technically possible, but still a very long way from any form of
commercial applications. It's strictly R&D.

Newest program is "NIF" or National Ignition Facility at Lawrence
Livermore National Labs. Before NIF, research was also conducted at
the
Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester. My
company's involvement was building the systems that applied
thin-film, high energy laser coatings on the optics used in the laser
bays. NIF is a very impressive laser system ... details he

https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/nif/about.php