Locrian said:
For someone of your education, this is an incredibly shallow remark. There may not be many people in the sahara who need it, but there are people north, south, east and west of it who might be able to benefit. The sun shines equally bright just a little outside of a desert.
Be realistic though: what is the total energy consumption of Africa compared to the US? Its not selfish to focus our efforts on the US.
You don't quote any numbers when talking about solar and wind power, and I feel it is safe to say you may not be aware of the most recent ones. It's already been shown here in the US, for example, that when you take into account the amount of money society spends on coal miners healthcare, the difference in cost between coal and wind power is negligible.
Such calculations are dubious and biased and even if true, its still not that simple: you have to weigh the short term vs long-term costs and benefits. People dying of cancer is an extremely long-term cost of coal that is difficult to reconcile with the extremely low short-term cost of the electricity. Plus, I doubt such studies consider all the costs of wind power: such as the land it requires and the real long-term cost. That has a little to do with the bias of the assumptions, but also has to do with the fact that the wind-power industry is not mature, so you have to make projections that you don't have to make regarding coal.
In any case, nuclear is as intrinsically cheap as coal (it is expensive strictly because it is over-regulated) and has none of the added long-term environmental and health costs.
Regardless of your views on global warming, the sharp rise in oil and natural gas prices may make alternative sources of energy economic more sooner than later; should we invest in them now? If we are reasonably forward thinking, we will certainly invest in their research.
The new nuclear power plants China has opened could certainly be considered "alternative," and may very well be superior to all other current types of power generation.
I don't reeally care what you call it, but if calling nuclear power "alternative" causes hippies to stop sabbotaging it, I'm all for it.
Anyhow, I see no reason why investing completely in nuclear coverage is more effective than dividing assets between several power types. I believe there are a couple of things you are not taking into account.
1) Is it safe to say you are from a country whose population is reasonbaly dense? Nuclear power is a fantastic solution to city energy supply. Nuclear power is a poor solution to rural areas energy supply. It is expensive to transport power.
Here in the US we have vast tracts of open land, and huge farm areas. In both of these, the size to effectiveness ratio is virtually meaningless; windmills placed on farmland can reduce the crop yield by tiny amounts, and increase the economic value of the farm considerably. It still isn't economic to do this on large scales, but we are getting close to reaching a time when it will be.
I don't want to speak for Andre (I've been accused of focusing too much on nuclear power before), but keep some perspective: You gave two excellent examples, but what is the size-ratio of those examples? Ie, if we built windmills on farms and used nuclear power for our cities, what would the ratio be? 99% nuclear? I wouldn't suggest putting
all of our eggs in the nuclear basket, but it is perfectly appropriate to put the vast majority (90%+) of our efforts into nuclear power.
2) I believe you are only considering a single use for these alternative energy sources - that of electricity. Solar power especially has direct uses that do not require electricity, but save electricity and other recources. Wind qualifies too, but less so and in different ways. Take solar water heaters for instance; it has been shown they pay for themselves in warm areas, and are beginning to be sold regularly in the US. Why shouldn't we invest in them?
That's fine too, but the same caveat applies: how much of your electric (gas) usage goes to your water heater? My argument has always been to go after the big fish. A dozen successful alternates would not even begin to compare to the effect of a single successful nuclear program.
If you have a hard time imagining what the 250,000 nomadic people of Western Sahara would do with a lightbulb (which you shouldn't), maybe you can think of some use for a solar water purifier that can purify any water in a short time (even urine and many types of polluted water).
Be realistic:
with what is a Western-Saharan nomad going to
pay for solar-powered water purifier and how much impact would selling it to him have on the global energy/pollution situation?
If renewable sources are so poor choices, then answer this: why has Japan seen a huge increase in solar power sales even as government funding has been phased to a fraction of what it once was? Why have solar cells seen huge increases in sales worldwide over the past decade?
Simple: when sales of such things are so microscopic, a doubling of sales is pretty easy to achieve and equally meaningless. Such numbers are trumpeted by environmentalists all the time regarding wind power. But how about a reality check: http://www.greenenergyohio.org/page.cfm?pageId=93
New wind industry investment was worth $9 billion in 2003, up from $7 billion in 2002. The total capacity of 39,294 MW [that's global] provides enough electricity to power the equivalent of 9 million average American homes...
Sounds great, right? The reality is quite different: first, wind power (and solar) has a
horrible utilization factor. While a nuclear plant can average 90% for its lifetime, a wind plant is at the whim of the weather and more often than not, is generating a small fraction (or nothing) of its theortical capabilities. For http://library.iea.org/Textbase/stats/surveys/mes.pdf , wind power isn't even listed, but the total average production of "geothermal/other", which includes wind and solar, was about 14,000 MW. Far cry from the 39,000 MW of theoretical capacity for wind alone.
The total of all the alternate energy sources is currently 1.3% of the world's generation. Should we try to increase that by an order of magnitude(if possible)? Sure, but that still means almost 90% of the total solution can (should) be nuclear.
ohwilleke said:
I think you are wrong about renewables and are also missing a huge piece of the puzzle, which is conservation.
How big and how do we do it? From the link above, global energy usage is going up by around 1% a year and fossil fuels make up about 2/3 of our total usage. Is it possible to decrease global energy usage by a meaningful fraction (say, 25%) and be able to maintain even current (much less, continue to improve) living standards? I don't think it is possible, and in any case, people won't do it on their own (despite high gas prices, SUV sales continue to increase).
Sometimes one must make stupid statements to get a bit of discussion. Again I'm not used to the hot bright desert type weather. The article that I read gave a tenfold higher cost for solar power against oil. But that's at higher lattitudes of course. Those kind of remarks easily cause bias
