Solar Energy Passes Nuclear Energy on Cost

Only with massive subsidies to solar energy, and massive additional costs imposed on nuclear energy.

I found the remark telling that "No one has built a reactor to contemporary [US] standards." This means that the standards are themselves fantastic, an artificial construct of government bureaucrats. We are far from the only nation that runs nuclear power facilities. We're just too stupid to do so safely.

Who wins is never a surprise when the game is rigged. Not surprisingly, Wall Street refuses to bet in games where the government can declare a winner and take the entire pot.

I personally lay a chunk of the blame for the BP disaster on our nation's failure to pursue nuclear energy as a viable alternative to Big Oil and foreign adventurism.

In actually, of course, it's all nuclear energy -- it's just that the reactor is a bit further away and outside our control.

I suspect that electrifying cars would not do all THAT much to cut-off the "river of blood from automobile wrecks", though. That is another system that relies "heavily on humans doing their part".

I'm all for cheaper energy, though, given how many computers are in our family. If solar power really is competitive I'd buy it.

Speaking of alternate energy sources: have any of y'all recently driven northwest from Indianapolis on I-65? There is a HONKING big wind farm just north of Lafayette that is still growing! The first time I took that road a few years back [in my boxy pickup truck with the camper shell] a friend warned me off the crosswind hazard there. I'm glad to see that someone recognized that as a resource and hope their company is making money.

Solar has been cheaper than Nuclear for sometime actually. The one cost to nuclear that's inevitably left out of the calculations is the cost of decommissioning. Once you factor that in, it's not so cheap any more...

There's also the point that once you've built both types of plants, while solar doesn't need much more than the occasional wipe down by the equivalent of a window cleaner in terms of maintainable, nuclear plants need expensive and specialised upkeep as well as refuelling every few years, and the fuel is the single most expensive component in there.

I remain a fan of atomic energy, consistent, reliable, safe. The waste is a issue but not a major one.

I direct you to Former 'No Nukes' Protester: Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Power and Sp!ked's Ten myths about nuclear power.

And nuclear technology is improving as well become more efficient and more safe such as Thorium reactors.

While I'm all for solar power there are some serious drawbacks to it simply in terms of energy density relative to nuclear. Solar is great as a distributed or mobile small scale source of electricity, but it simply can't provide enough energy without taking up titanic amounts of land. Plus it is only really useable for half the day, so that even if you were to build massive capacitors to enable storage of excess energy for periods where the solar isn't working due to lack of light you're still going to have to generate the excess energy in the first place. Simply put, the two fill very different niches in energy generation, nuclear is fantastic for baseload energy while solar is far better for distributed and mobile generation as well as for off grid applications.

Yes the waste from nuclear is dangerous and yes the things are expensive to build and decomission, but both the environmental and economic costs of nuclear are far less than the other baseload options which are available. In particular, coal and gas are far more problematic than any modern nuclear reactor.

Also, you'll find that the chances of another Chernobyl are vanishingly small as many of the innate flaws in the chernobyl reactor which allowed the disaster to even have the possibility of occuring have since been rectified in most susequent designs worldwide. Any current designs are simply incapable of failing in quite such a catastrophic way. At least not without someone actively sabotaging the whole thing and even then it should be very difficult to cause anything more than a highly localized disaster.

Ultimately the world is going to have to rely on nuclear power for bulk energy generation until some new technology with equivalent generation capability arises (personally I'm hoping for fusion, but I don't expect it to be viable for at least a couple decades if not more) If we can get solar cells which are capabile of capturing more than 40% of the energy from the light that strikes them, great! but I do not believe we can rely on them for the amounts of energy the world will ultimately require, and other renewable energy technologies such as hydroelectric, wind and wave power have their own restrictions which limit their use.


Appologies for the huge rambling comment.