[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

If a terrorist blows up a nuclear power plant, or gets a hold of some plutonium and uses it in a dirty bomb, or dumps it into a water supply, what happens? You get a lot of dead people and/or a ruined area.

Nope. Worst you get is a lot of public hysteria. First, suppose you try blowing up a nuclear power plant. First you have to assemble a strike force sufficient to get past all the security guards, and do this without being noticed. Then you have to get through several feet of concrete & steel containment structure that's designed to withstand conventional explosives, and set off your charges next to the reactor vessel. They have to be BIG charges, since said reactor vessel is pretty strong. And if you do manage to do this, the result is contained inside the containment structure, so you have gone to all that effort just to wreck a reactor.

Now if you want to steal some plutonium from one, then you have to figure out how to unbolt the reactor pressure vessel, extract many tons of fuel rods (if I can steal a line from Terry Pratchett, they'll have to be quite strong terrorists :-)), and carry them away for reprocessing.

But let's ignore all that, and get to the real issue. Let's also be more honest than our so-called leaders dare to be, and call these people by their right names. The jihadists already HAVE their nuclear reactors and weapons: Pakistan has them, Iran will soon if it doesn't already. The horse has already been stolen, why worry about the barn door?

Over the 1,700 miles from San Antonio up to Calgary, do you think that there will be no wind blowing anywhere?

It's not NO wind, it's sufficient wind to generate the amount of power demanded by the grid.

In the 500,000+ square miles in the sunniest areas of the country, do you think that there will ever be a time when it is all cloudy?

Take a look at weather satellite photographs over a year, and again remember that it doesn't ALL have to be cloudy, just cloudy enough so that supply is less than demand. Say you have enough PV panels scattered over the US to produce 100% of electricity on an average day. Then you get a Pacific storm system covering most of the west coast, a low over the east, some clouds in the Gulf... suddenly that 100% has become 50% or less, and you have a major blackout.

Did you know that enough sunlight energy strikes the earth in 40 minutes to power the whole earth for 1 year?

Did you know that most of that solar energy is already being used? It drives photosynthesis, on which life depends. You talk about covering large sections of Nevada with solar collectors, putting wind turbines everywhere, building tidal energy plants... and you completely disregard what that could do to the environment.

Nuclear plants have little effect on the environment, they don't take up much space, and you can build them in places near cities where the urban dwellers who'll use most of the power have already trashed the environment.

You folks need to watch this:

If your argument's not worth writing down, then I'll go on thinking it's just more propaganda pablum for the illiterate.