- Joined
- Jul 25, 2011
- Messages
- 12,879
- Reaction score
- 2,707
- Location
- New England
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Very Conservative
Nuclear power is not some monster. It can be run quite safely.
Very true.
But the real answer is to start building homes and businesses that are much more energy efficient and energy producing. Buildings should be built to be as energy efficient as possible, including ensuring that they are well suited for the environment they are in. And we should be considering adding both solar panels and small wind turbines (where practical) to all buildings to try to create as much environmentally driven power for individual buildings as possible. This would greatly cut back on how much power is used from power plants and even help people when these things happen. People would be able to power their own houses, at least partly, without relying completely on the power plants.
It's not new construction that's the problem. It's the older homes and buildings. Especially in the Northeast where many of our buildings still date from the 18th and 19th centuries and are still in use today.
Micro-generation comes with a couple of concerns for me. The first is a practicality issue.... how much are people going to spend compared to how much they get back out of it.
The second is a safety issue.... The last thing an electric worker wants to hear when he/she drives into an area with an outage is a generator. At least those can be heard. These new micro-generation systems may not be audible from the street. "So What?" you say.... well an improperly installed generator (as probably 70% of them are), can backfeed into the electrical grid and cause a potential hazard to that worker as they try to restore power.