It is impossible to believe those that claim the Earth is in mortal danger from carbon dioxide when they reject nuclear which produces zero CO2, hydroelectric projects again with zero CO2 production and natural gas which has cut CO2 production by 10% in less than 10 years.
When only the highest cost least efficient power generation is insisted upon it can only be because a solution to the problem put forward is not wanted. Protection and propagation of the problem is the goal, solving it eliminates the ‘problem’ and political army that rely on it for their very existence.
17 comments
Nuclear energy produces nuclear waste, which remains dangerous for millenia. It is, at best, a transitory solution, since, anyway, uranium is a finite resource.
What a naïve and fatuous comment. The people who observe the problems of CO2 are not the same ones as the people who mine and burn coal. I have to take the electricity that comes my way, and have no choice in how it's produced. And the people who are wealthy out of coal have a very good reason "not to notice" the harm it causes.
Using the economics of energy production as an argument against global warming is comparing apples to hedgehogs.
Nuclear does produce CO2, just in very low quantities. With hydroelectric it depends on how the dam is constructed and gas is still majorly polluting.
Still, he does have a point. We are bashing on nuclear despite it being the safest energy to use by a long shot and one of the cheaper cheaper and the second least CO2 polluting energy in the world (the least polluting is wind enery). Valery Giscard-Estaing has developed a large nuclear development project and foreign countries are paying the price for not having invested in nuclear by paying France for energy. And renewable energy isn't all that pretty either: Solar energy is still a huge CO2 pollutant during its fabrication, waste incineration can only work on a small scale, burning plants for energy is also largely polluting, geothermal energy has a huge cost of water and wind energy, my favorite of those, has large fluctuations in output and can cause deaths to birds.
@Indicible
Britain.
Those 'Pods' - driverless electric cars in Milton Keynes - by General Motors.
The Joint European Torus Project: Fusion power.
So why does Donald Fart want solar cells on that 'Wall' of his...?!
And why did he invite the Numero Uno of Climate Change - Al Gore - to his penis extension in New York...?!
@ Hydrolythe
Well, nuclear energy makes up for more than 50 % of my country's energy production (France). It is indeed very useful, but we are left with one very difficult issue: nuclear waste. This stuff is dangerous beyond reason and its danger will last for actual millenia.
Too many things have gone wrong for us to continue using nuclear energy as we have done until now (nuclear submarines wrecks, Chernobyl, Fukushima, Chelyabinsk, obsolete nuclear missile installations, Three Miles Island, all the small incidents we disregard in nuclear power plants...). We have to find a way to reduce our dependancy to it, because for the time being, it makes us vulnerable. We cannot spare the power, so the day something goes wrong, we do not have any contingency plan.
@Indicible
I agree with your argument on nuclear waste. Though at the same time I have to say that it's not really that much nuclear waster you're consuming (if you spent your whole life on nuclear power it'd be a cola bottle). Also, while meltdowns occur, they have a low count on human deaths. The highest amount of deaths were caused by Tchernobyl and it is in total 10 people that got killed. The amount of deaths caused by nuclear energy does not even equal the amount of people that die due to diseases caused by coal energy every month. Nuclear definitely isn't safe, but it's probably the safest we have at the moment.
@ Hydrolythe
The highest amount of deaths were caused by Tchernobyl and it is in total 10 people that got killed.
I do not know where you got your numbers, but between the so-called liquidators and people in Europe who developed cancers due to exposition to radiation, 10 is grossly underestimated.The WHO estimates the number of victims at 4000, due to exposure to radiation. They also counted about 50 persons dying of the direct effects of the accident.
As for nuclear energy being the safest, solar and wind energy seem safer to me, since they do not have byproducts, as far as I know. I am aware that the production of wind mills and solar panels produces pollutants, but so does the building of a nuclear power plant, with the problems mentioned before.
I am not against nuclear energy. I am simply not comfortable with the fact that, should anything go wrong, we do not have a contingency plan to counter the effects of an accident. Unfortunately, the "Japanese miracle" from Ghost in the Shell fame (the anime, not the colorful cinematographic turd) is only a fiction.
@Indicible
I apologize. I got the statistic from Rationalwiki a while back and I can't find it anymore since the two articles on nuclear energy got merged together. Still though, the hydroelectric dam failure in China killed 26000 people directly and 145000 were killed indirectly by it. From an utilitarian perspective, nuclear is definitely better, though probably not the best. Again, I have to admit that I believe that an energy should have 0 deaths total. Nuclear power (or any form of energy for that matter) is far from achieving this.
Source: http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/lorrie_goldstein/2011/03/18/17675461.html
@breakerslion
That solar panels are recyclable is something I'm willing to believe, but the latter article you mention talks briefly about the wind turbine syndrome, making it hard to take seriously.
@ hydrolythe
I can't even sleep in the same room with a blinking telephone or laptop LED, so I am willing to believe that strobe from giant vanes moving in excess of 100 mph at the tips bothers some people. Point taken however. Like many of these negative documentaries, they take a shotgun approach toward making their point. One should not throw out all the information because some of it is questionable.
You may be correct that natural gas gives less CO2, but natural gas itself (methane) is a much more powerful "greenhouse gas", so there is no advantage., especially when they find that so many gas wells leak methane into the atmosphere at rates far higher than expected.
@hydrolythe
I pay a company that monitors my power and buys wind vouchers for 100% of my use. I can't get off of coal, but I can offset it. I have no issue whatsoever with nuclear power. The waste is dangerous and long-lasting, but it's containable. The coal lobby saw to it that it is illegal in my state, It isn't likely that it could compete on price, but I'm not a fan of boxing it out as a matter of course. I have heard some economists say that coal is inaccurately priced by a long shot--if we factored in the environmental cleanup and healthcare costs up front, we would never use it.
@breakerslion, hydrolythe and Kanna
I have nothing against nuclear power as a transitionary energy source, but too many people are downplaying the lack of resolutions to the waste problem. Because guess what: We still don't know how to deal with tons and tons of nuclear waste that will keep being dangerous for millions of years to come. And at least here in Germany, not only do we still lack a reasonable disposal zone for it, people don't want to have it in their near vicinity either, which means that all those problems that wind turbines etc. have in that regard is also true for nuclear power. Humanity seems to like the idea of taking all the advantages of energy production while at the same time outsourcing or ignoring the downsides. Also (and not limited to Germany this time) most of the provisionary containers for nuclear waste are already starting to deteriorate and will cost us if we would ever choose to renovate them (which most governments seem to not be willing to do at the moment). Another problem: We can't "compress" nuclear waste in any meaningful manner because this leads to critical masses and dangerous chain reactions. And last but not least: Uranium (and especially the isotope 235 needed for a controlled chain reaction) is a finite ressource, no better than coal or gas in that regard. So no, I don't see nuclear fission power as a good energy source for the future unless these problems are resolved.
Funnily enough, we manage to see two different potentially deadly threats at the same time, and we want to exclude both of them. As there are solar energy, wind energy, water energy and a couple more sustainable energies that have little or no lasting effect on the environment, why focus on the ones that are killing us?
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