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The French have the most effective and cleanest energy program on the planet, and 75% of it is nuclear based.
Why don't other countries follow suit?
If people are worried about the small amounts of radioactive waste, they can be rest assured that within a few decades we'll be able to dump that waste on the moon or shoot it towards Venus.
We're continuing to find new ways around the waste, as well. In this example, thorium can be used in place or uranium.
Coal and gas remain by far the largest sources of electricity worldwide, threatening our climate equilibrium. Non-fossil alternatives, such as solar power, use up a forbidding amount of land, even in sunny California, plus the decommissioning will pose a serious recycling challenge within 20 years. Solar is best used on an individual household basis, rather than centralized plants. Wind requires an even larger surface area than solar.
As Michael Shellenberger, a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment”, recently wrote: “Had California and Germany invested $680 billion into nuclear power plants instead of renewables like solar and wind farms, the two would already be generating 100% or more of their electricity from clean energy sources.” Correct, but the disturbing issue of long-term nuclear waste produced by conventional, uranium based, nuclear plants still remains.
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The First Energy Amplifier Test (FEAT), funded by the European Commission, successfully demonstrated the principles of a clean and inherently safe process of energy production, based on widely available thorium. Since then, numerous experiments have demonstrated the feasibility of a large scale-up for industrial use. They also demonstrated that existing long-term (240,000 years or more) nuclear waste can be “burned up” in the thorium reactor to become a much more manageable short-term (less than 500 years) nuclear waste.
A new report from Environmental Progress shows that solar panels produce an obscene amount of waste, especially relative to the amount of power they produce.
Here are some of the key findings:
1. Solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than do nuclear power plants.
2. If solar and nuclear produce the same amount of electricity over the next 25 years that nuclear produced in 2016, and the waste is stacked on football fields, the nuclear waste would reach the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa (52 meters), while the solar waste would reach the height of two Mt. Everests (16 km).
If you want green sustainable energy, Thorium Nuclear Power Plants is the best option. Safer than uranium. Can't effectively be used to create nuclear weapons. Relies on thorium, which is extremely abundant on planet earth. There's way more thorium than uranium. There is no power source that is cleaner with fewer ecological downsides than nuclear and thorium is a step better than traditional nuclear plants. Hydroelectric hurts fish reproduction and animal life. Windmills are bird blenders that are extremely good at massacring endangered bird species and extremely dangerous to maintain. Solar power relies on a lot of toxic materials to make and the disposal of broken solar panels means dumping a lot of toxic crap somewhere. Working on solar panels on rooftops leads to many deaths from falling every single year. Solar and wind require a massive amount of land to produce a meaningful amount of electricity.
France and Germany did the exact opposite things. Germany abandoned nuclear power. France went all-in on nuclear power. One of them has a power problem and the other does not.
The grid in Germany is no where near the size of the grid in the US...
Shouldn't have much of an influence on the average outage in and of itself, though. I'll grant the lower population density as being an added US challenge. Still, the discrepancy seems pretty drastic.
Less than 2.5% of German homes use electricity as the energy source for heating. Is there anything you guys aren't willing to believe?
Hint: The speaking heads on the picture box have an agenda.
Last year, the average German citizen experienced 12 minutes of power outage. The average US citizen? 4.7 hours. The Germans are just way better at this "electricity" thing.
So, what is their energy source? Is it NG? If it is, is it against green energy?
So, what is their energy source? Is it NG? If it is, is it against green energy?
Natural gas, oil, district heating and biomass. Electricity is just not a smart way to heat houses.
The OP doesn't specify a date for his jeremiad, which is probably by design, because German wind power generation in 2021 has so far been slightly above average.
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