Nuclear vs. Solar vs Wind. Who is mightier?

[Kenneth Baker]

Nuclear Power seems a very viable option to replace fossil fuels. But I think that Nuclear power poses a very real threat to our existence. What if the nuclear power plant falls into the hands of terrorists?The probability of this is very low but we can't totally wash our hands off.Also how to dispose off the nuclear waste and what about proliferation secure and safe?Wind energy can not be used in the non-windy areas. The only other option seems to be solar which is abundant in almost every part of the world. If we can produce some really cheap solar cells that would solve the problem. Today solar power represents a small fraction of energy production in USA. Just imagine that installing solar panels and not having to pay energy bills . I am myself thinking about going the solar energy way.I visited a website . . . [moderator: gratuitous plug to commercial site removed] to get some information. This is a pretty good site to get started. Comments are invited

[Russ Bailey]

@Kenneth - The type of power with the best safety record over the past 50 years? Nuclear

Your scare tactics are cute but not going to convince anyone not already convinced.

[Allan Adams]

Nuclear is not renewable, so forget that. I live in the shadow of a nuclear reactor and have nothing against them nor the money it brings into my county. However, they are not the answer. The answer is not JUST renewable. We need to learn to manage our usage. What is an amp? What is a watt? I grew up when power was cheap and seemingly plentiful and we had little reason to discern between amp and watt, yet even with tiny utility bills my parents ragged on us about left on lights. Using encapsulated solar wakes one up. I run everything from mills to 8 cfm at 90 psi air compressors on solar. I have learned well what an amp is and what a watt is and how to squeeze it out of sunshine ~ accounting for every ray. Wind is promising for the increased amperage. The Neosho River nearby can produce that at least. BATTERIES! Give me more and better batteries! Until then... SOLAR. We are getting there. It is just that so few know it.

[Steven Fahey]

This isn't a soapbox.
Please don't come just to preach your opinions about the world.
Technical or otherwise, a forum like this is only going to welcome new menbers if the ones we have don't preach or make judgements.

Industrial scale nuclear can produce 100's of megawatts non-stop, pennies per kWhr, at a price of dozens of acres of land for the plant, and 100 acres of land at the mine. Health costs are unmeasurable at the power plant, unless you count what they spend on protection and prevention, all of which seems to work. Operating costs are large due to the complexity of triplicate safety systems. Canada is still only half-way up the nuclear power learning curve. Countries ahead of us are only slightly farther. Health effects on the miners, tailings, water table, and site clean-up are issues that are usually ignored with respect to nuclear power. The earth has enough uranium to power human society for about 100-500 years - estimates vary depending on how much growth you consider.

Solar power can produce a megawatt or 10's of MW, at 10's of cents per kWhr, but would consume hundreds of acreas of land to do so. Operating costs are negligible, but the output is unpredictable and cannot supply industry without other supplies available. Raw materials are pretty cheap, also mined, not particularly toxic. Producing solar panels is labour-intensive, slow, but there are automatic production techniques that may help in the future. repeat: in the future. Solar power could power all of human society today, but it would be pretty shady - everywhere, and now where will we grow all our food?

Wind farms can produce 10's or 100's of MW, at 10's of cents per kWhr, but it's even more capricious than solar. The farm covers lots of land, but at least something else can be done with it around the towers, such as agriculture. Making WT's doesn't have to be technologically complex, but advantage goes to those who make use of modern technology. Some raw materials are rare and toxic and must be mined (such as permanent magnets, if the WT uses them). WT's don't need much attention once they're online, but they wear out and require maintenance and when things go wrong it's pretty spectacular. You could cover the earth with enough WT's to power all of human energy needs today, but most would be out at sea and delivering all the power back to the land would eliminate all advantage.

SO

How someone can categorically choose one of these over the other is beyond me. Each belongs in the world, each has + and - points, each can do better in one part of the world than others.

[Allan Adams]

It is little wonder this forum is so inactive. You are all more inclined to complain about the style of communication we who invent in the field tend to than you are to come up with solutions yourself. There is so little said here and never with any spirit. I am not preaching. I live in the shadow of a nuclear reactor, Wolf Creek, and benefit from it. There is far more individuals can do personally other than politically support one technology or another. I am an inventor. I have parts in the reactor here and in Oklahoma. I am more personally excited about my encapsulated solar "contraptions" than I am those contributions to nuclear or the many inventions I have in the field in support of oil exploration. I convey that excitement. It does not mean that I do not see the place for oil, coal, or nuclear. I see that a greater emphasis on renewables can mean less of this attitude one hears in the national news lately that a certain amount of disaster is necessary to achieving energy independence. I also value complete independence from all power grids and all intrusive and abusive corporate power. That is my personal view that leads to my inventions. It is not something I recommend others share. It is something I share as an element of my inventiveness.

[Allan Adams]

I do not recommend industrial scale solar. I recommend "encapsulated solar" and can generate considerable income from no larger an installation than the one shown at the end of this photo shoot:

http://epiphany3.com/wh1.html

I do similar installations to run oil well pumps, water well pumps, chemical pumps, and a variety of small shops.

Bigger is not always better. Bigger is what we have in the Gulf of Mexico right now. The world presently runs on what is sometimes referred to as an open loop production/consumption model. It is based on extensive waste and planned obsolescence. It is possible to build closed loop production/consumption cottage industries that feed off the waste and use renewable energy to do so. It is also possible to eliminate obsolescence with materials like Riton that was rejected by Echlin for no other reason than it would destroy the automotive after market because parts made of Riton NEVER wear out. As an inventor I have been in those board rooms when our entire world reality, safety, and health was sold out for profit.

[Allan Adams]

Where did this notion come from that a forum is not a soapbox? You have email... that is not a soapbox. You have groups... not a soapbox. A forum is that on the web which is most like a soapbox where participants take turns sharing their viewpoint. A forum is, indeed, a soapbox when you get past making soapboxes the villain. A soapbox can be a wonderful thing and are the heart of a strong democracy. The are instrumental in engineering team dynamics. One should not attempt to perpetually dominate that position, but one should certainly attempt a strong enough showing to have meaningful input. Other than corporate kowtowing, there is precious little meaningful input here. If there were, there would be a lot more said about the literally millions of thermoelectric assemblies being discarded in good condition in small coolers that are prime for recycling and ideal for a number of applications in renewable energy.

These cooling units can be easily wired into computers to supper cool them. They can be used to modify inverters, converters, motors, compressors, and many other devices to increase their efficiency. They come with fans and sinks preassembled and are free in countless numbers on any university campus at the end of each semester. They are common and cheap at yard sales.

The cells themselves can even be used to generate power if assembled between the metal walls of typical obsolete surplus telephone data tape storage hut, available very cheap (got mine for free). One merely reverse wires them with diodes to prevent back charging and they work much like a solar cell and will boost the needed amperage to batteries during the coldest weather. The greater the heated inner metal layer to cold outer metal layer the more current the sink/cell assemblies produce (I remove the fans for this function).

If more were treating these forums like soap boxes just maybe we could be discussing real solutions and concepts rather than being apologists for huge corporations that are doing just fine ripping us all off without our help. The big boys are not going to go away. They will be sucking our bones after they are done with our bodies. The real solutions lie in cottage industries that leach up some of the waste ~ some of the pollution meant only to profit the heartless legions ~ and turn it to tribal profit. It is so sweet that those too rich to make sense are going to get richer still on GREEN technology. What is more important is that what is GREENEST of all is a return to small ~ tribal manufacturing and energy production. It took one man and the concept of bit on/bit off to create Microsoft.

[Julian Egelstaff]

I think the original question of the post is very interesting, and a point that has to be definitively addressed, if solar power supporters are to make their case to change the status quo.

On my own website, I have a couple pages about comparing solar to other energy sources, including an attempt at a levelized energy cost comparison between Darlington, the Portlands Energy Centre, Waldpolenz Solar Park, and our own rooftop array. Some of the figures are guesses, but I was able to find a lot of real information online.

http://www.yourturn.ca/solar/solar-power/how-does-solar-power-compare-to-other-energy-sources/

Comments on that comparison would be very welcome, especially if anyone has more accurate numbers they can share, with a source.

The "hidden" cost of centralized production is the giant distribution grid, which no one factors into the cost comparisons. Just like the cost of roadways is part of the cost of cars, the grid is part of the cost of central plants, especially giant ones like Darlington. The beautiful thing about solar is that it is already "distributed" everywhere for us by the sun.

I think the real trump card in all this is grid-based storage. When the grid can level out the peaks in supply that are separate from the peaks in demand, then we'll really have a revolution on our hands....related to that, if the efficiencies of panels can double from where they are, and the cost of efficient batteries goes down, non-grid tied local generation becomes a real possibility for pretty much everywhere. The government should subsidize that with the money they save by not having to create/maintain a distribution grid.

--Julian
__________________
I'm Solar Powered in Toronto (http://www.yourturn.ca/solar/)

[Russ Bailey]

Hi Julian, I expect the grid will be with us for many years to come and will become even more important rather than less.

Until the storage issue is resolved both solar and wind are not a large scale answer - an individual answer yes very much so.

Many parties are at work on the storage problem at this time and megabucks are being dumped into it. Twenty years from now it may be coming into being.

The gas turbine you use for cost is considered at a capacity factor (40%) used for rolling reserves - which is very low. A combined cycle plant for continuos generation would be far higher than that.

For a nuclear power station 75% - most places would sack the manager for such a low number.

You cooked the books pretty strongly to make even the case that you did. No maintenance on solar for 20 years. No manpower at all?

Even at that the power costs are not attractive for your array or the German unit.

[Julian Egelstaff]

Hello, thanks for checking out the site.

I agree, the grid isn't going away. I think we should factor in the build and maintenance costs of the grid somehow in a levelized energy cost analysis, to do a proper comparison to local, off-grid generation. But I have no idea how to factor that in.

The 40% capacity factor for Portlands is a figure that Portlands has published themselves. See this link: http://www.portlandsenergycentre.com/newsroom-faq.html#4 It was a stipulation from the beginning of the Portlands project that the plant would not run in a baseload configuration, due to local air quality concerns.

I agree, in power supply systems where there are not other baseload sources, a combined cycle plant would run more than 40% of the time.

80% seems to be an accepted general figure for the capacity factor of baseload sources. For example, it is used in this comparison on the Canadian Nuclear FAQ website: http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/cnf_sectionC.htm

I believe that the 80% figure, maybe higher, is true for reactors, while they are in general service. But since a 20 year comparison must consider the entire plant over 20 years, I think a slight reduction due to the downtime when the reactors are completely not operating for months or years at a time, is quite reasonable. It's no secret that Ontario's reactors have had some costly, and lengthy, restart procedures from time to time. For example, recently all of Pickering has been offline, all eight reactors. You have to figure that time into an overall capacity factor for the plant, even if their capacity factor during time-in-operation is 80% or higher.

For a residential array, there is literally no maintenance except for possible inverter replacement one time. The rest of the system is under warranty and there are many examples of systems working for that length of time with no maintenance costs, that is one of the beautiful things about the technology.

At the recent Canadian-German Chamber of Commerce solar power conference in Toronto, I had the pleasure of speaking with some people from the company that built the racking system for the Waldpolenz solar park. They said the park has no dedicated staff and is instead remotely monitored. Perhaps the staff figure in my analysis could be increased a bit, but I take it as a fact that there could not be an average of more than a few full time equivalents dedicated to the operations of the park year round for 20 years.

If you download the spreadsheet and adjust the numbers, you'll see that the main factor affecting levelized energy cost for a large system like Waldpolenz (or any solar system really) is the initial build costs. So a few extra staff doesn't fundamentally change the picture.

For gas turbine, the fuel cost seems to be the pain point. For nuclear, it's a combination of build cost and staff/maintenance, but the fuel is a marginal cost.

If I had been cooking the books, the figures for the gas turbine and Waldpolenz would be much closer. What I'm trying to do is put some real, useful information out there so people can understand the current landscape and not be under any illusions...and also know what the target is.

If people have hard data for the annual salary costs and maintenance costs for Portlands or Darlington that they can share, that would be very useful.

--Julian

[Julian Egelstaff]

Another factor I'd love to know more about....interest costs. Was the $14 billion for Darlington paid for by cash that Ontario Hyydro had in the bank? Or was it debt financed? And if so, does that $14 billion include the cost of the debt? Or is that just the capital costs? The interest on $14 billion would wreak some havoc on the levelized energy cost.

What I know for sure: all of us in Ontario will continue to pay the "Ontario Hydro debt retirement charge" until 2018 at least.

When you try to look at it globally, including debt, including distribution costs, and on and on and on...I wonder if really accurate levelized cost analysis is even possible. But it can at least provide some useful general information.

--Julian

[Russ Bailey]

Hi Julian,

I like your site - well done and lots of good stuff. Usually there are many ways to look at a situation - sometimes we use different ones depending on where we are coming from.

Gas plant capacity factor - the 40% is the accepted number for open cycle reserve. On line combined cycle beat that by a substantial margin - don't remember the number off hand but maybe İ can find it.

Nuclear plant capacity factor - I understand where you are comimg from but the number I am accustomed to is higher.

Glad you posted your URL - I can learn there (as well as being a bit of a nuisance at times)!

Regards,
Russ

[Russ Bailey]

Unless one has access to utility and government records to see what all went where I doubt it is really possible to make an accurate levelized cost.

You see how many versions there are for ethanol - even among guys who are not supporters of either side. No one can say where you start and stop counting for one thing. No can agree on what is a subsidy and what is not.

[Rob Beckers]

There was a book I read about a year ago, that compared various sources of electricity. The author was an economist if I remember correctly, he seemed to know what he was doing; the essence of it was that nuclear power is not cheap by any measure and actually right up there with PV in terms of cost. The book also compared other sources, such as coal, natural gas etc, it was not just about nuclear or renewables. Unfortunately the title escapes me, and an Amazon search hasn't brought it back. I got it through my local library (their loan history doesn't go back far enough, so I can't see there either what the title was).

There is a statement that gets thrown around, and I don't know how accurate it is, that there is not a single nuclear plant in existence that actually made any money from a commercial perspective. Almost all of them are subsidized, either outright, or indirectly through cheap loans, grants or debt that is forgiven, rate payer subsidies (isn't our Ontario "debt retirement charge" largely to pay for a nuclear plant?) etc. Then there is indirect cost that has not even been figured in yet, such as the cost of storing spent fuel (for which there is no solution yet), the environmental cost of uranium mining and processing etc.

Given that history I'm less-than-enthusiastic to repeat history with more nuclear plants...

-RoB-

[Julian Egelstaff]

That sounds like an excellent book. I'll have to look around for something along those lines and post some titles in here to see if it rings a bell.

The Debt Retirement Charge is about half for Darlington, and I don't know what the other half was...accumulated debt from other sources...Pickering? Mismanagement? Over $38 billion in total! We'll be paying it till at least 2018. I've added some info about this to the levelized energy cost page on my site, just today coincidentally. And to think between 1998 and 2002 they buried this cost in fees on your bill, it wasn't a separate line item. Like I tell my kids...if you don't want to tell someone about something you've done, it's probably a sign that it was the wrong thing to do!

The worst part about it, is that OPG doesn't bear the burden of paying for this debt. Here, have a nuclear reactor, sell electricity to the grid, oh and by the way, we'll just take that debt you're carrying, from building the darn thing, and give it to someone else to pay off. It's having your cake and eating it too. If even a fraction of the nuclear subsidies went into renewables....don't get me started!

--Julian

[Colin McGonagill]

Just for the sake of adding fuel to the fire my vote is for Coal. :cheesy:

PS.Natural gas is about to explode. My dad is heavily involved in it and they have a 100 year supply on USA soil. He says they have so much they don't even know how to make money off of it. I dont know if you remember economics but just think if the supply graph was shifted all the way to the right.

[Dave Turpin]

Coal is how 75% of US power is made today.

I side with Nuclear because, well, I'm a Nuclear Engineer. But I also believe the real long-term solution is moving the power plants off of the earth and into space. Modern partially-enriched nuclear plants can only use about 10% of the potential power of the nuclear fuel. Why? Because it becomes unsafe. Partially-enriched Uranium is still 98% U-238, which becomes U-239 and decays to Pu-239 inside a reactor. Pu-239 is very unstable, so you can only operate a plant for a couple years between refueling, and all that partially spent fuel has to be buried. The Navy does a better job with "highly-enriched Uranium", and they can operate reactors for twenty years on their ships without refueling. But we don't want the highly enriched stuff getting in enemy hands, and it takes an incredible amount of energy to make it. The solution: Put the reactor in space, or on the moon. Then you can operate the partially-enriched reactor for 10 times as long. If it melts down nobody will care. Or, better yet, put solar panels in space where they wil be 5x as productive, and not take up any real estate.

In the end solar wins. We will eventually run out of fissile material, but we will never run out of silicon. The problem just comes down to who wants to spend the billions to put the first solar power plant in orbit?

[Dale Sheler]

Just for the sake of adding fuel to the fire my vote is for Coal. :cheesy:

PS.Natural gas is about to explode. My dad is heavily involved in it and they have a 100 year supply on USA soil. He says they have so much they don't even know how to make money off of it. I dont know if you remember economics but just think if the supply graph was shifted all the way to the right.

The last time I heard that, they built a lot of gas fired mid sized plants around here, the demand from these plants caused the price of gas to rise drastically, they basically went bankrupt and were sold to the large regional electrical utility for pennies on the dollar.
So they have a huge amount of gas, they dream up all kinds of stuff to do with it, cars, power plants, fuel cell electricity generation so the demand causes the price to skyrocket, then, with all these new uses, that 100 year supply turns out to be 15 years instead.

[Rob Beckers]

Reading through cost numbers per kWh for wholesale electricity a few weeks ago: Coal was cheapest, around 4 ct/kWh to make. The surprise was the next one up, wind power, ranging from 4 to 8 ct/kWh in cost (these are the large wind plants in suitable locations). Natural gas clocked in at around 6 ct/kWh. Nuclear ranged from 7 to 15 ct/kWh to produce. Unfortunately PV is still way up there, around 20 - 25 ct/kWh for a sunny place and large plant (think Nevada desert).

There are a few footnotes you should be aware of though. Nuclear power can only be used for base-loads. These are large plants that take a long time to start up or shut down. Base-load electricity is the 'cheap' kind, that on the wholesale market goes for less than a dime per kWh (in North America), usually much less. As such, most nuclear plants don't make a penny, they just slowly loose money. Now, I've also heard that nuclear plants were once the darling of the powers-that-be, and large subsidies were received by the utilities that built them, which is not included in the cost picture. Not included in that price either is the cost to dispose of nuclear waste, for now most of it is just stored on site. Governments choose to have us pay through taxes, instead of putting those things on our electricity bill. There would not be a discussion about nuclear today if we paid for the actual cost through electricity rates. If you want to talk worst-case scenarios: The cleanup of Chernobyl (which is still ongoing) has (conservatively) cost more than the value of all the electricity ever produced in the former Soviet Union.

In short, it looks to me that regardless of your environmental or political views on nuclear power, the economics are abysmal. Even in the past those numbers were understood, but decisions were taken based on strategic interest (and possibly lobbying), not economics. Building a nuclear plant today won't do any better either: Regulatory requirements have made them more expensive, not cheaper.

Now, I can see the need to get off greenhouse gas producing plants that run on fossil fuels. Maybe that requires nuclear, I simply don't have the information needed to understand what the alternatives are. It would be a smarter path to focus on renewables though and get those to the point of economically and technically viable as soon as we can.

Interestingly, PV is even today actually cost competitive at that 25 ct/kWh rate. PV is good at providing power during those times it is most needed, early afternoon in summer, when electricity on the wholesale markets goes at peak-load prices. Often well in excess of 25 ct/kWh (I've heard that 80 ct/kWh is not uncommon for peak-load). PV can not replace base-loads though, the sun doesn't shine at night. Either we have to find a better way to store energy, or make a globally interconnected grid (the sun is always shining somewhere on the planet).

-RoB-

[Julian Egelstaff]

Hi Rob,

Those PV numbers look way too high to me. I've done some research and estimating, and published the results on my website, as posted earlier: http://www.yourturn.ca/solar/solar-power/how-does-solar-power-compare-to-other-energy-sources/levelized-energy-cost-comparison/

A key thing in these comparisons is what the time horizon is. With solar having a huge up front cost, but then practically zero maintenance and up keep costs, and the panels having a 30 year+ lifetime...if you calculate the cost over 20 years, you're actually selling solar short.

Anyway, I'm deeply interested in this topic, it's a bedrock issue on which policy gets made. So if you could pass on your sources I'd love to look into them more.

Thanks!

--Julian

[Rob Beckers]

Julian, it's been a while, and I'm not sure where the numbers came from. I believe it was a Web article that compared technologies, in combination with a book I'd read that did the same. I've been trying to find back the title of the book, but no luck.

Your cost comparison is enlightening! I have a feeling though that there's quite a bit more to cost for traditional power plants than fuel and personal. For example, maintenance cost is likely horrendous for nuclear (with scheduled replacements of parts), then there's the cost of capital (the firms constructing plants probably didn't pay out-of-pocket for them) etc.

Large solar plants likely have ongoing cost as well; panels fail (if you have so many of them the statistics are against you), inverters fail. Agreed though that the time has definitely come for PV. Cost has come down enough that large installations in sunny locations can compete without subsidies. The issue to solve is storage, since PV can't be used for base-load at this time.

-RoB-

P.S. I had the pleasure to work on the specs for a 1.5MW solar plant here in Ottawa over the past days. Not sure if the customer will actually go ahead, but that would be a nice project to work on...

[Julian Egelstaff]

There's pretty much nothing to go on for the annual ongoing costs of a nuclear plant. But yes, it must be pretty huge, considering the billions in refits, nevermind the general maintenance on a facility that size. I guessed it at $100,000,000 annually, I think. $2 billion over 20 years? I doubt accurate figures are really known by anyone.

Plus there's the government subsidies, bailouts, overpayments....the list goes on. The book Electric Empire, out of print now, but available at the Toronto Public Library for instance, goes into great investigative detail about the boondoggles of the pre-Darlington era. At one point, the government of Ontario agreed to pay above market rates for uranium, for 10 years, and guaranteed it would buy more uranium than it would need during that time too. It's unimaginable how screwed up that business is.

Nevermind the carrying costs of the debt! Which conveniently for them, neither OPG nor Hydro One has to carry on their books. I've never seen a levelized cost comparison that tried to take financing into account though.

Anyway, if the true cost of nuclear is in the 20 cents a kwh range, then solar beats it hands down.

But yes, storage and handling baseload is the key issue. From an engineering perspective, nuclear is king for baseload. This is why I too believe storage systems are the holy grail of renewable energy. I'm convinced that today's panel efficiencies are enough. What we need is a way of dealing with the uneven supply, rather than generating more electricity at a single point in time.

For our house, with a small 3 kw array, over the course of a year, we produce electricity equal to about 50% of what we use. But the production curve totally does not match the usage curve. With the slightly more efficient panels of today, and a slightly larger array (our townhouse roof is pretty small), many houses could produce 100% of the electricity they need....if only they had a way of efficiently storing and using it.

We can feed the excess to the grid, and take electricity back from the grid when we need it, like a giant battery. But that's not really the same thing at all.

So who is working on storage? What are the promising technologies there?

--Julian

[Dave Turpin]

It is too expensive to try to store electricity in batteries. However, technology does exist to use electricity to convert atmospheric CO2 and H2O into C2H4: natural gas. A combination solar/gas-fired plant could then be used as baseload.

[Julian Egelstaff]

Batteries are certainly not the answer, but there are other electricity storage technologies. Hydrogen fuel cells are one example, though I think the "hydrogen economy" is hype and a lot of money is going to wrong way there. The EU is spending billions on the quest for a fusion reactor. If that money went into developing new storage technologies, we'd be a lot closer to solving the energy problem, than if they get a few seconds of sustained fusion reaction 20 years from now.

The question is, what are the alternatives...this is the frontier, of course it's not batteries, we have to be looking at the future, not the past.

--Julian

[Dave Turpin]

Aren't there people on here using the H2 side of an O2 generator to make fuel for a fuel cell? There are plenty of options already in existence. I remember seeing someone selling an O2 generator in the for sale section.

[Joe Blake]

This article in Gizmag

http://www.gizmag.com/liquid-air-energy-storage/18148/

makes interesting reading. It seems it's only designed for local use, to store excess generated power for use during periods of low power gen. It's certainly not as powerful as H2 for example, but at least we have a good handle on the storage and transportation of liquified air.

Might have an unexpected side benefit, in that on a really hot day one could slip down the local utility storage facility and get a refreshing blast of cool air.:bigsmile:

Joe

[Julian Egelstaff]

Thanks Joe, that's really fascinating!

--Julian

[Solar Expert]

Nuclear Power Advantages:

Fuel is inexpensive
Energy generation is the most concentrated source
Waste is more compact than any source
Extensive scientific basis for the cycle
Easy to transport as new fuel
No greenhouse or acid rain effects

Wind Power Advantages:

Wind is free if available. As it turns out, the US has many areas available.
Good source for periodic water pumping demands of farms as used earlier in 1900's
Generation and maintenance costs have decreased significantly. Wind is proving to be a reasonable cost renewable source.
Well suited to rural areas. Examples include Mid-Columbia areas of Oregon and Washington, western Minnesota, Atlantic Ocean off Cape Cod.

Solar Power (http://www.solar-panels-power-energy.com) Advantages:

Sunlight is free when available
Costs are dropping.

[Russ Bailey]

Hi 'Solar Expert' - Your post says nothing new and rehashes some green points that are true and some that are myths.

What is your point?

Russ

[Dave Turpin]

Nuclear fuel is FAR from inexpensive. Especially considering the zirconium cladding.

[Julian Egelstaff]

The environmental impact of mining and processing the uranium is fairly large as well. And you just have to look at Japan to know that having safety precautions that are good enough except once in a hundred years or so, is planning for failure at least once every hundred years. And considering the consequences of nuclear failures, you have to eliminate that risk, but reaching that level of certainty is prohibitively expensive.

It's just not worth the risk, or cost.

Let alone how Ontario overpaid in the 80s for uranium, and even at above market prices Ontario ended up buying tons more uranium than it needed, all because of bad deals underwritten by the government. The book Electric Empire tells the sad tale. And that's just the tip of the government overspending and bailout iceberg.

If just 10% of the government money wasted on nuclear was pumped into renewables, oh where would we be then. But the entrenched interests swirling around all that money are now intent on preserving the status quo.

--Julian

[SunFusion Energy]

Nuclear energy might be bringing us money, but what about our ecological concerns? We all know the consequences of radio active waste disposals or accidents of nuclear plants. For almost 3o years, no nuclear proposals have been submitted for this reason.:worried:

[Jack Martin]

I agree that nuclear power is harmful for our existence. But if we talk about the mightiness then nuclear powers is mightier than solar and wind. But if we talk about the low cost power then I will point the solar power.