this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
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Oh neat like the ones outside Vegas, I always wonder if birds fly into the center
Well they certainly don’t fly out of it
The ones with cameras might, probably a big conspiracy
Moths must love this shit
At night?
The sodium probably gets hot enough to keep glowing overnight
Curious how well it works with moon reflection
A construction like this could never work with moonlight, not even theoretically. There is a nice xkcd about it: https://what-if.xkcd.com/145/
Technically still solar power, but with the moon as an additional mirror in the system.
Sadly the ones outside Vegas are about to shut down because they are not profitable https://live-ier.pantheonsite.io/big-green/california-shuts-down-its-solar-thermal-plant-13-years-early/
I love how fucking biased that article is. It mentions Obama like 10 times, including this gem:
Thanks for the hindsight, moron writer guy. So what's trump doing, investing in better renewables?
No, instead of building an underperforming power plant, he spent the same money just to prevent a power plant from being built.
Money for nothing and the chicks for free amirite.
Yeah, they do, and get incinerated, unfortunately. A few every day, actually. Which is one of the reasons those never took off. Besides big upfront costs for the tower generator, there are additional costs for maintaining the generator with moving parts, and then for scraping the dead birds off the mirrors to top it off. All just to save a few pennies on mirrors instead of just chucking a bunch of solar panels into a field and mostly forgetting about them.
big advantage is that molten salt allows for energy storage for nighttime
But then you also have to re-heat it in the morning with combustibles to kickstart the generation again.
Yeah, but that secretly a lazer weapon.