[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

Nuclear is extremely capital intensive, centralized, high tech way to boil water.

Yes, it is. But do you think solar is not capital intensive? Current solar panel prices are over $3/watt just for the panels: Cheapest solar panels! Free Solar Panel Price Survey. $3/W solar panels A typical nuclear power plant will generate 1000 megawatts. To get the same generating capacity would cost $3 billion for the panels alone. Now remember that while the nuclear plant is generating 24/7, solar panels only generate full power when the sun is falling directly on them. So you need to double the number of panels to account for night, and double them again if you don't have some sort of (expensive) tracking mechanism to keep them pointed at the sun.

So that's $12 billion just for the solar panels to generate the same amount of electricity as a nuclear plant. Now you have to add in the cost of installation, plus the control electronics (inverters and such), plus some sort of storage so you can have electricity at night... All of a sudden, solar doesn't look so cheap any more :-)

The plant that we have poured an enormous amount of money into wears itself out, and needs to be disassembled.

So you're claiming solar power doesn't wear out, or break, or need maintenance?

Plutonium is extrememly poisonous, and it's half life is ~24,000 years

So are many of the byproducts of solar cell manufacture poisonous, as is the lead &c used to make storage batteries, and they don't HAVE half-lives. Plutonium is relatively easy to separate from spent fuel, and can be used to make more fuel rods. The half-life is not a problem, because it gets "burned up".

The plutonium and all the other radioactive waste needs to be stored in a extremely stable and secure location -- when this problem is solved, come talk to me.

Safe storage of nuclear reactor byproducts was demonstrated about 1.5 billion years ago, at Oklo: Natural nuclear fission reactor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Of course an economic nuclear cycle will reprocess all its wastes into new nuclear fuel, thus eliminating the problem.

And I'm still waiting for you to get back to me on the safe storage of solar photovoltaic waste :-)

Solar PV can be used on every roof top. This greatly reduces the transmission losses, and it could meet a very large chunk of our needs, since A/C is needed most when the sun is shining.

But even simpler is to design houses that don't NEED A/C.

What you don't consider is that residential electric use accounts for only about a third of the total. Sure, most houses could get most or all of their power from solar (and water & space heat, too), and that would be a good thing. That leaves the other two thirds, a lot of which goes to run energy-intensive industrial processes (including the factories that make your solar cells, and the materials that go into them, and the tools that make them...) Then you need reliable baseload generation to keep the grid up & running, so that when Joe's house in Arizona is producing more power than it needs, the excess can be used somewhere else.

Geothermal can be done anywhere you drill a deep hole.

Well, back to the capital-intensive thing again. Just for some ballpark numbers, I found a figure of $150K per 1000 ft for drilling an oil well, so that's about $5.5 million per well. The geothermal plant up the road generates about 100 MW, and has dozens of wells. Assuming sustained generation of 1 MW per well, you'd need 1000 wells to equal one nuclear plant, and there's $5.5 billion just in the drilling costs...

There is a 93 unit housing group in England, that is completely self-sufficient for heat and power, and they get everything they need from efficiency, PV on the roof, solar heat collection on the roof, and from composting household waste and the landscaping trimmings.

But where did the energy come from to build all the equipment they use? That's the real problem. It would be fairly simple (in principle, anyway) to design & build housing that got all its energy from renewables. But where do you get the energy to run the industrial base that makes all the things that go into building these houses?

I apologize for going on at such length, but I want to make a point. You, like many people that advocate purely renewable power, never seem to think through all the implications. You seem to think that your solar panels, geothermal wells, and all the rest are just magically going to appear out of nowhere, at no cost, and that's simply wishful thinking. Making anything has costs: up front and ongoing financial costs, and environmental costs that are often not fully appreciated until you've built so many X-type power systems that the process is irreversable.

Just consider the environmental consequences of hydroelectric dams: did anyone realize beforehand that one consequence of all those dams in the Columbia River basin would be the near-extiction of salmon? Yet that's what's happening.