What is Better? nuclear energy, Solar power or coal?

Question

What is Better? nuclear energy, Solar power or coal?

Answer 1

Nuclear - unlimited resource, clean energy but nuclear waste is a problem.

Solar - waste free but limited to daylight and restricted size of solar cells

Coal - limited resources as it is a fossil fuel, pollution problems

Best long term source of energy is nuclear as long as the waste disposal problems can be addressed.

Answer 2

solar is better for the environment

  

Answer 3

solar

Answer 4

solar is better and safer

nuclear is dangerous

coal is bad for the environment

Answer 5

Solar because its energy from the sun

not nuclear energy cause it causes air pollution and not coal cause it clears the land but its really good for australia cause we import it to china and they make lots of stuff there

Answer 6

nuclear its cleaner

Answer 7

Nuclear. Even though there has been accidents in the past it is still the most effective and environmentally friendly way of producing power.  

Some would also argue that Solar power is all of the above, but it doesn't produce power  24 hours a day, and only on sunny days it is completely efficient.  

Coal is not renewable so is not environmentally friendly at all, actually the complete opposite

Hope this helps

oxoxo

Answer 8

After reading all the answers people have given you, and a majority have chosen nuclear, i would like to know why nuclear?

Look at it on this side: indeed nuclear is better, giving off more energy; which is a particularly good choice considering our current and possible future demands for energy. however, the issue with nuclear power is where to put the waste! indeed they are concealing it underground, but is it really safe to just bury the problems and let the future generation deal with whatever might happen?

also, there is a chance of nuclear radiation or explosion, like what had happened with Chernobyl in the Soviet Union, or Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. And not to mention possible terrorist attacks. It can happen!

Aside from human dangers, there's the environmental dangers as i have mentioned above: what to do with nuclear waste?? i guess its all a matter of your morals: does discarding the waste temporarily rid us from environmental problems, and is it moral to do so?

for me, my personal choice would be solar power or other renewable sources. we have been given these sources for free! why use up our resources to create something so dangerous to our health, and then spend another billion dollars to clean it up!!  

Answer 9

Solar Power, is the best, nuclear energy is too much of a risk in many ways. The sun is free and provides massive amounts of energy. Solar energy can be stored and new technologies that produce higher efficiency are being developed everyday. If we spent more time trying to develop solar energy instead of finding new ways to damage the environment we might be able to find a solution to our energy problems. Drilling for oil causes damage, just because we can, doesn't mean we should. Minimal damage, which I don't believe, is still damage.  

Answer 10

Nuclear Energy is the best by far of the current technologies, and new design and builds of reactors factor in human error and have inherent safety features that prevents another Chernobyl, whether by accident or deliberately. Some new technologies, like the Pebble bed reactors are also designed to run hot, which will allow enough energy to split water, to create hydrogen, which might be used in a new generation of cars. Also with technology the way they are Nuclear waste can be reprocessed and used again, any wastes are on the levels of hundreds of years and not thousands and legislation requires decommissioning in mind before even the first brick is thought about, with land being reclaimed in about 150 years instead of 100's of thousands of years. Lessons have been learnt from the past.

Solar Power technology is increasing in efficiency. The most recent discovery is that a single sheet of a material put in any window will take energy from the sun and direct it to the sides of the window where you can harness the energy, thus reducing energy requirements from the network. This technology still has a way to go but if you imagine buildings like skyscrapers in big cities, which are a glass haven big savings and green kudos can be obtained.

Coal is the least green of these three technologies and are a non-renewable resource, although technologies of today have allowed for minimisation of the environmental effects you simply can't get away from the fact that these are remnant of ancient forests, which locked away carbon millions of years ago.

Answer 11

Nuclear is best because its available rain or shine, 24 x 7 and doesn't emit pollution or greenhouse gases during normal operation like coal does.

Answer 12

solar power because it is a clean renewable resource

Answer 13

Solar power does not causes any pollution!

Answer 14

Nuclear is the best, everything else is a distant second.  That's why they use nuclear on long distant space crafts, ships and submarines.

Answer 15

nuclear

Answer 16

Solar power actually. Because it is natural power. It does not require burning or anything.

Answer 17

Nuclear power is statistically safer than pretty much everything else out there along with being clean and proven to be able to run an entire country's electricity grid, something you can't say about wind or solar.

Solar power lacks reliability so without improvements in energy storage technologies it can't be truly clean (since it requires fossil fuel backup at night) but it should be reliable enough to contribute towards peak load during the day (whether it can do it economically is another matter).  No one has ever run an entire country on solar power alone or even solar in combination with wind and without improved energy storage it is likely impossible to do.  Of course putting the solar panels in space and then beaming the power down in the form of microwaves would solve that problem and make solar very viable but we're a few decades away from having the space infrastructure needed to do that.

Coal is pretty close to the worst power source possible, it's amazing that there are people who actually prefer it to nuclear.  We need to get rid of coal as quickly as we can.

In summary, if you want clean power you want nuclear power.

Answer 18

If you're asking which is better for the planet, it's definitely solar power because it is a renewable energy. Renewable energy comes from natural sources, like the sun, and it can be used over and over again at any time.

You can read more about solar power here:

http://www.greenstudentu.com/Solar_Energ...

Nuclear energy:

http://www.greenstudentu.com/Nuclear_Ene...

Coal and other fossil fuels:

http://www.greenstudentu.com/Fossil_Fuel...

Answer 19

I like Solar and Coal

Answer 20

coal has more energy (likemore of it) then the rest but solar is the way of the furture

Answer 21

Space based solar is the best all around answer but it needs to be supplemented by nuclear for more reasons than I can answer here. Problem is when he was president Jimmy Carter at the prompting of the big oil companies put in place a series of presidential decrees that banned space based solar and crippled nuclear to the point it became to expensive to use economically. One of these orders prevented recycling any nuclear material and forcing it to be stored forever until it rots away.

Yes nuclear fuel rods lose their power because a skin forms on them kind of like rust that lowers their efficiency. The rods can be sent through a recycling process that removes this nuclear rust and the rods becomes as good as when new. Then the rust can be collected for making new rods that are even more powerful than the original fuel rods were, this rust is called plutonium and can be either made into bombs or high power reactors. Right now we are using our fuel rods for only a short period and throwing them away.

What Jimmy Carter did with that presidential order would be like you buying precharged ni-cad batteries and no charger, using them once and throwing them away. His order makes about that much sense and so nuclear fuel rods that are good for a hundred thousand years if recycled properly are wastefully scrapped after 10 or 12 years of service when the plutonium skin lowers their efficiency a little. And his order on preventing space based power plants from being built through cutting back the space program makes even less sense when you realize that this country would be the worlds largest exporter of low cost electricity today. Instead we are the world’s largest importer of oil to produce very costly electricity instead, dumb, very dumb indeed. Thank you Jimmy Carter for the problems in the middle east, the boom and bust bubble economy, and the energy crisis that is breaking our economic backs.

Answer 22

solar power

Answer 23

Nuclear  

Answer 24

Solar Power certainly,

Nuclear Energy : Nuclear Energy is energy due to the splitting (fission) or merging together (fusion) of the nuclei of atom(s). The conversion of nuclear mass to energy is consistent with the mass-energy equivalence formula ΔE = Δm.c², in which ΔE = energy release, Δm = mass defect, and c = the speed of light in a vacuum (a physical constant). Nuclear energy was first discovered by French physicist Henri Becquerel in 1896, when he found that photographic plates stored in the dark near uranium were blackened like X-ray plates, which had been just recently discovered at the time 1895.[1]

Nuclear chemistry can be used as a form of alchemy to turn lead into gold or change any atom to any other atom (albeit through many steps).[2] Radionuclide (radioisotope) production often involves irradiation of another isotope (or more precisely a nuclide), with alpha particles, beta particles, or gamma rays. Iron has the highest binding energy per nucleon of any atom. If an atom of lower average binding energy is changed into an atom of higher average binding energy, energy is given off. The chart shows that fusion of hydrogen, the combination to form heavier atoms, releases energy, as does fission of uranium, the breaking up of a larger nucleus into smaller parts. Stability varies between isotopes: the isotope U-235 is much less stable than the more common U-238.

PROBLEM : Radition

Thermal Energy

In thermal physics, thermal energy is the energy portion of a system that increases with its temperature. In a loose sense, "thermal energy" is a term used to describe the energy content of a system related to heating effects, e.g. temperature increase or decrease. In thermodynamics, thermal energy is the internal energy present in a system in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium by virtue of its temperature.[1] The term is not widely used, however, in a rigorous sense, owing to the result that the phrase "thermal (heat) energy" is counter-intuitive. That is, "thermal energy" can only be defined as any spontaneous flow of energy (energy in transit) from one object to another, caused by a difference in temperature between two objects; thus, an object cannot possess "heat".[2] This is explained by the second law of thermodynamics. Hence, by extrapolation, it is difficult to define quantities of heat energy (thermal energy).

PROBLEM : It is not a renewable source of energy.

Hope it helps

Answer 25

nuclear is good if you want to run the risk of having something like  Chernobyl happening again, it also as lots of dirty waste. but it's cleaner than coal. solar would be good but it is to inefficient at the moment to become a effective power supply on a large scale. The best form of power i think is Geothermal using the heat of the earth to heat water to turn the turbines, Greenland likes it.  

Answer 26

nuclear is not a renewable, clean technology - the problems of waste and accidents aside, to run a nuclear reactor you need fuel. even at our current rate of consumption i.e assuming we don't build anymore reactors,  the amount of high quality ore is rapidly decreasing. within 10 years, the carbon pollution from a nuclear reactor will be equivalent to a gas fired plant, as we burn more fossil fuels getting at the ore and then refining it

Answer 27

Solar.

Answer 28

Solar energy because its clean produce zero pollution on the other hand nuclear and coal energy provide large amount of energy but at the same time while creating these energies  Co2 is releases  in area which creates more pollution Solar is unending renewable energy where as other tow will be disappear in 15 to 20 years .