The pendulum has to swing on these whackos eventually
Agree... Considering that natural gas prices have risen at least 400% over the past year and are likely to remain at least 100-200% higher in 2001 over last year, while the cost of nuclear power has remained stable, this is the year for advocates of nuclear power to make their point.
This link that is attached to the one Raymond pointed out shows that public support of nuclear energy remain in the mid 60 percentile range among college graduates:
c-n-t-a.com
However, unfortunately solar energy is still mistakenly perceived as the "fuel of the future" which is clearly not supportable by the fact.
Solar, while "sexy" in theory, requires MASSIVE capitalization and inflicts massive environmental impact due to the large amounts of resources and geographical area required to generate sufficient capacity.
Permit me to quote some excerpts from Hogan's "Know Nukes" essay with regard to solar energy:
...."With solar the biggest drawbacks that advocates overlook is its extreme diluteness. To get an idea of how dilute it is, consider a lump of coal needed to make one kilowatt hour of electricity, which would weigh about a pound, and ask how long would sunlight have to shine on that piece of coal to deposit the same amount of energy. Well, its shado-- which represents the sunlight intercepted-- would have an area of about 15 square inches. In Arizona, the sun would have to shine on that area for one thousand hours to deliver one kilowatt-hour of energy, which at twelve hours of sunshine per day is almost three months. For the average location in the US, it would be twice that. But if we wanted to get one kilowatt-hour of electricity out of that sunbeam, then, at the 10% conversion efficiency typically attainable today, it would take FIVE YEARS-- to get the same useful energy that a small piece of coal will yield in minutes!! That's how concentrated the energy is in coal, and how dilute it is in sunshine."
He goes on to add:
"For a one thousand megawatt solar-electric conversion plant, for example-- the same size as I used to illustrate nuclear-- we're talking about covering fifty to a hundred square miles with 35,000 tons of aluminum, two million tons of concrete, 7,500 tons of copper, 600,000 tons of steel, 75,000 tons of glass, and 1,500 tons of other metals such chromium and titanium-- one thousand times the material needed to construct a comparable size nuclear plant. These material are not cheap, and real estate isn't free. Neither is the labor to keep miles of collector area clean. Moveover, these materials are all products of heavy, energy hungry industries-- to the degree that many studies have concluded that building solar plants would produce a net energy loss-- and produce lage amounts of waste, roughly 10 percent of which is highly toxic. So much for "free" and "clean" solar power."
Regards,
Ron |
