According to one report, Proposed 150 MW Solar Plant Would Store 7 Hours
This storage is similar to the Andasol 1 plant in Spain. It certainly would not be sufficient for 24/7 operation at nominal 150 MW output by a fair bit.
The whole piece is based on a Fox News article. That by definition makes it unreliable. Quoting anonymous "security experts" is worthless and just citing the number of users signing on to Stuxnet security sites is hardly any better. I don't know if the Iranians have this thing under control or not and in all likelihood neither does Fox News.
While you luxuriate in your little cocoon of ideologically induced ignorance, others might like to consider some of the facts:
1. Iran as a signatory to the NPT has a right to run nuclear power plants. Even Hilary Clinton doesn't object to the Bashehr facility.
2. Bushehr facility is a Russian VVER pressurized water reactor. Russia is supplying the fuel and taking away the spent fuel. PWRs are very unsuited to producing weapons grade material. They must be shutdown for refueling. To produce PU239 uncontaminated with significant PU240, which is for all practical purposes inseparable from PU239, you need a short fuel cycle. The frequent lengthly shutdowns makes this an infeasible proposition. PU239 contaminated with significant amounts of PU240 is just not much use for weapons - it would fry the bomb makers with significant risk of premature detonation.
3. Iran certainly has an uranium enrichment program and this would give them a "break out capability" but whether Iran is actually producing or about to produce nuclear weapons is another matter entirely and not supported by any substantive evidence.
4. Whether Iran's nuclear program is "evil" is at most a matter of opinion. However, what would be construed as evil by most thinking people is the installation of the Shah by the CIA at the behest of British oil interests with the support of the British government. Rather unsurprisingly, nations tend to know their own history and mostly do believe in their right to self determination. Viewed against this historical backdrop, the most likely factor in triggering an Iranian weapons program would be a continuing and ramped up aggressive posture by the United States.
Solar thermal may be cheaper than PV but is still a lot more expensive than nuclear. The Arithmetic adds up to Nuclear
I'm not aware that there is any solar thermal plant in existence that has anything like the 90% capacity factor of nuclear. Andasol 1 and 2 in Spain as I understand it have 7 hours of storage. The most likely scenario for solar thermal is that it is backed up by gas in the immediate future.
For a perspective on the role of nuclear weapons in US foreign policy see here: Empire and Nuclear Weapons
In addition to using nuclear weapons, the US has also threatened to use nuclear weapons on more occasions than all other nations combined.
What are you smoking?
Many developing countries have grids where the lights go out on a regular basis because of a the lack of baseload generation capacity. They are in desperate need of baseload (coal, nuclear, gas or hydro) to stabilize their grids and meet demand. You cannot do this with PV - period. Nuclear is the least environmentally damaging option and the lowest cost low emission technology.
Notably Vietnam and Bangladesh have recently signed agreements with Russia to build two VVER nuclear power plants in each country. Vietnam looks to be about to conclude a contract with Japan for two more reactors.
It's not entirely true that there are no inhabited areas with high natural background levels. In fact much higher than the global average. These include Ramsar in Iran, Guarapari in Brazil, Kerala in India and others. The interesting thing is that epidemiological studies do not find adverse health effects on humans. Which certainly raises questions about the linear no threshold model which holds that there is no safe lower limit.
Further to that the US has threatened to use nuclear weapons on many occasions, probably more times that all other nations put together:
Indeed the world cannot sit on it's hands waiting fusion. Fission is a highly practical, safe and clean form of electricity generation. And Generation IV reactors make it sustainable and hugely reduce the waste issue. If you haven't seen it, there is a host of informative material and discussion on Barry Brook's blog. Brooke is Director of Climate Science at the University of Adelaide and one of the group including Hansen pushing for development and deployment of Gen III and Gen IV nuclear.
Not since 1950 eh? How about the carpet bombing of Cambodia. (A lot) More bombs on a defenseless tiny nation than were dropped by all allied forces in WWII. This vile campaign went under the name of Operation Menu.
The only reason this experience is not being repeated on the same scale is that the US lost the war on Vietnam and strategic and political thinking changed. Not that there has been a sudden outbreak of "humanity" in US foreign policy or military doctrine.
The following link has a table of reactors currently under construction (or with construction about to commence) in China.
It can be seen that the construction schedule is mostly in the range 3 -5 years per plant.
The capital costs of the new Chinese plants seem to be well under $2 billion per GWe capacity (avg ~ 1.5 billion). At this price they are probably cheaper than coal when the much lower fuel costs are taken into account. Notably some of these new plants are Generation III+ Westinghouse AP1000 reactors.
Yeah, right around the world meteorologists have been hard at it, repainting weather stations just to increase the surface temperature anomaly.
The issue of "well sited" or "poorly sited" stations, urban heat island effect, altitude of stations etc etc etc have been sliced and diced every which way in the published literature and have not been found to have any significant effect on the global temperature trend.
Not to mention the fact that the satellite temperature record shows about the same trend of global warming as do the surface temperature records.
Watts' surface station project has fallen flat on it's face and contributed a bit fat nothing to the understanding of climate.
Don't you be silly. Nearly all the raw temperature station data has been available for years. It's called the Global Historical Climatology Network. Go and look it up.
Anybody wanting to construct their own global or regional temperature records has been able to do so. In fact NASA GISS temperature record is constructed from this freely available dataset.
The fact that after years of whining, the skeptics never did so says one of two things - they are incompetent or for not hard to fathom reasons, unwilling. Far easier and suited their purposes better to defame working scientists.
In fact in the last 6-9 months, several science bloggers have done so, including (at last) one skeptic. And the results all are in close agreement with the published HAdCrut, GISS and NCDC temperature records.
So exactly what data is withheld that actually affect in any meaningful way the core conclusions of climate science?
THEGODDESSOFTHENETHASTWISTINGFINGERSANDHERVOICEISLIKEAJAVELININTHENIGHTDUDE
