I am tired of the call for wind, solar, geothermal power while failing to mention that these will never produce more than 10% of the needed power while making those who produce the products rich.
This is the real reason why so many fight to prevent the only low cost alternative Nuclear power. This nation has become a third world country when it comes to Nuclear power, even the Japanese who have strong reason to dislike nuclear power have been building Nuclear power plants while getting rid of the dirty pollution causing coal burning plants. Nuclear power is cheaper and can also be used to produce hydrogen for hydrogen fuel cell cars but the oil industry lobby does not want cheap fuel they want us to pay $5.00 to them for gasoline while they get richer and richer. WAKE UP AMERICA.
Why this government refuses to read the reports from it's own agency which have stated that the biggest polluting problems come From coal fired plants which throw tons of pollutants into the air daily including many different types of radioactive substances. Oil shale is contaminating many areas but this government turns it's back and ignores it because of political lobbyists paying off our Congress. WE HAVE THE BEST GOVERNMENT MONEY CAN BUY, AND IT DOES.
Comments (11)
If renewable energies where made cheaper and easier to obtain to all Nuclear plants would not be needed! Wind, solar even lunar! If one has solar panels or wind towers and you make more than you use the electric company pays you for your energy, but the main problem is the cost of setting up your own solar/wind collectors. Nuclear is Not the answer. If terrorism is what scares people then why use dangerous things like nuclear? They are not as safe as you think! As far as free energy why not use that. Why is Nikola Tesla's ideas and inventions supressed because of money issues? Our own earth is a big ball of energy yet we do not tap into it because of greed based utility companies. This whole planet needs to wake up and see what is really here!
Nikola Tesla had great ideas but even he could not figure out how to make them work. Nuclear is not as dangerous as most people think, Only those who opose it want to prevent people from finding out they are being decieved by people like Hanoi Jane Fonda who want to prevent use of one of the most abundant resources to powr plamts to produce cheap power,
Take a good look at who oposes Nucler paower and why.I think that most people can see the hand of those who would lose profits behind the demonizing of Nuclear power.
Nuclear power is pure insanity. Nor is it renewable, clean or even efficient.
What has kept renewable energy marginalized and expensive has been the obstructionism of the entrenched energy industry, which is willing to see the planet raped and the human race decimated in order to continue the pathological capitalist pursuit of more, more, more profit. Profit before all else.
How can any sane person maintain that a poison spewing, astronomically expensive nuclear plant has any advantage over individual residential and business renewable energy systems?
Lew Hay, chairman and CEO of FPL, said, "If our cost estimates are even close to being right, the cost of a two-unit plant will be on the order of magnitude of $13 to $14 billion. That's bigger than the total market capitalization of many companies in the U.S. utility industry and 50 percent or more of the market capitalization of all companies in our industry with the exception of Exelon." This, he said, "is a huge bet for any CEO to take to his or her board."
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/06/02/nuclear_power_price/#
Once the plant is on line it still must transmit energy long distances through inefficient, power-wasting grid systems. Then we must consider the amount of energy consumed to produce the materials for the construction of a plant, to actually build the facility and to mine, process and transport the fuel, which is non-renewable, deadly and rare. Then there’s the waste disposal problem for which there is no solution.
There are already homes in America which are receiving monthly checks from power companies because they are producing more energy than they use. There is at least one large American dairy farm that operates entirely on methane gas produced by the manure of its livestock. The simple fact of the matter is that renewable energy, used by individuals site by site, would put the energy giants out of business. That’s why it hasn’t been in use for the last fifty years or so.
As the transition from non-renewable becomes inevitable we will see legislation passed by the corporate owned congress making it illegal for individual home and business owners to generate their own electricity. Once the power giants have accepted the fact that a new paradigm must be put in place, they will take the necessary steps to ensure that that capitalist ownership machine will be in complete control of it. The process is already underway.
We will be forced to buy our energy, still transmitted over giant inefficient grids, from huge corporate owned wind and solar farms. The only difference will be that, after the initial investment for the necessary hardware, the corporations will be getting the power they sell us absolutely free. There will be no need for extraction, processing, refining or shipping. Nonetheless we will pay as much as, if not more than, we do now for the privilege of turning on a light.
The greatest failing of our energy system is our energy system. Huge, inefficient and antiquated power grids waste more than half the energy that is produced. Large centralized power plants of any kind are inefficient from the moment of construction. The greatest loss of energy, which can be up to two thirds of what is produced by any given plant, is the transmission of that energy over long distances to the end user. The cheapest, safest, most cost effective and efficient way to provide energy is on a site by site basis. Every new structure could easily be built with the necessary hardware to make it completely self-sufficient. Existing structures can be retrofitted.
The next problem with our energy system is the people who use it. Self-interested, arrogant, wasteful and gluttonous, the average American consumes five times more energy than the average global citizen. If everyone would just switch to energy efficient light bulbs it would cut demand enough to equal the output of two nuclear plants!
The only people that would continue to promote the corporate ownership of the means to produce energy are psychopathic, profit driven capitalists or their apologists, who worship wealth and power over all else, including the well being and survival of their own children and grandchildren.
The easiest, fastest, safest and cheapest way to improve our use of energy is to conserve. Our wasteful, “non-negotiable” lifestyle, created by the obscenity of free market capitalism, is at the root of most of our problems and those of the world at large.
The capitalist lust for endless and ever increasing profits, which drives a society indoctrinated to mindless consumerism, is hastening us toward becoming the proud inhabitants of a third world planet.
I find it no stretch to envision the starving masses, confined to crumbling cities of the future which have been left to rot, their antiquated and neglected infrastructures collapsed by disasters or simply decay and never repaired.
In gated, guarded fortress communities, the rich elite, the master race, will live in luxury with all their needs provided by privatized corporate suppliers.
And by the way, guess who has lots of money invested in nuclear power.
Can you say oil companies?
Not to mention U.S. taxpayers to the tune of tens of billions in subsidies.
Nikola Tesla actually did know how to make it work...he and his ideas are mainly supressed due to corporations and greed based policies. He even lit up bulbs wirelessly! The general public would be shocked and saddened at how much he was for the betterment of humanity, but his ideas were either stolen or hid! Free energy does exsist and is possible but utility companies will see that it never exsists because they think the dollar is almighty. How sad our country and world is...I wish the world would wake up and realize what life is really all about, because it is Not about money!
What I don't like about this proposal is its one-sided nature. If we are to look at the potential and costs of one source of energy, there should be a fair assessment of all of them.
Perhaps what we need is a blue-ribbon committee to produce a report of the potentials of each of the different forms of energy, reporting on all of the costs (social and ecological as well as financial) and potential of each. Such information exists piecemeal, but it is hard for anyone to judge how much of the information is biased and how much is accurate. Possibly an independent committee of prominent academics could produce a credible study.
If the pyramids in Egypt had been nuclear power plants, the radiation danger from them would now be about 80% of what it was the day they were shut down, 3,000 years ago.
The most-bang-for-the-buck targets for terrorists are our nuclear power plants.
In order to get that nuclear energy, an enormous amount of conventional energy must be invested in mining and concentrating the fuel in centrifuges and building an elaborate facility; so much, in fact, that it takes more than the first third of the plant's life before one has a net gain!
pecohen, who would you trust for your committee? In most cases you only get to choose one side of an issue. Follow the money.
dougolat, well said. Valid points all.
beebe75, I agree and share your sadness.
About 10 years ago National Geographic put out a special Energy issue. One of the articles evaluated how long before a resource ran out for the US. Coal was 150 years, but only if we used dirty coal and coal buried in our National Parks. The Uranium required for nuclear had only 30 years supply. So, go nuclear is stupid since not only hard to build and dangerous, in 30 years we'll be in the same situation. Better go with other sources now and not waste time. Unless you're talking fusion. But, no guarantee that we can make it work.
Here you go, for 2008, unsubsidized costs (see source below):
$/MWh
Wind: 89-150
Solar: 210-405
Geothermal: 82-116
Nuclear: 98-126
Coal: 74-135
Gas (primary): 73-100
Gas (peaking): 221-334
Including fuel price sensitivity:
Nuclear: 97-128
Coal:67-144
Gas (primary): 59-115
Gas (peaking): 198-356
from here: http://www.narucmeetings.org/Presentations/2008%20EMP%20Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Master%20June%202008%20(2).pdf
The 2008 levelized costs of nuclear, oil, coal and wind are (in $/Mwh):
So as you can see wind and geothermal (limited locations) are quite cost competitive. The above costs do not take into account costs of possible climate disruption increased CO2 output of Coal, and to a lesser extent natural gas, the full PDF does include some analysis of this.
The cost of all forms of energy should be "shown" including fossil fuels. Keep in mind that our interest (and military expenditures) in the middle east are for a large part driven by the desire to keep the area stable so that we can continue to have "cheap" oil. If one takes the $600B for the Iraq war alone (not counting the trillions in other defense expenditures) and divide that by the US oil imports from OPEC nations (6 million per day) over the past eight years (17.5B bbl) we have a cost of $34 per barrel. This does not include the tax breaks and other subsidies given to oil companies. Coal and Nuclear have similar subsidies, direct and indirect.
Richard Posner: Sorry for the delay in responding. For some reason the email about your comment was rejected by my spam filter.
There is not perfect way to reach the truth. Nonetheless, we have juries to decide guilt or innocence of criminal defendants and we have in the past had blue ribbon commissions to study important issues (the Church Committee is a good example. Just as juries too often reach incorrect verdicts, so blue-ribbon panels often reach questionable conclusions. However, both processes uncover important facts and we really don't have any better alternatives. If you can suggest a good one I am quite certain it would be a welcome innovation.