Why hasn't America done more to promote green power?

Question

Nuclear power plants create huge amounts of energy from very little fuel, and the waste they produce, while admittedly dangerous, is localized and easy to take care of. You have the spent uranium rods, but you basically just need to lock those up and bury those, and wait for the radioactivity to die. Chernobyl was an unusual disaster; they didn't have any of the advanced safety systems we have today, and they overrode the automatic processes that were there.

We could even just clean up coal. Get rid of the carbon, mercury and other c**p. It would work pretty well.

We could eliminate our dependence on petroleum if we took a hint from Brazil.

Solar power needs some time to mature, but if we just used more effective appliances it would work quite well. Same for wind.

Petroleum is just so outdated and dirty. Despite the username, I'm a strong supporter of the free market. I understand how economics come in to play, but money doesn't mean much if the world's underwater.

Answer 1

You're right. One major problem with green energy sources is that people have a concept that it should be easy to go green in a big way. The truth is far from it. Here is an example of what would be needed to replace a nuke plant with a solar plant with the same output:

Fun With Solar & Wind

A group of companies are planning a 3,200 acre, 300MW solar farm in the New Mexico desert. 3,200 acres of solar to generate 300MW boils down to about 11 acres per MW. For Southern US we get the equivalent of about 6 hours of full sunshine every day due to seasonal sun angle and darkness. Central Australia gets about 5.5 - go figure. So, 6/24 being about ¼ of a day the average output needed is about 44 acres/MW to make up for dark periods if we want 24 hr operation. This way we generate 4x the amount of power we need while the sun is out and rely on batteries for remaining ¾ of the day when it is dark or at twilight. If we assume that charging and discharging batteries is about 80% efficient then we need about 55 acres for every MW we want to be supplied over 24 hours. So if we have 55 acres of solar we can generate an average of 1 MW/hr daily.

If a three unit nuclear plant generates 3,000MW (Palo Verde NPS = 3,800) then at 55 acres per MW we would need 165,000 acres to equal the production of a nuclear plant 24 hours a day. With 640 acres per square mile we would need about 258 square miles of solar. That would be a square about 16 miles on a side.

Now since a solar plant only works during daylight we will need batteries to be able to supply balanced power over a 24hr period. To supply battery power for 24 hours means we need a rack of batteries. Assuming 12v 104Ah (24hr) batteries we will need about 75 million batteries according to a handy dandy battery calculator I found on the net. If each battery, its housing, inverter, cables and access path takes up 3 square feet then we need about 225 million square feet of space for our batteries. That would be a square almost 3 miles on a side, or about 2,500 Wal-mart Super Centers. If you wanted to build a skyscraper for your caps you could store them in 50 Sears Towers.

Of course batteries only last 5 years so we would be replacing 15 million batteries a year or about 1 million per month. If we continue with this and assume each battery weights say 20 pounds and half of that is lead and half is acid then we are disposing 500,000 pounds of lead and 500,000 pounds of acid a month.

The 300MW plant listed at the beginning of this article is priced at $1.5B. Now we are going to build a 15,000,000,000watt plant (to get the equivalent of 3,000MW/hr/day in only 6 hr of full daylight) and using that as our yardstick we can guess our plant would cost about $50B. By comparison it costs about $6B to build a nuke and about $300M to decommission. So we could build and decommission 8 nuclear plants for the same price it would cost us to build one solar plant. Are we having fun yet?

A casual survey of 4 wind farms on the net finds that the average maximum capacity of a wind farm is about 70acres/MW but that the average wind generator produces only about 33% of its capacity over time. This means the actual average output of a wind farm is about 210acre/MW.

To replace our typical nuclear power plant at 210 acre/MW it would take 630,000 acres of wind farm. With 640 acres per square mile we would need about a thousand square miles of wind or a square 31 miles on a side with at least 1/3 of the units spinning on average. We would still need a battery storage facility since the wind tends to blow in winter when you don’t need the power and does not blow in the heat of summer when you do need it.

The only error I made in these calc's is that I assumed car batteries rather than industrial batteries but the basic concept is still sound.

Answer 2

Wow!  You have keen insight as to all the energy sources and what they do.  I commend you since you seem to be an exceptionally bright light on this forum.  

Here's my input....

Nuclear energy is where most want to go now, but as you've mentioned, it has distatrous consequences.  Just look at the difficulty having to deal with other countries who have nuclear capability, and that alone makes this a difficult road to travel.  Burying it's waste, also highly contaminating and probably will cause many cancers we hear about.  

Coal is getting some play now, some companies can use it with little environmental impact...but not as effective as other energy sources.

Brazil is blessed with huge sugar cane resourses which converts to ethanol rather easily, so they have 85% ethanol in their petroleum prducts.  America has corn instead, not a viable source for converting to ethanol.  

Solar power...highly expensive and not capable of attracting many interested consumers presently.

(As you can see, many drawbacks to these other energy forms)

Oil.  Once drove many engines which built the biggest industrialized nations of the world...now slowly heading toward extinction.  Dirty.  Yes.  Causes world conflicts over those countries rich in it's resources vs. those with little or no oil reserves.  Contaminates and pollutes our environment...just look at what the Exxon Valdez did to Alaska back in 1989.  (additional fact....Exxon was fined something like two billion dollars for polluting the Alaskan Bay....today Exxon/Mobil is the richest American based corporation, rolling out profits of some forty billion dollars per year....who owns our politicians?  Don't you think that Exxon/Mobil should be called to task over environmental issues now?  There are many other large corporations with history of polluting...causing cancer in many people)

Iraq would be a big oil producer if not for this turmoil that has no immediate end in sight.  

As oil gets phased out, and other alternative sources get more attention...bear in mind one important fact.

Oil usage over some one hundred and thirty years time, has caused irrevocable damage to the planet.

And your statement is right on target...as water envelopes our globe...more and more...where will all the overpopulated areas move to?  

The pendulum has shifted toward a new world emerging, fighting hard to get other sources of energy but reeling from the use of oil products over many years which changed earth...forever.

This is a gigantic economic/environmental issue of major importance...and mankind fails miserably in coming to agreements among nations as to what course of immediate action should be implemented and followed through.

The free market system just wants to follow old, tried and true energy production...and neglects what it's repercussions will produce.

I can only hint at what earth will look like in twenty years time from now....Less coastal areas inhabitable...other sources of energy becoming highly unafordable.  Oil reserves near depletion....Unless agreements get serious attention...there is every likelihood that the changing earth weather patterns will alter severly the way humans will live and have to adjust.  

Could be a strange scenerio about to unfold.

If the rising stock markets offer any glimmer of hope, there could be newer technologies which may have benefical effects on earth....in desperate need of saving at this point in time.  

I'm praying that capitalism has solutions to this energy problem.

Answer 3

Good question.  The answer is because we don't want to.  We say we do, but we don't.  I live in LA.  People keep driving their sporty gas guzzling vehicles, even though we are screaming the loudest about global warming.  The car pool lanes are still relatively empty.

Hollywood is responsible for scaring the be-Jesus out of all of us with the movie, "The China syndrome."  Then the teachers of the 80s scared the you know what out of the students of the 80's and no new nuclear plants have been built.  

It goes on and on.  

Every year, there is a competition that takes place, I believe, in Australia.  All the major care companies participate.  It is a contest for building the fastest alternative energy car.  GM has won it a couple times, so has BMW.  The car goes triple digits, but the public does not want it.  They want horse power.

Wind mills are going up everywhere around the country, except in the politicians' back yards (just ask the Kennedys).  They don't do a ton anyway, but I guess they help.

Does that help?

Answer 4

One thing: Oil Industries want MONEY. Too many times have I read about stories of Oil Industry paying loads of cash to stop development of alternative fuel energy. And it may not necessarily be the Industry but the people who run them. There are individuals who are so wound up about making money that they do not care about the consequences of their actions.

Another thing: Mass society still will not leave their petrohog vehicles. Everyday I ride my bike to school and watch as large SUV's, trucks, and Hummers drive by. I'm thinking, you don't even need to be driving that thing. It starts with mass societal awareness and then we go from there.

Answer 5

because it exorbitantly expensive, impractical, and impossible based on current technology. did u know that to cover current energy requirements in the usa. you'd need solar panels covering a shape the size of Massachusetts? green power technology has not advanced far enough, and we are too bust flaunting a nonexistent global climate change than actually DO anything. the truth is america doesnt want to reduce its dependency. american industry loves making billions a year.

however, the solution lies in the complementary usage of all these technologies... wind, geothermal, tidal, solar, nuclear. and then u can achieve less dependency.

btw, nuclear has many downsides... the main concern being where the h**l do you put these barrels of irradiated and fissionable materials?

Answer 6

not everyone has relized how important it is i guess.

Answer 7

Because China, Noth Korea, India, Russia and many other countries dont.  If they dont want to worry about it why should we.  The small amount of people in this country would not make a world of difference.  All this global warming non-sense is driving this country bankrupt as CEO's get cheap slave labor over seas as well as they do not have the enviromental laws we do here.

Answer 8

Democrats support envirmentalist so when half of congress adn the house does not want to support Nuclear energy its never going to happen.

Answer 9

Power source for power source, I'll take the fossil variety. It doesn't have the long lived after affects of nuclear energy. You really do not have the knowledge that you believe that you have to argue in favor of nuclear energy. There is no truly safe way, yet, to just bury and forget it for spent nuclear fuel rods. One of the prime projects at the Savannah River Project is to find a way of safely entombing nuclear fuel rods. They haven't met with success yet. Just bury the stuff is an unsafe pipe dream.

Oil can be a very clean energy source. It is the way that it is used that creates many of the problems it has. In an open, and controlled burning system, the emissions that plague the cars is reduced dramatically. The problem is, the oil and automotive industry just doesn't want to make the changes. There are ways to make engines that pollute a whole lot less, it just isn't as profitable, and profit is the main driving force in decisions that are made.

Coal can be burned in Fluidized Bed burners such that the pollution level is just about zero. The trick is to use limestone as part of the fuel mix which locks up the pollutants into a stable material that can be used for land fill. While this is known, how many coal systems are using this technology. Like it or not, it all boils down to money, and what is profitable. Industry leaders only care about profit and there are laws that actually drive that requirement to make money. If the environment suffers, oh well, the needs of the stock holders comes first. If "you" or mom and dad, or anyone else are stockholders, then a profit is expected and the law requires that as best is possible, a profit is to be made. Once we make the environment so sick we can't live in it, then there will be companies to take care of that, and a profit must be made, by law, as well.

The people must do for themselves to make a difference, and that is the only way that it will really happen.