Quote:
Originally Posted by danarhea  I don't believe that there is anything wrong with someone admitting that he was wrong, and then going about his business. Are you Jesus Christ, or are you sometimes wrong, like the rest of us? |
No, not JC, but perhaps a descendant of a distant cousin of his...
I am sometimes wrong, but seldom as much as those who have no education or experience in power production.
I am a former navy nuke operator, have worked in or around nuclear most of my working career since 1966, and have taken several related college classes. The most interesting was called Alternate Energy Technology, and during that semester we studied all that was available, and the pros and cons of each. Coal came out cheapest, but environmentally very dirty. Nuclear was expensive, but clean. NG is fairly clean, but at the time of the class (1984) it was supposed that there wasn't enough proven reserves. That has since changed a bit. Oil was, and is, barely used to make electricity. Solar, wind, geothermal are site situational, you use it locally, anywhere you can make it feasible, and there are not as many places as you might think. AFTER production, you have to look at the capabilites of getting the power to the customer. The grid we have is not up to it, we would have to upgrade whichever direction we go, and build new lines as well.
And after all that, we looked at conservation. We proved, using basic math, that if each American consumer reduced usage of electricity by 10%, we could put off building new power plants for a number of years. I forget the numbers, but it was significant.
If a "moon shot" is to be done, we should first aim at conservation....it is cheap, easy, and doable immediately with no new technology involved.