Quote:
Originally Posted by gtc
I saw an interesting TED debate last night about Nuclear power vs Wind/Solar.
For the whole world's energy, we'd have to cover an area the size of the US in wind turbines and/or solar panels.
Whereas the amount of uranium needed to provide electricity for one person's entire lifetime would fit in a Coke can (2 lbs of waste). (even more amazing, when compared to the amount of CO2 from the equivalent amount of coal generated electricity)
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The difference is the CO2 doesn't make you glow in the dark and give you two-headed babies.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for using nuclear power as a temporary method to bridge us from where we are today (stupidly dependent upon foreign oil) to a sustainable energy solution in the future (fusion, tidal, hydro, wind, some combination of these sorts of sources), but to think nuclear (the fission variety) is the be-all end-all is very naive.
Also keep in mind that despite billions of dollars invested, Obama just recently killed the Yucca Mountain program, so we'd be right back to Square #1 insofar as finding a viable long-term disposal solution.
Seven billion people on the planet, two pounds of highly radioactive waste per person, that's roughly seven million TONS of highly radioactive waste per generation. That's not so great sounding anymore, is it?
The idea that we'd have to cover an area of the earth the size of the U.S. with wind/solar farms sounds dramatic, but it really isn't. There are HUGE areas of the planet that are unpopulated or sparsely populated and power generation could be a very useful tool in giving some of these areas an exportable commodity to lift them out of poverty - the key (and the limiting factor) is the infrastructure necessary to store and transport the energy. Wire is still expensive to produce and even more expensive to run. Battery technology is still horribly inefficient (although there have been some breakthroughs recently that hold promise for large-scale power storage).
Nuclear is great in the short-term for getting the U.S. off of oil (at least for our electrical demand, it won't do squat for our transportation infrastructure). It is not so great as a global long-term or permanent energy solution.