How do ya'll feel about nuclear power?

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by almightybmw

...although now that I remember, someone said a solar array the size of NV would easily power North America.

First off, it's Nevada, not NV, dammit. It's a real place, not some stupid two-letter code dreamed up by government bureaucrats in order to dehumanize places - people live here, along with the critters and plants that make up an ecosystem. Large parts of the state are really quite nice places. Cover it with a solar array, and you kill that ecosystem, just like you kill ecosystems by scraping off the tops of mountains to get at the coal underneath. Except that plants will grow to cover the scraped-off mountain, someday, in a few centuries or so. Cover land with solar arrays, and it's dead for as long as those arrays exist.

That's what really pisses me off about these supposed greens and their anti-nuclear BS. They make up all sorts of stories about how dangerous nuclear power is, and how even a trace of radioactivity is going to kill everything for miles around - going in the face of real-world experience that disproves their claims - yet they'll turn around and calmly suggest wiping out the entire ecosystem of a state, just because they're too stuck on the "solar is green & harmless" meme to look at reality.

[almightybmw]

my aren't we testy today.

[PaleMelanesian]

I do believe he said "the size of" Nevada, and not "cover the state".

[MetroMPG]

Yay, another nuclear thread devolving!

[Ryland]

That does it, we're covering the state! centralize our power production!

[dcb]

Maybe there should be a sub board under fossil fuel free for all nuclear tirades^H^H^H^H^H^Hdiscussions

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by PaleMelanesian

I do believe he said "the size of" Nevada, and not "cover the state".

OK, so you distribute your ecological destruction over all the dark red areas on that insolation map. Is that an improvement?

The basic problem with solar, and to some extent with wind is that it's just not very energy-dense, so you have to cover a lot of area to get industrial-sized amounts of power. It's fine on rooftops and so on, providing power to run your home & maybe charge your electric car. And solar thermal, for water heating and some space heating, is practical almost everywhere, but that's not sexy high-tech, so nobody outside of Mother Earth News talks about it.

[almightybmw]

well James, the very first line of my post I commented on energy density. I completely understand the issue with it. Solar is great, but 15-20% ef isn't good enough. We need 40% to really make solar competitive against power dense sources like nuclear.

Sorry if it seemed like a pissing match, that was not intended. But damn man, cool out. No one is attacking you or your state. (except space invaders)

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by almightybmw

Solar is great, but 15-20% ef isn't good enough. We need 40% to really make solar competitive against power dense sources like nuclear.

But there's one of the major problems: why should solar be competing against nuclear? They're complementary, and both are needed to displace fossil fuels: solar providing energy for homes & distributed applications, nuclear for power-dense sources to run industry.

No one is attacking you or your state.

But in fact they are. Not necessarily the state, but there are a lot of people out there who apparently think it's ok to destroy a desert ecosystem (hey, it's a desert, nothing important there), or fill up a nice view with wind turbines, in pursuit of supposedly green energy.

As for the other part, what's so hard about calling a state by its right name, or a recognized abbreviation if you're too lazy to type, instead of those nasty two-letter codes?

[Christ]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

Sure. Know how many people were killed? How many injured? How much property damage (other than the plant itself)? Zero, zero, and $0.

Now would you like to look up a few numbers on how many people die from the emissions from coal-fired power plants? How many die in mining & other accidents? The cost of property damage?

Or how about hydroelectric? That's pretty safe, isn't it? (Unless of course you're a salmon :-)) Look up Banqiao, though, and you might find out different. Or read here: List of dam failures - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Easy, bud! I wasn't suggesting that anyone was hurt (though there are still lawsuits going on against them (the company that controls TMI, so we're not able to accurately disclose costs associated with it at this time).

I worked there for 17 days as a brick mason... They're VERY secretive about things, so much so that they put covers on the hallway windows so you couldn't see into the reactor areas if you happened to have to walk through there. (Were they really reactor rooms? I dunno. We couldn't see.)

I was just saying that it was there, I knew it was there, and many people tend to forget that there is a nuclear reactor in their back yard... (By back yard, I mean potential footprint of a nuclear meltdown, which covers from Ohio to New Jersey, New York to North Carolina, etc... that's a pretty big backyard.)

I'm not suggesting it's good or bad, indifferent or otherwise... I'm just making sure that people remember exactly how close they are to a Nuclear Facility, be it dangerous or safe.

I would wager that Nuclear technology is safer than many other things that have been worked on throughout history... At least with Nuclear, people understand the potential harm associated with it, and think about it all the time. I'm not necessarily an opponent, nor a proponent of it. I'm kind of somewhere in the middle.

On this particular topic, I choose to remain ignorant, actually. I don't wish to get involved in the hub-bub about it, as I (normally) don't like to get involved in conversations and discussions which so easily melt down (pun intended) into a pointless argument with no basis nor an end. I'd rather spend my days staring directly into the sun.