The Dirty Side of "Clean" Energy
erco
Posts: 20,256
I didn't see this in the brochure...
http://news.yahoo.com/solar-industry-grapples-hazardous-wastes-184714679.html
http://news.yahoo.com/solar-industry-grapples-hazardous-wastes-184714679.html
Comments
Nothing to see here, just a bunch of uneducated folks clinging to their carbon based fuels...
C.W.
...better smile when you say that, big fella!
oh.. they meant... oh.. (give me break!)
Jeff
What the Fukashima disaster has made quite clear is that any and all nuclear reactor sites are likely to become the final destination for spent fuel rods as nobody has been able to clearly define a nuclear waste management scheme for the world. Sure, there are bits. The U.S. Navy has a nuclear waste dump somewhere in Tennessee, and the Hanford Area is holding what the Manhattan Project created, and some Scandinavia countries have prepared to entomb waste for hundreds if not thousands of years.
But overall, the nuclear power industry seems to have spent fule rods remaining on site and often no place to remove them to. Taiwan has no place to move them to. It seems Japan is in the same situation. So your neighborhood nuclear reactor site is the defacto final destination for waste for the foreseeable future.
You're not saying that you cling to the dirty energy of the past are you?
C.W.
It probably is true if calculate the energy to create it from raw materials.
Bean
Edit: See for example http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/29/turbines-energy
-Tor
Of course, natural gas has become the big back up play and there has been a shift in the US to begin to have fleets of trucks and long-haul trucks move to using. But I suspect that oil will be king until the last jet airplane is out of fuel.
Nuclear energy keeps promising to be the long-term solution in one form or another for the urban dweller and industry, but actual costs seem to never have been fully accounted.
As far as the article of "The Dirty Side of "Clean" Energy", I suppose most of that waste went to Kettleman Hills Toxic Waste Dump in the California desert, and it seems that similar destination in Nevada and Arizona have taken on waste. My own feeling is that these destinations - for the most part - are unproductive lands that are appropriate for waste disposal. So what's the big deal? Are we expecting to produce energy without any environmental impact? I am happy to settle for less overall environmental impact on a continued basis and safe sane management of wastes.
...ok...ok - be it known...yes, I am a BITTER CLINGER!!!
A windmill manufacture is not exectly an independent source of info...
Bean
Dave Bad, Solar Panel Good, Windmill Better, Living like sensitive vegetarian caveman over "settled science" Best!
I suppose you eat meat as well...
C.W.
-Tor
...errrrrr! (nom nom nom!!!)
With chickens like that I'm glad I prefer beef!
C.W.
I have heard in several places that if you make windmills out of meat then money falls from the sky.
Sometimes lunch, too.
And sometimes the meat as well.
We will consume all of the underground energy resources, oil, gas, coal, etc at an ever increasing rate until they are all gone.
Then we will find out that building windmills, tide generators, nuke plants, solar farms, etc need more energy to build than we have.
At that point we have no problems anymore with greenhouse gasses an global warming.
Then, in a desperate attempt to keep warm, we will burn every tree we can find.
When that is done the human population will drop dramatically, helped along by the enevitable wars over the last remaing resources.
If anyone survives all of that they are basically back in the stone age.
Don't forget making synthetic jet and diesel fuel for the military. They are not about to go without fuel and go back to horse and mule power. And of course we will need plenty of lubricants.
I do wonder what will ever replace tarmak though. The whole world is covered with miles and miles of ribbons of crude oil and crushed stone.
I'd prefer beef as well, but all you get in Europe these days is horse meat. At least I know what chicken meat looks like.