Quote:
Originally Posted by cfg83
hvatum -
Sorry for pouncing on your earlier post. It sounds like you have an in-depth knowledge of your side of the argument.
PS - I consider myself a version of one of those silly "environmentalists",  .
http://www.nirs.org/
CarloSW2 |
No problem
Thanks for being open minded about this, whenever I argue about this I don't mean to ever be making personal attacks, I just want to see the best solution implemented - and fast. Whether it's going to be wind, solar or nuclear we need to really move on it, because the lead time for building the massive over-capacity we'd need to go wind and solar or educating a new nuclear energy workforce would be at least a decade.
By the time we really start feeling the pinch from global warming, peak oil or environmental catastrophe we won't be able to suddenly switch over to a carbon friendly infrastructure because it won't be there, we need to build it now.
Thanks for the link. They have some good points about safety on older plants, but their economic and emissions analysis is way off base. They assume a massively increasing effort required to find nuclear fuel, but if we re-processed that would be a non issue. Also they assume almost no expansion in known uranium reserves, which is kind of like someone in 1920 saying that we'll run out of oil by 1940 - sure, with current known reserves. But no one is even looking for Uranium because producers expanded capacity so much in the 70s, then TMI and Chernobyl happened so there's been a massive over-capacity.
http://www.nirs.org/alternatives/alternativeshome.htm
Also their proposed alternatives have some mis-leading statements like "19.7 Gigawatts of wind" was installed in 2007. But that's PEAK capacity, average output will be closer to 20% of that, and the minimum is probably somewhere around 2-5% of that.
And Biomass as an alternative energy source? Are they serious? I don't know about you, but I'd rather have a modern nuclear power plant next to my house then a biomass plant that's burning sooty biomass to produce a meager amount of power. Burning biomass puts so much fine particulate matter out that installing filters would be prohibitively expensive because they'd cloged in no time. Just think about it for a second, when you grill, what puts out more smoke and junk: Burning charcoal, or burning moldy logs that were destined for a landfill?
Gasification is a better technology, but it needs to be demonstrated on a commercial scale. Anyway, if you're talking about Biomass just gassify coal and then plant trees to capture the carbon, same end effect but it would be a lot cheaper.