Reply #12: Furthermore [View All]

[liberation]

the filthy secret is that nuclear power is incredibly expensive. People don't realize the amount of money that has gone into nuclear development: from things like the Manhattan Project, and other military developments, to the annual budget in nuclear research, and the fact that most nuclear plants are financed (initially) with public money because they are not only incredibly risky, but massively expensive. And lets not forget the actual cost associated with the "externalities" because I am sure as hell the operator of Fukushima reactor is not going to pay out of their pocket for the economic and human effects of this catastrophe as a whole. And of course there is the matter of storing the nuclear waste, and the costs and overheads associated with it.

Whereas clean energy, has to fight tooth an nail for meager research investments. And has to provide levels of profitability that were never ever requested from other forms of energy when they were coming on line.

Truth is that we have energy all around us, and transforming it into usable electricity is a matter of mechanical conversion (from the most part). We can have access to photovoltaic panels (granted solid state, not mechanical per se), or use solar energy to produce steam to move turbines. Or we can use wind to also move those turbines (wind can be considered also a for of solar energy). Or we can exploit tidal energy in the coasts. And if we must really really boil water, we can dig deep holes into the ground and use the earth's heat (most of our planet is molten hot lava not solid cold crust) to create steam to move our turbines.

And that is just the beginning. Fairly simple and mechanical. People do not grasp that the level of ingenuity that was necessary to understand and exploit the atom, for example, was orders of magnitude what is required to enhance the already existing mechanical approaches for clean energy production. So we're more than capable of meeting the challenge (if we can run a marathon, we sure as hell can do a 5K). Sure, they may not provide the same level of energy density as a nuclear core... but who the hell cares? When you take into account the area needed to extract the uranium ore, the processing facilities, and the storage space for the spent fuel... that "energy density" disappears rather quickly.