redunderthebed wrote:The problem with nuclear power is that its like coal and oil - not renewable not to mention the pollution and safety problem of which have yet to be address properly.
Strangely, France now gets something like 70 percent of it's electricity from nuclear and hasn't had an accident. And the fact is that EVERY source of energy is "non-renewable." It's a function of something called "entropy." The question is whether or not a particular energy source is usable, economical, reasonably safe and available in sufficient quantity to serve our energy needs today and for some forseeable period into the future.
You may pooh-pooh nuclear power, but there are few other viable alternatives.
Solar wind and tidal are all viable and massive investment is being made in it.
Solar is not viable. It costs far too much to convert sunlight to electricity and the efficiencies are quite low. That may change, but until it does, and the cost per watt is cut by a factor of ten, it will not be widely useful. Besides, it's only available when the sun shines, and the systems that attempt to store it are complex, expensive, and inefficient. This means that it only functions as an adjunct to parallel systems like coal, natural gas and nuclear, not a replacement.
Tidal power again is a minority player and will be for a long, long time. The technology has a long way to go before it makes up any major portion of our electrical capacity.
You have also ignored seth geothermal energy a source of it has being found in the far north of south australia, which is equivalent to the oil reserves of kuwait and the technology is in place to get it on the national grid right now.
Geothermal does indeed have great promise, but again, it's location dependent to a great extent. Where it's available, like Iceland, it can produce a lot of power using steam generating systems that are mature technology. But it's not available everywhere, and the line losses inherent in transmitting power make it far less useful outside of geothermal resource areas.
I think the status quo on the issue is unsustainable but it will take time and a gradual reduction in reliance on coal and oil.
Indeed. The key is "gradual." It's not just the technology for electricity that's involved, it's also the transportation fleet and its need for fuel and there is simply no fuel that can, at present, substitute for gasoline and diesel fuel. Liquified Natural Gas has potential, but the massive investment in distribution infrastructure and suitable engines guarantees that the changeover will be measured in decades, not years. One thing that eco-nuts fail to consider in their zeal to proselytize for "renewable" energy is that the economy simply cannot afford to discard the trillions of dollars invested in the current oil-gas-diesel-natural gas systems that we use today. Fleet replacements to vehicles using the far less energy dense natural gas await a distribution network of natural gas refill stations that equals the distribution network for gasoline and diesel. That network alone will cost trillions of dollars to create, and it won't be created till there is demand for it, and the demand for it awaits the availability of the network.
In other words, the reason that natural-gas fueled vehicles remain bit players limited to municipal and short-range commercial fleets is because if you can't refuel almost anywhere, like you can with gas and diesel, you aren't going to buy a natural-gas fueled vehicle. Municipal fleets, like buses, and short-range transport like in-plant truck fleets work only because the vehicles remain close to their fueling points.
And then there's the inherent inferiority of natural gas as a fuel because it is far less energy-dense than gasoline and diesel. This creates design issues for vehicles that need long-range capacity.
But to just say renewable energy is not pheasible is patently crap and proof is popping up the world over there are communities the world over that have large slice/majority of its electricity from renewable sources and they haven't all the sudden plunged into darkness i just think that there is a scare campaign going by the oil and coal lobby.
Name five major cities that have a "large slice/majority" of renewable sources as their primary energy source. Hell, name one.
Fact is that in the US, all "renewable" energy sources (wind, solar, geothermal and tide) account for about two percent of our electrical power, and almost every such system is heavily subsidized by the government, which means that almost none of them are actually economically feasible.
Citing examples of small communities that use renewables doesn't address the issues of scale. I can build an off-grid solar house that uses no line electricity...at high cost, with a payback that goes into decades, and adapt my lifestyle to deal with the inherent inefficiencies. Some few people do so. But this does not address the needs of the vast majority of human beings, particularly those living in cities.
We will be burning coal and natural gas, and hopefully increasing our use of nuclear power for at least the next century. That's simply a fact of life you have to learn to accept.
This does not mean that maturing renewables so that they become economically viable is not a good thing to do, just that the press to "switch over" that is actually being driven by global government proponents has less to do with energy and more to do with power and control.
Renewables will come into their own as the market demands them, and not before. And that will be a long time yet, certainly long after both of us are dead. Until then, a rational, reasonable, and affordable policy of finding and developing renewable energy resources, sans all the hype and hysteria, is what's needed.
Fusion is our best hope, and that's where our resources should be directed, not at the bit-players of solar and wind.
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