Reply #14: This is nonsense.

[NNadir]

It has been nonsense for many decades and is simply fatal religious cant.

Nuclear energy, although it clearly does something different than solar energy - nuclear is suitable for continuous and not peak loads - is safer than solar energy: http://www.externe.info/expoltec.pdf as is seen in figure 9, as always.

In fact, solar energy is almost as safe as nuclear energy, although it is very much more expensive. If it were not just toys for rich boys, it would be of serious utility in fighting climate change, especially because it can do what nuclear power cannot do well: Meet peak loads. However the real danger of solar energy, which has yet to produce a single exajoule of energy in a single year in more than 50 years of trying, is that it generates a lot of dumb complacency on people who refuse, through denial and deliberate ignorance, to address the serious issue of climate change.

It is impossible to address climate change without appeal to nuclear energy. Even with nuclear energy, the challenge will be extraordinarily difficult. Without nuclear energy the possibility of addressing climate change is nonexistent.

Sorry if you don't like it, but that's how it is.

For the record, many billions of dollars have been spent around the world subsidizing, promoting, and researching renewable energy. For all that money there has been a disastrously poor result. Why? Because it doesn't work very well. The energy is too diffuse.

The number for the entire earth's supply of renewable electricity for instance:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table17.xls

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table63.xls

represents less than 2.0%.

Of course, I do recognize that one of the lame excuses for the failure of renewable energy thus far is to blame Dick Cheney, but the renewable exercise has been an international activity for some 50 years. Dick Cheney is not omnipotent. In fact on an international scale, he's something of a regrettable curiosity at best, a sort of Robert Mugabe of America.

The solar cell is 50 years old. It will never work in time or on scale to address the crisis at hand. It's not even on the energy map as a practical source of energy. Neither will wind address all but a tiny fraction of the demand. Neither will biofuels or tidal or any of the schemes-du-jour that have been failing to deliver for many decades in spite of decades of empty promises about what they "could" do.

I remind you that human history began with so called renewable energy. If it worked as well as people wish to advertise it today, there would have been no impetus to abandon it. I also note that the last time it worked, human population was well under 6 times smaller than it is now. Look around you and decide which 5 of the next 6 people you see will have to die for your renewable fantasy.

It's wishful thinking and denial to represent that throwing money at fashionable renewable schemes is either wise or enough. Whatever renewable energy can produce is, of course, welcome, but it is patently absurd to insist against all sense of reality that it is enough. It cannot knock off nuclear energy (it's not as safe anyway) nor can it accomplish the infinitely more important task of knocking off fossil fuels. (Fossil fuels, if you haven't heard, are incredibly dangerous and kill millions of poeple every year.) If there's anything that is Repuke-like, it is substituting dogma for scientific fact. Understanding the scientific facts about industrial energy begins with a concept of the exajoule, i.e. with having a concept of scale. There is not one "renewable will save us" advocate who has a sense of scale. They are all talking about demonstrator products that no one actually sees. We hear, for instance, all about the wonders of say, biodiesel, but the vast majority of people here would be unable to buy or even find any if they wanted to do so.

The world's largest scalable source of greenhouse gas free energy is nuclear energy. Twenty percent of the electricity generated on earth comes from nuclear energy, meaning that one in five people are nuclear powered. This result has been achieved with an extraordinarily low loss of live and environmental damage.

We will all, or most of us anyway, die without nuclear energy. In particular it is the only form of energy suitable for the task of phasing out coal, a critical task of immediate and overweening importance. The world as a whole has recognized this fact, and nuclear energy is picking up steam (pun intended) throughout the world. The international pace of announcements of the intention to build nuclear plants is nothing short of extraordinary, as I've been documenting here. The anti-nuclear position has been intellectually, economically, environmentally and morally discredited and is now being ignored by rational people everywhere. One hopes it isn't too late. It probably is, but we must avail ourselves of the last best hope of the human race.