I can’t deny that nuclear power is the most cost-effective at current running costs (albeit this is mainly a result of the cold war). But to state that nuclear waste is ‘managable’, when there is no permanent solution in operation for high-level waste, is stretching it. Plus, there is the unique potential with nuclear power for catastrophe. Nobody can ever genuinely describe a nuclear generator as 100% safe.
Arse over tit…hmmmm…I’ll have to remember that.
I don’t know how I screwed that up. It did seem a little high. ]
100km by 100km is nothing, land wise. Of course you’d need a lot of steel, cement, etc, overall it uses alot of resources, but the land area is small.
I don’t know that much about economies of scale…I’ve seen cost per watt per solar sketched out…It fell dramatically from $20 / watt down to $4 per watt, but for the past 5 or so years it’s been stuck at $4. Most of the technology, I think, is the same as silicon wafer manufacturing for electronics. About that much is known and I don’t think there are any economies. I think they are pretty far on the learning curve. A square meter of silicon will cost something like $1000.
There are other experiemental type of solar cells which are supposed to be cheaper. So far they have efficiencies of about 1%, I think. There was an article in MIT’s Technology REview about it.
So that would be 15 times the land area or 400km by 400km approx. About 240 miles by 240 miles.
Plus you’d have storage issues, but if power were cheap enough it would be doable.
I want cheap clean energy just as much as anyone else, I just think people (so far) are fooling themselves if they think nuclear isn’t a big part of the solution. It’s not perfect, but lacking any huge advances, I don’t see anything else.
Eventually the US will have to replace it’s oil consumption, which energy wise is 11 trillion kwh per year vs. 3.5 I quoted above for electricity (6.5 billion barrels at 6.1 GJ / barrel - one kwh is 3.6M joules). Using electricity in cars would be more efficient than oil so maybe we’d only need 2 or 3 trillion kwh / year for transporation. But as you can see the US uses alot of energy. It’s staggering.
Here’s a better chart of wind potential in the US:
It’s actually on the same web-site as the other.
http://rredc.nrel.gov/wind/pubs/atlas/maps/chap2/2-01m.html
Now this is interesting. They have a write up on their site and I’ll have to read that.
But looking at the chart, there are parts of the east coast that have wind. Unfortunately most in the upper right (New England) areas that have wind are going to be on mountain ridges along the Appalachian. There is possibly a potential to put them off the coast of MA (they are currently trying to do this near Martha’s vineyard and running into opposition from rich liberals if you can believe it).
Windmills could be put densely at about 100 per square mile, I would think. That’s about 6 acres each. So theoretically you could put 1 million of them in a 100 mile by 100 mile area.
The reason why the mid-west is usually mentioned as ideal is because the land is relatively flat, and the land is pretty much worthless except for farming. And even then it’s only worth a few thousand $ per acre.
But it raises the question; if you could get wind power cheaply enough, say 1 c / kwh you could use it to generate hydrogen and use that as a feestock for creating natural gas, oil from coal, or possibly just ship it across country to be burned in power plants. The efficiency losses would be large, but possibly worth it.