4 ms·
There is not a single renewable energy source that is a net negative over its lifetime. We have gotten very efficient over the past 40 years since that factoid
by evgen 16y ago
There is not a single renewable energy source that is a net negative over its lifetime. We have gotten very efficient over the past 40 years since that factoid may have once been true.
That is not to say that this study did not engage in a lot of hand-waving assumptions (the claim that a small fraction of total power that was hydro could cover solar/wind fluctuations for base load is delusional to be point of being outright deceptive) and is light on a practical path from here to there, but if you were to add a nuclear component that was 30-40% of the total I would not find the paper's claims to be completely unreasonable.
- pshapiro 16y agoThorium is promising, but I've heard on a TED talk (can't find the link now, it was a talk with lots of data and projection being presented) that even if we were to build one nuclear power plant each day, it would not be enough to keep up with the increase in energy usage, much less to switch over completely. Do you have any figures or an experimental apparatus to back up what you said?
- johngalt 16y agoA large nuke will produce around 3GW, a large solar plant will produce 0.1GW. So if building a nuke every day won't do it, sounds like building 30 solar plants every day won't either. So I guess we start building two nukes every day?