Im sorry but what is synfuel?
Synthetic fuel? We made from scratch?
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It's synthetic fuel and there are two types.....the one that pollutes a little more than gasoline and another that burns cleaner at very close to the same efficiency.
Unfortunately, this topic can turn political very easily and since that's not allowed....I will simply say: the ONLY viable form of self sustaining renewable clean energy production for the US is nuclear...but not in the traditional sense.
Salt Thorium or LFTR or Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors AKA Molten Salt Reactors burn almost all of their waste (98%), have the longest half life of radioactive material, can actually produce the amount of electricity the US consumes commercially for industry and for personal use (unlike solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, etc), and most importantly run at atmospheric pressure and don't require water cooling as traditional reactors do thereby reducing the chances of a meltdown to nil. They are safe enough that I wouldn't even think twice about it being in my backyard.
Even with population growth estimates exponentially growing....there is enough Thorium available in the US to provide power generation for the next 500-1000 years.
As noted, the limit of electric power is currently the battery technology.....that, and the fact that the best batteries are currently made from Rare Earth Elements.....and China has cornered the market on those already (and are also now experimenting with LFTRs)....so if we got off oil, we'd be trading Middle Eastern Masters for Chinese ones.
Further, solar has massive drawbacks....from the massive amount of pollution to produce a single panel (not to mention wage and environmental arbitrage that occurs in the rest of the world to produce them) to the fact that once the temp gets over 77º, you start to lose efficiency and a panel will only produce about 1/2 the power once it gets over 100º. Then you can water cool the array.....but water WILL BE our most precious resource on Earth....so using it for cooling panels makes less sense....AND you need to filter it so that hard water isn't filming the panels and causing extra corrosion of the related array hardware.
This isn't to say we shouldn't explore other alternatives where they make sense....geothermal, tidal, wind and solar....but those options CANNOT meet all our energy needs, while LFTRs could.
The only reason we didn't continue to use LFTR technology (it was run for 4 years by Oak Ridge Laboratories in the late 60's) was that it didn't produce fissile material for our weapons program....LFTRs produce energy, not weapons grade Uranium/Plutonium....so the feds didn't pursue it as it wouldn't help build our nuclear arsenal.
Obviously, the energy question is deeply rooted in the rest of our economic and political issues....for every unit of GDP, there is a unit of energy behind it. Since we aren't allowed to discuss the politics of it....I'll simply say, do a little research on Molten Salt Reactors and Synfuel and it will become obvious that not a single candidate for office is talking about it b/c our government is not run in the best interest of its people, but at the behest of the special interests that contribute to their campaigns and insider schemes to enrich themselves. Our model is not Capitalism/Free Market....it is Corporatism.
