Dear LazyWeb: Since a hydrogen economy requires lots of energy, and since solar, steam reforming of natural gas, and wind turbines wind power cannot meet the full needs of an ever-growing worldwide consumption, and since coal gasification and other methods are counter-productive, isn’t the only real solution nuclear power?
If that is indeed the case and if I were a hippy, that would make my head explode. I wouldn’t know who to picket.
Comments (2)
Wanker. Perhaps they will picket pedantic dittoheads too lazy to read their own references.
If you followed your own links, you’d recognize that nukes are at best an interim solution to get us over to just using solar, not really worth investing in heavily. Solar is the obvious choice - indeed, it’s what all fossil fuels are, fossil fuels just happen to be a few million years of stored solar energy, and along with it, a lot of stored carbon that screws up our environment when it gets released suddenly in the span of 150 years or so.
Solar energy is delivered to us for free on a daily basis, on every continent, in every country. All we need to collect it is a large, but reasonable amount of space, and collectors that use technology we’ve already got.
Even with present, inefficient, underdeveloped, under-funded photovoltaic technology operating at a very conservative one-half of its efficiency (i.e. 8%, rather than the average 15% that PV presently operates at), a chunk of desert 250 miles square would provide over 100% of the US’s energy needs. I think we could negotiate with the environmentalists to cover 250 miles of desert with solar cells if it meant we could quit fossil fuels and nukes. (http://www.ez2c.de/ml/solar_land_area/)
In fact, we wouldn’t even have to use virgin land for most of it. Presently, the US has enough roof space to provide 75% of the country’s energy needs, even adjusted for local sun intensity, day length, shade, etc. (http://www.ef.org/documents/PV_pressrelease.pdf).
And given miniscule funding compared to “clean coal”, nukes, and oil, the development of cheaper, more efficient solar has been quite slow. Given an actual commitment to moving towards sustainable, unlimited, essentially free energy - a Manhattan Project-like commitment - we’d have a solution in just a few years. We’re smart enough to do it if we just put the money behind it.
However, too much of the world economy is tied to fossil fuels, and a quick change would shock the economy as badly as fossil fuels are shocking the environment. Besides, the US presently has more or less a chokehold on the flows of oil from the Middle East, which is an indispensable bargaining chip when negotiating in the anarchy of the international realm. If push comes to shove, we can put the hurt on just about anyone by pinching off oil flows, and everybody we have to negotiate with knows that. If everyone had all the energy they needed right in their own countries (ok, grey Finland might have a bit of trouble in the wintertime, but all in all…), then we’d have to do a lot more bombing to get people to see things our way. That’s a change of playing field we just don’t need now, so more for reasons of world politics, world economics, and tranquility than technical or cost-per-kilowatt reasons, the move to solar will come slowly and very, very incrementally.
(And Chris, spare me any embarrassing, sophomoric smarty-boy comments about how solar energy is actually nuclear energy. That’s just stupid semantics. Whatever waste that giant fission fireball creates is safely 91 million miles away, and if any significant bit of it reaches us, we’ve got rather larger problems than cancer and mutated children. Much love, Mark)
But all that sun collection is UGLY and also kills puppy dogs and rare lizards and is vulnerable to terrorism and kills rare regional flora and fauna and is hard to maintain…
And, that’s why I made it a Dear Lazyweb post — some some gullible yokel like you would carefully craft 8 paragraphs, citations, and links.
Sucker.