Wind energy costs approach nonrenewable levels

I guess it all comes down to the "nuclear power is great but not in my backyard" argument. We need a way to ensure safe operation of the power plants and, once that's properly established, educate the public about it.

f**ushima needs to be the last time this kind of thing happens. Don't build nuclear power plants on fault lines! It's hard to advocate for nuclear power when things like that happen but bad decisions regarding location do not mean that it's inherently unsafe. Still, we're going to be dealing with the after effects of the f**ushima disaster for a long, long time...

Interestingly ,the f**ushima plant was built to survive earthquakes, just...not quite of the magnitude that hit. Nor did they anticipate a tsunami quite as high. The back-up generators got swamped and all the lines taken down, so there was no way to keep the reactor coolant going.

I'm probably over-simplifying ,though.

The f**ushima disaster was a perfect storm of events. The possibility of what happened was rare except that it *was* in a location that was particularly prone to tsunamis. The engineers built it with that in mind yet one event exceeded the plants' ability to withstand.

The lesson was clear: don't build on fault lines. The public instead took the idea that nuclear power = disasters waiting to happen. NIMBY? You have to put it close to a large source of water for cooling. Japan doesn't exactly have much real estate that's near water that isn't also near fault lines, IIRC.

I'd argue toward new reactor designs - ones that can resist any tsunami - however that needs to be built. But most of all I'm rooting for wind power.

I personally don't think that there is "one" solution for the world's energy needs, instead, each country (or more accurately, each region) will have to look into what makes more sense, per region. For example countries towards the tropic of Cancer (on the northern hemisphere) and the tropic of Capricorn (on the southern hemisphere) are much more suitable for solar power, especially those with desert climates, little precipitation and/or cloud cover. Iceland, on the other hand, which straddles Eurasia and North America in the geological sense, sits right at the spot for geothermal energy, and even today (combined with hydropower) it already covers almost the entirety of the country's electricity needs. Of course Iceland has only a tiny population, and for a country the size of the US, which covers up half a continent, to realize a similar percentage, will take a lot of thinking. The desert southwest of the United States, which is also very near the tropic of Cancer, is also quite suited for solar energy. Now with nuclear power, in addition to safety issues, there's also the as-of-yet-unresolved problem of what we actually do with the nuclear waste. On the flip side, its easy to see that nuclear power is "clean" in so far as that it doesn't put any carbon dioxide emissions into the air (as coal power plants do), or soot (which is a problem with many poorly maintained coal power in less-developed countries in the world). So yeah, in my opinion we should not pursue one solution but all of them if we want a future that has both a cleaner environment and where there's enough electricity for everyone on the planet.

What do you think?

Whenever I withstand, bad things happen. There's no way details is going to pursue any time soon. They usually thought.

Thorium can't cover. Side sounds like a good thing.

Woot!

Vega7285, you said about three hundred fourty five words about this. Blabbermouth.