Do you know where that Uranium used in a power plant comes from? Right from beneath your feet! Guess what they use to mine for in “Uranium City”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_City,_Saskatchewan
Let’s try it this way. Imagine that most people living in Texas want a cool place to live in the summer. Imagine they like TV and enjoy walking down a street that is well lit. These people also like to have jobs and enjoy being able to move about. Some even enjoy escalators and elevators, a cold fountain drink with ice in it and warm food. Now imagine that the only power sources available that can really provide reliable, large volumes of energy at realistic prices, is coal or nuclear. What is your choice? Don’t babble about some bullcrap solar cell or wind generator, the discussion is de facto limited to nuclear or coal, those are your choices. Now, what’s it going to be? Nationally, we just like the Germans, are building many many more coal plants in the future. Think about that while you dream of wind farms that today deliver a marginal output in Germany 3.7%, California 1.5%...
http://www.energy.ca.gov/wind/index.html#reports Think about this: lack of reliability, at more than three times the cost! Billions invested and California is getting a whopping 1.5% of their power from this.
Energy alternatives fail because:
1. Reliability / maintainability (Bad weather = no power)
2. Cost (Most forms of alternative power are far more expensive and even the optimistic measures price wind, solar, etc substantially higher than traditional power)
3. Mass production (Often you just can’t get there. A single aluminum plant can suck as much as a city.)
4. Suitability for application/operating environment (Think of a submarine)
5. Lack of environmental factors or susceptibility to damage in area to generate this alternative power. (Wind or even the sun is not available everywhere in great amounts; something like a hail storm can wipe out your $15,000 worth of solar panels on a roof.)
6. Storage requirements of power (Costly and possibly ecologically counterproductive to the whole purpose in the first place. Save the planet but have a battery bank next to your house. Example: a Prius with its batteries, is it really so clean?)
7. Weight, space, and or volume requirements to generate and store the power.
As mentioned, some of these alternatives simply aren’t so green (i.e. solar cells and often hydroelectric). When you build your wind farm like in California, you build them in the most suited and best locations, but what happens as you keep building more and more of these farms? What’s going to happen as more and more is pulled from wind is that the marginal return on investment for the next dollar spent will go down! You will rapidly hit a point where you have a situation of diminishing returns on the dollar invested with many of these alternatives if you were to truly attempt to make that the mainstay of power generation in this nation.
These alternative sources have a place and they do offer something. Indeed in the long term they may be the key to our energy needs, but in the mid and short term, they do not show to be be economically viable, reliable enough, nor capable of delivering the output. They are practical especially in remote areas that demand little. Think of a railroad crossing, emergency phone, and a light in a cabin in the middle of nowhere…… There it’s even economical to use these forms of sources since a generator or running power lines there is more expensive often. However, those out there beating the green power drum, believing it’s a grand conspiracy why we aren’t green today, thinking that all our demand can be covered by some wind farms; those folks are living in a fantasy land far removed from the economic and technological realities surrounding this issue. But that’s my opinion, which I at least can back with some facts, without resorting to hypothetical solar cells that don’t exist yet, wind farm efficiency that is not realistic....…….
Now, back to reality - Coal vs. nuclear
H2SO4 (acid rain- but that fad is over), CO, CO2 (global warming - that’s the new fad), carcinogenic hydrocarbons (Ignored, but probably the largest threat to health), sludge left over, residual soot despite scrubbers, massive mining, etc. How many coal miners died just in the US, just last year? None of this is there or to the extreme with nuclear power as with coal. I understand to you a nuclear power plant is an evil thing. That’s what people are taught to “feel”. However, since your green alternatives are pipedreams and everyone pretty much knows that with exception of 18 year old idealists in their freshman year at college and Hollywood celebs living in 20,000 square foot homes, we are placing our emphasis on coal. Coal is the direction Germany is going, it’s the direction California is now going, it’s the direction we as a nation are heading, and nuclear is the much cleaner alternative.