Personal and spiritual growth
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- The benefits of modesty
- The more the better?
- Children develop their parents
- Perceptive reality
- The human needs
- Higher consciousness
- About the meaning of life
Global warming, climate change
- Definition of global warming
- Cause and effects of global warming
- Responsibility and global warming
- Energy consumption
- Reduce the energy demand
- Carbon footprint
- CO2 emissions by country
- Reason for climate change
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Nuclear energy, atomic power
Time for change
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Only freewill, self-wanted development brings progress. Everything else is manipulation.
Ecologists: Wrong targets
Many so-called 'ecologists' are targeting the oil and the nuclear industry.
Wrong. We are in a world of energy shortage. The world economy is the hostage of production of energy: shortly after a period of strong growth, it collapsed due to a steep increase of energy prices.
And the world economy must grow: ~75% of human beings are living in poverty.
Add to that the "greenhouse effect'. My feeling is that it is not the most urgent problem we must fix, but let's say that it is:
- Nuclear energy can help to alleviate the energy shortage, and reduce the emission of CO2.
- Oil is successfull for a reason: it is excellent for vehicules, like cars, boats, airplanes, and cannot be easily replaced. Alternatives like hydrogen, biofuel or electric cars (batteries...) are, actually, more polluting.
- Natural gas is great for warming systems - high efficiency, low maintenance and non-polluting delivery by pipes - and for electrical power plants - ~60% efficiency against ~40% for coal or oil plants.
- 'Non-polluting' (actually, it doesn't exist) renewable energy is not enough for the needs of humanity.
Hydr-electricity, windmills and passive solar could reach only ~15 % of our needs.
In short: we should use oil only for vehicules, and increase production of nuclear electricity and natural gas.
IF WE DON'T, THE NET EFFECT WILL NOT BE LESS POLLUTION, BUT MORE: USAGE OF COAL WILL INCREASE, AND COAL POLLUTES A LOT MORE.
And we should, of course, use less energy in the rich countries, and LOWER THE NATALITY in the poor ones, because every human needs food and energy, and therefore pollutes.
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Better alternatives to nuclear power: Renewables
You seem to overlook that there are much better alternatives to coal than nuclear power: Energy from renewable sources like wind, water, water waves, solar power and from waste.
The right priorities are:
1) Energy efficiency. The rich countries must reduce their energy consumption and use the energy more efficiently
2) Expand the production of renewable energy.
3) Phase out nuclear power (radiating waste problem remains unsolved, nuclear proliferation, risks of accidents, supply of Uranium insufficient, etc.)
There is enough food and enough energy on the world. It is just a problem of distribution of these goods. A simple question of political will.
Renewable
- The 'good' renewable energy sources (windmills, hydraulic, ... not biofuels, more polluting than oil) are not even able to replace the growth of usage of coal every year.
- If you phase out nuclear plants, the results will be shortage of energy, prices sky-rocketing, acceleration of exploitation of coal and increased green house effect.
- Solar has potential, but we need technological breakthroughs (photovoltaic, batteries), and I don't think that it will happen in the next ten coming years...
- If not a panacea, nuclear energy is necessary in the short- to mid- term. They are problems associated with it: let's fix them.
- I agree with you on the reduction of energy consumption in the rich countries, but it is ridiculously inadequate to compensate for the needed growth of energy usage by 75% of the humans on this planet, just to make their life decent (most are still in misery today).
Energy efficiency has a tremendous potential
Energy efficiency alone has the potential to reduce the electrical energy consumption by 30 to 50%.
A rectangular field of about 300 km by 300 km size in the desert with concentrating solar power could supply enough electrical energy for the whole world population (2007)!
In terms of new power stations, the amount of nuclear capacity added annually between 2000 and 2007 was, on average, 2,500 MW. This was six times less than wind power (13,300 MW per annum between 2000 and 2007). In 2007, newly constructed renewable energy power plants in Germany generated 13 TWh of electricity – as much as two large nuclear units.
For details see also the article about "nuclear phase out progressing"and its links.