Greens for Nukes!

Nuclear power is common in Western Europe and Japan. Can you imagine the mess they'd have if they had to burn coal?

Still, it's ironic that the environmental nuts here say "down with this and down with that" without offering us *practical* alternatives.

As long as we have to fuel the love affair with the giant SUV and pickup trucks, we had also better commit ourselves to being in the Mid East forever.

 

Nuclear energy might prove to be a least-worst option in the immediate term, what with the climate change crisis.

Obviously its main benefit is to produce warheads for your nuke arsenal, and once you've got enough of those, it gets a bit expensive for just electricity. The plants cost billions, and it's not totally clear that the money might wouldn't be better spent on investment in renewables and/or efficiency measures.

Also, if you're supposed to be in a "war on terror", it might not be such a good idea to create such tempting targets for your "enemy".

 

I agree that it might be least worst given the worsening air quality in the world. I'm not sure how I feel about nuclear as a long-term solution, though. I think we need to work hard to find something better.

Yes, nuclear energy does not cause air quality problems. But its scale is really large. If something goes wrong -- even something relatively minor -- thousands of people can be affected. It's expensive. I'm not convinced that we know enough about safe storage of nuclear waste.

 

Nuclear energy is free and readily available for distributed production, it is called "fusion". The source is the sun. No radioactivity. Minimal waste. A granddaughter and grandfather are walking along the street. The granddaughter points and exclaims, "Oh look grandfather, a $20 bill!" The grandfather replies, "Don't be rediculous, if the $20 bill were genuine, someone would have picked it up already!"

Nuclear fusion (sunlight) is real and every roof - carport, residence, church, school, business and municipal - is available to collect solar energy and feed it into the grid. In net metering states, each generator is credited at the current retail rate. Those on "time of use" metering are credited up to $0.30 per Kwh. France has a major investment in nuclear fission and is not dealing with radioactive waste with a half-life of 500,000 years.

A plug-in hybrid with adequate batteries is perfect to run on nuclear fusion (sun) power. I look forward to the day when the windows and body panels are also designed to take advantage of nuclear fusion.

 

Standards are good. Lack of standards are bad. Shoddy install/repair is :guns:

Take the current cellular telephone mess in North America. We have - what now - FIVE major competing systems?!? It's an acronym soup:

TDMA, CDMA, CDMA 1X, CDMA 2000, GSM, iDen, GSM, EDGE, and, God Help You, AMPS.

Geez, just pick an acronym and stick with it.

 

Just think how much quality solar power kit could be bought for the billions of dollars one nuclear power station would cost to build, run then decommission.

Much of the US's industrial strength comes from programmes funded by central government - it would be nice to see the money being plowed into something progressive for a change.

Only problem is that solar power doesn't have any obvious military spin-offs.

 

Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy: http://www.ecolo.org

Googling 'safe clean nuclear energy' finds among many others http://www.nei.org/

 

harnessing 1% of the wind power in the primarily uninhabited areas of the western united states would be enough to provide all the energy currently provided by oil, coal and gas fired power plants.

 

There is a major problem with solar and it tends to condemn anything more than token research into that arena.

And that problem is the inability to centralize the control of the production of solar energy. If there were a major breakthrough in solar, everyone would have their own means of energy production. There would not be a need for gigantic electric plants or jumbo sized oil refineries. And without those mega sized plants, there would not be a way to centralize megaprofits.

Nuclear, because of the need for gigantic facilities, maintains that business model that allows for those mega profits. So that is the direction we will go. That is why the American public is being softened up to start to accept the nuclear option again.

I've read that over it's lifetime, the ICE has had hundreds of billions of dollars spent on R&D. Nuclear has had dozens of billions, and solar and wind continue to squeak by with small R&D budgets.

So we can be assured that the USA will return to nuclear in the next 15 years. Because that's the only way to centralize profits. We are already being softened up by the media in that regard.

Sad but true.

(Wind power has some attributes of the big power plants, thus the big profits. However, as science comes up with ideal shapes and generators for the energy that wind produces, others can copy those shapes and put a wind power/generator in their yard. The very fact that the device can be decentralized, dooms it. Nuclear cannot be decentralized, thus you can expect it in our future. It's the way America works.)

 

invest a tenth of the expected amount of $ required to replace all fossil fuel plants with nuclear into wind and solar and you may find that we dont have a large need for additional power


a few years ago, the estimate was that regulations would add 2+ TRILLION to the cost of converting to nuclear. since nuclear plants require a large body of water near by, some say it would at best only replace 70% of fossil fuel plants now.

realize that each plant would cost 1-3 billion and thousands would be required

 

ok, i'd love to raise windmills and a whole bunch of solar power plants for my house. i'd also love to receive your check to fund this

 

Maybe common, mostly in France, but still the majority of the EU's power comes from Coal and Oil. There is a small impure from Wind, sun and waves, plus in some areas hydro, but I would expect fossil power is still around 60- 70% or so.

We have a program in Germany that allows home owners to put solar panels on their roofs and feed power back into the grid. The gov. provides help with the cost of the panels, and the electricity company buys your power of you. Still, the initial investment is some 20,000+ Euros.

 

that may be true, but as of today, the British are one of two countries in the 35 country kyoto accord that is on pace to hit their emission reduction goals.

France is not one of those countries btw...

 

Unfortunately, even ignoring safety issues, nuclear power is incredibly expensive. When you amortize decommissioning costs over the lifetime of the reactor and its expected power output, nuclear is the single most expensive power source--more expensive than wind, more expensive than solar, more expensive than geothermal.

Of course, business tends to like to get around this by arranging for someone else (i.e. the taxpayer) to pay for the cleanup.