In 2009, 5,700 new wind turbines were installed in the United States. This constitutes up to 10,000 megawatts of new power.
Meanwhile, nuclear energy has supplied not a single watt of new power in the US in the past 30 years, yet gets tens of billions in loan guarantees. Good news for hucksters promoting nuclear power. I predict in the next five years, not a single nuke plant will break ground in the US, and meanwhile we can expect more and more wind turbines generating actual electricity.
Now, please, all you nuke loving fantasists, let’s hear the excuses from the losers who can’t bring power on line. Oh, ugly shriveled up coal apologists are also welcome.
That’s great…really…but, what does that take the total energy produced for wind as a percentage of the total energy produced in the US? 1.8%. 5700 new wind turbines (at a cost of $11,400,000,000, assuming each wind tower cost approx. $2 million). Consider what the cost would be to get it up to 10%…or 20%. And the real costs will be higher, since this doesn’t take into account infrastructure or maintenance costs. And then, where are you going to put hundreds of thousands of wind turbines? And how are they going to do when all the good places are taken (or are denied because of NIMBYism)? Or because the environmentalists start to twig to the environmental impact these things have?
No, we haven’t had a new plant designed or built in the US in decades now. Presumably, this 8 billion is to kick start the process to start building the things again sometime in the near future. Since nuclear is the ONLY C02 free alternative to coal and FF that could actually scale to meet our current and future energy needs, the only think I can see worth pitting is…why the fuck has it taken this long to get this going? What the fuck took so long? And what the fuck do we need to do to get the old school eco-hippies the fuck out of the way, so we can start making some real progress in reducing CO2?
Maybe the nuclear developers should hire better lawyers than the hippies hire. I mean, can’t they get lawyers who are persuasive enough to convince judges and juries that Three Mile Island and Chernobyl didn’t happen and at least nobody got hurt at TMI? Windscale was a fantasy and nothing happened at Hanover ever. Awww. whaaaa, call an whammbulance for the losers, because wind power doesn’t kill enough people. Whhaaaa!!!
If wind power keeps increasing the way it has, there might not be enough room for power so cheap from nukes that it won’t pay to meter it!! And that socialist solar power! Don’t those damn hippies know that you are supposed to buy electrical power from large utilities!!! Without centralized power, how can Enron-like companies create false shortages if electricity is damn near free.
I’m a big fan of wind power, and i support the expansion of America’s wind turbine industry. I’m glad that more are going up, and i hope they continue to be built despite the whining of the NIMBYs who only want wind power as long as they don’t have to actually look at any turbines.
But your OP is fucking retarded.
Even if you accept that there are still questions that might need to be answered regarding the long-term safety of nuclear power and the issue of waste disposal, it’s pretty stupid to laugh at the nuclear industry for not supplying any new power when nuclear has essentially run into a complete legal and political stonewall in the United States.
It would be, in practical terms, sort of like laughing at California gays since the passing of Prop 8, and saying, “Hey, how many of you homos have managed to get hitched in the last year? Us straights are tying the knot left, right, and center.”*
It’s not that the nuclear industry can’t get electricity flowing; it’s that they’re not allowed to. Every attempt to get moving is confronted with all sorts of legal and political challenges that either shut down the plans altogether, or make it so expensive that it’s not worth doing.
Yes, i realize the analogy isn’t perfect, but it’s close enough for my purposes.
Your analogy is retarded and offensive to retarded people. I’m not actually opposed to doing a demonstration pebble bed reactor in the US, but I find the Obama administration’s throwing billions of loan guarantees at an unsafe and unproven industry to be retarded. Shit, these pro-nuke assholes won’t even risk their own money. Damn socialized nuclear power. And don’t get me started on “clean coal”.
My understanding is wind can only provide 20-30% of energy due to its unreliability. Plus you have to upgrade the grid infrastructure to transport the energy all over the US.
Nuclear really isn’t that bad. We only have about 103 reactors, but they provide 20% of all grid energy in the country. Plus they are easier to control than wind power and can provide power on demand. A large reactor costs about $5 billion, so 100 new ones is $500 billion. And supposedly the cost would go down if we had a way to build them that lowered construction and litigation costs.
So I’m all for getting 30% of energy from wind, but doubling our nuclear capacity on top of that is good too. Do that and 80% of grid energy will come from wind, nuclear or hydroelectric.
Ha! Shows what you losers know. I bet wind beats nuclear for more new capacity in 2010 and 2011 too!!! And solar will also beat nuclear for new capacity in 2010 and 2011! Shit, I could go down to Home Depot and buy a gas powered generator and run it for five hours and beat new nuclear capacity for the next five years!
“Unsafe” and “unproven”? it’s a safe technology, unless you go out of your way to make it unsafe like they did at Chernobyl. As for it being “unproven”; as said, the Navy uses it, various foreign countries use it. And on a large scale. You might as well call the steam engine unproven.
Do you know what the likely result of the anti-nuclear campaign is going to be? Not wind and not solar; they simply don’t scale up. Coal. America has lots of coal, and it does scale up - it’s more polluting than nuclear and contributes to global warming, but it doesn’t have the anti-nuclear fanatics blocking it. That’s likely to be the legacy people like you leave the country and the world; an America dotted with coal plants spewing pollution.
But at least they aren’t nuclear! We can choke on coal particulates with a clean conscience (if not clean lungs). :rolleyes:
I’m not afraid of nuclear energy, I"m opposed to the ridiculous cost of it and the deceptively low price people pay on their monthly bill that doesn’t reflect its real cost, its future costs, and the cost of eventually shutting it down and rendering it safe.
No one expects wind to provide all the power, all the time for heaven’s sake.
Why can’t the government just take a stance that basically says “We’ve examined our energy situation and have determined that going forward that nuclear energy is the most efficient, clean and reliable source of new electric production. We’ve conducted studies that have concluded the best locations for new nuclear power plants. We’re building these things, and there’s fuck all any of you environmentalist groups and your lawyers can do about it!”?
Where is the resistance to building new nuclear plants coming from in our government? Liberals? Conservatives? Both?
The costs of nuclear are artificially high, not low.
“We can supply everything with wind and solar” does seem to be a common attitude among the anti-nuke people; the ones that don’t want us to go back to the Stone Age at least.
I’d like to believe the OP and that poster’s follow ups were just an attempt to troll the board, but he really does seem to be that stupid and immature.
Nuclear has some problems, but it’s a proven way to get a lot more power quite reliably. It’s almost criminal that the technology has not been developed in any substantive way since it was introduced. If we’d kept on it we might already have fusion power by now, which would effectively solve almost all our energy problems.
Wind is nice but not very efficient or practical. Solar and nuclear are our best bets right now.
I’m looking forward to superconducting transmission technology, myself. A considerable amount of generated electricty is lost in the grid itself, and better cabling promises to deliver lossless energy from remote locations (as in, where wind and solar can most efficiently be exploited) to the cities.
Well, plus expanded nuclear, leaning toward fusion.
Oh, but don’t you know how Wind Power makes people ill???
“Mariana Alves-Pereira, a Portuguese acoustical engineer, said in a 2007 study that turbines can cause vibroacoustic disease, which can lead to strokes and epilepsy.”
:rolleyes:
Don’t buy that for a minute, but Wind power has it’s own detractors and lawsuits, which are just gearing up because the tech is fairly new and not yet widespread. Just wait.
Right. If we had only kept up with nuclear power we would not only have fusion, but we’d have warp drives and have colonized the galaxy by now. :rolleyes: