02-14-2017, 12:21 AM
(11-26-2016, 09:04 AM)David Horn Wrote:(11-16-2016, 03:35 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(10-05-2016, 12:48 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(08-25-2016, 04:15 PM)David Horn Wrote:(08-22-2016, 02:49 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: We need to replace nuclear with solar. Delay is not a reasonable option.
Ask the Germans about that. No one is more attuned to renewables and more averse to nuclear, so they were the first to come to grips with the obvious. You can't run a modern society on intermittent power, so they are biting the bullet and reopening some coal fired plants. Is that better?
In a system that uses the pooled resources from many solar and wind plants at once, there is no intermittence. That has been proven. When one is down, the others are working.
If nuclear can be made safe, it's an option. There must be no chance of a meltdown, and all nuc waste must be recycled. I reported on the old thread that there's some movement toward this, especially in Russia. Personally, I don't like the risk of entire regions becoming off limits due to another Fukushima. We may be truly fu'ked if we rely on nuk. A few hundred square miles of solar can power the world. All we need is transmission lines. The transition is not immediate, but we must go as fast as we can.
Germany:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_...in_Germany
Fukushima = Fuck you, Shiva! We don't need mass destruction!
Just a little hyperbolic poetry there.
Other than Fukushima, which was a natural disaster that would have been bad regardless, and Chernobyl, which was the failure of a plant extremely outdated decades before it plant crashed, show me any deaths related to nuclear power. Compare that to all the fossil fuel options. And please, don't ring in with your overly optimistic expectations for renewables. They may get there, but not soon. Assume the same numbers the expert proponents assume: 50 years.
The barriers to getting there have been all political, and we just got another one installed. We would have been there by now otherwise. But now it will take some time. How "soon" may depend on the definition of both "soon" and "getting there."
I am willing to be somewhat open-minded about nuclear power, since some innovators are developing systems that use the waste for fuel and are safer from meltdowns. Still, nuclear power is only at best a bridge fuel, like natural gas, because it too is non-renewable in the long-run. And it will take a while to bring these new kinds of plants on-line; so certainly at best it can only keep up with the rapid pace at which solar and wind are coming online these days.
And some older Fukushima-style nukes could be closed down in the meantime, especially if another accident happens. An earthquake in CA could be devastating, since Fukushima-type plants still exist here. And some exist near NY too.