Members of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth now is the time to use your common sense. Stop listening to the siren calls of your 'experts'. You know that the Capacity Factor (CF) of wind turbines is pathetic and if you look up at one of these things, common sense should tell you that a great deal of resources and energy has been used to make and erect them. For every kWh of electricity you get out, tonnes of steel, concrete and neodimium has been used and the planet desecrated that much more.
You know there is an insurmountable issue of intermittency. Common sense should again tell you what the 'solutions' from your 'experts' mean: More desecration - back-up CCGTs (more desecration) or batteries (more desecration) or pumped storage (more desecration) or inter-regional/international smart grids (more desecration).
Please - use your common sense and come over to breeder reactors (the small modular versions). They can provide all of the energy requirements of every individual on the planet (at developed world standards) for as long as Homo.s can exist on Planet Earth.
You just have to decide if you want the 'Liquid Metal - Uranium' one or the 'Molten Salt - Thorium' one.
I know which I prefer - do you need any help making your mind up?
While this is phrased rather more harshly than I'd have put it, I can't help but agree with the basic facts of the case.
ReplyDeleteA fully renewable world might be possible, but it's pretty dubious that it's cost-effective or politically feasible in a world of increasingly consumerist democracies. Times will surely change, but persuading people must be a slow, incremental process.
And, of course, the real elephant in the room: whether it's possible at all is entirely dependent on a much, much cheaper and highly efficient large-scale energy storage technology being developed. Battery technology can't be deployed on such a scale without causing significant resource crises and safety issues (chemical batteries are highly reactive by definition); pumped-storage would reduce useful land areas and tie up increasingly valuable fresh water; hydrogen may be possible someday but the technology is still very much in its early research stages, and not cost-effective.
Breeder reactor technology at least exists and is proven; a dedicated push to realise their potential is an absolute necessity if we want to reduce humanity's environmental impact.
I cannot understand the members of the environmental movement who are both highly optimistic about technology solving renewable energy's shortfalls and pessimistic about technology doing the same with nuclear power; it smacks of post-rationalisation to me, in a policy debate in which impartial rationality should be paramount.