What's Your Favorite Renewable Energy
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- By the end of 2026, how useful do you think agentic/multi-agent AI systems will actually be in your daily work or personal projects? Posted on March 11th, 2026 | 40 comments
All of the above? (Score:3, Insightful)
No one type works for every area. They need to work in tandem if they're ever going to replace coal.
Re:All of the above? (Score:5, Informative)
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Indeed, although most of those options really need to be augmented by hydrogen fuel cells or some other means of storing the extra for periods when the main source isn't cooperating.
Re:All of the above? (Score:5, Insightful)
...when the main source isn't cooperating.
Then treat your hamster better!
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when the main source isn't cooperating
That's what I like about hydro power. If you have a big enough body of water, it always cooperates. And you can even dial it back to save water when the power demand is lower.
Re:All of the above? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the problem with people.
Note, while I am singling you out, it is only due to yours being the first post of this type. That said...
ALL FORMS OF POWER GENERATION HAVE DRAWBACKS! ALL OF THEM!
However, if you look at Hydro power -- it is the least damaging of all! There is, in reality, NO permanant destruction of wildlife habitat. The local edge of the river simply moves, and in a matter of a decade, wildlife has fully re-established on the new front. Considering that once a dam is in place, it can be used forever (as, it can be rebuild if need be), that new edge of the river will stay environmentally friendly forever!
Further, fish runs? There is tons of work done to provide alternate paths for fish, and to re-spawn fish along new fish-runs.
One needs to look at the big picture. I've seen so many crazy enviromentalists that fight against hydro projects, then turn around -- and with astonishment on their face, get upset at nuclear! Or COAL FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!
I'm sorry, but everyone that cries out against hydro needs to be bitch slapped and thrown in a cell for 1000 years. It is the most environmentally friendly method of power generation available. People need to stop finding fault with every method of power generation. People need to shut up about conserving power (my Grandma, at 86, was convinced that she needed to live in 100F high humidty heat, because if she didn't, all the power she used for the air conditioner would be the end of everything!).
Frankly, Northern Canada should have 1000s of Hydro projects on smaller rivers, which then convert the power to H2, and ship it south via pipes...
Won't happen though -- the bleeding hearts will have us using Nuclear instead! THANK YOU ENVIRONMENTALISTS!
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http://otherpower.com/hamster.html [otherpower.com]
Re:All of the above? (Score:5, Informative)
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I thought that heat is also thanks to tidal forces. For example the volcanic activity in Jupiter's moon Io is caused by tidal forces. Or is that negligible in case of the Earth.
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gravity cannot produce energy in any fashion
I ask you, how do rocky planets become 'round'? Once there is sufficient gravity, it overcomes the bonds of the rock molecules and breaks them into a nice round(ish) shape.
;-) As you noted heat is a byproduct of pressure. So gravity causes immense pressure in the middle of a planet (5000 miles of rock will do that) which causes heat.
And the inevitable "In this house, we OBEY the laws of thermodynamics"
Re:All of the above? (Score:5, Insightful)
but gravity cannot produce energy in any fashion.
Since all you guys want to be so fucking anal, nothing can create energy. Law of conservation of energy. Even from nuclear fission and fusion... that is just a transformation, nothing is created. What we have and all we will ever have all comes from the big bang. So if you want to be so fucking picky, why don't you all complain that the "Big Bang" is not an option?
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All wrong.
Gravity can compress, making the existing heat density higher, resulting in higher temperatures. Heat content remains the same.
Gravity can pull items through Earth's atmosphere, eventually impacting. Kinetic energy is exchanged for thermal energy. Total heat content of the two-body system remains the same.
Gravity allows you to flush your toilet without the use of pumps, exchanging gravitational potential for kinetic energy. Heat content remains the same.
Gravity can pull one body toward another
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You're right... what would we do with out all of the hamsters!
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I'd rather have them work in parallel. If they are in tandem, failure in one will result in failure in all, like those old Christmas lights where one burnt out bulb causes the whole string to fail..
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Re:All of the above? (Score:5, Informative)
These are all the boring ones, lets invest all the solar panels and turbines money into a giant solar radiation antenna in deep space;
Great. When you solve the (not insurmountable) problems of launching such huge mass into geostationary orbit, construction and maintenance on something the order of hundreds of square kilometers in space, focused transmission over distances of 40Mm, you'll be a billionaire.
a Tesla style earths magnetic field dynamo
You can't extract energy from a static magnetic field. You can only extract energy from an object moving through a static magnetic field, in which case you are extracting it from the kinetic energy of the object itself.
or potential zero point energy generator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect [wikipedia.org] (if you had a way to capture the energy of such small movements).
Zero-point energy is the lowest possible potential. While not devoid of energy entirely, by definition, you cannot extract any further energy. There is no lower potential you can reduce it to. Think of the Casimir effect as a static pressure source. At the nanoscale, it will act as a force pushing two plates together. That force is a potential, which can be extracted as the plates move together. Once touching, they have reached the lowest possible potential, and energy must be applied back to the system to pull the plates apart.
Pseudoscience buzzwords do not make an energy source.
Hydrogen (Score:3)
Solar is swell, but it's not portable except as electricity, and batteries introduce all sorts of problems.
Hydrogen is easily produced by the same power sources that feed batteries, is unquestionably portable (and that technology will be viable in cars soon if not already), and when burned produces only water.
Go hydrogen!
Re:Hydrogen (Score:5, Informative)
Hydrogen in this context is pretty much just a battery right? It's not an energy 'source' (not a lot of naturally recurring hydrogen, and in that case it is not renewable).
So what's your favorite renewable source to produce the hydrogen? Why not use solar to split water?
Your comment seems to treat solar power and hydrogen as somehow exclusive, rather than as different parts of the energy production chain.
Re:Hydrogen (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not use solar to split water?
That's what he said.
"Hydrogen is easily produced by the same power sources that feed batteries"
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It burns clean all-right but has a lot of problems.
First of all to get any decent amount of energy stored you have to liquefy it, which is far from trivial for hydrogen. Low temperatures and very high pressures are involved.
Those problems of course are worse when trying to transport it.
It's destructive to your tank walls: hydrogen fatigue. The hydrogen molecules are so small they are happily absorbed by metal tanks walls, and weaken the metal in the process. Oh and don't think plastic liners will do: the
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First of all to get any decent amount of energy stored you have to liquefy it
The Hydrogen Fuel Cell cars already on the road would seem to disagree with you. Hydrogen fuel cells don't use liquid hydrogen.
It's destructive to your tank walls: hydrogen fatigue. The hydrogen molecules are so small they are happily absorbed by metal tanks walls, and weaken the metal in the process. Oh and don't think plastic liners will do: the hydrogen simply diffuses through.
This is only a chemical engineering issue and since we already have hydrogen tanks, it's been solved.
And all in all it's not that safe due to the storage conditions. If a tank fails (overheating, fatigue, external impact) the explosion will be devastating.
I assume you're talking about the liquid to gas explosion? See above, we don't need liquid hydrogen.
Finally to convert electrical energy into chemical energy into heat energy into motion energy is not exactly efficient, especially the heat conversion is very lossy. So other techniques for energy recovery are needed.
Solar + Water = hydrogen + oxygen -> hydrogen + oxygen = water + energy.
Where is the chemical energy? We aren't talking batteries here.
Likewise, heat? perhaps some he
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You still need a power input to create the hydrogen but that is done easily with solar, wind, etc. Hydrogen allows for intermittent sources to now supply energy at times when the intermittent source isn't available.
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Hydrogen power is crap all.
Whats the point of using hydrogen if you need to use the other sources to originate the power/energy.
It has one huge advantage over, say, battery powered EVs. It can be refilled quickly. The biggest problem, IMO, with current EVs (taken alone, leaving out where they get their charge) isn't just the limited range. It's the charging time as well. The current limited ranges of EVs would be a lot more acceptable if you could pop in to a station and recharge them in a matter of a couple minutes rather than hours.
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Hydrogen power is crap all.
Whats the point of using hydrogen if you need to use the other sources to originate the power/energy.
I need refined petroleum to power my car, and that hasn't prevented it from becoming quite popular these days. I guess you could argue that I'm not synthesizing my gasoline or diesel, but rather refining it from another form, but I'd argue that in both cases you take raw materials, run them through a process, and get your stored energy out. No one calls gasoline "crap" because vehicles don't burn crude oil.
wind mills (Score:2)
I'm dutch. I wanted to click "solar power", but my mouse went to "wind mills". Hmm.
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I'm Dutch too. I own a small plane. I invite you to fly with me across The Netherlands and look at the mess our current windmills make of the landscape. All that for a mere 4% of our power system. Now multiply by 25 and ask yourself if that's the environment you want to live in.
Ya want yer power, ya picks yer mess.
Biomass and tidal? (& wtf does "renewable" mea (Score:4, Insightful)
Burning [wikipedia.org] wood or crop waste is a renewable option.
Tidal power [wikipedia.org] is a perfectly good energy source as well.
I personally agree with one of the commentators above, all (or most) of the above should be an option. It depends on local conditions to a large degree. In the northern and southern most parts of the globe, solar power is not feasible for much of the year. In deserts hydro is unlikely to provide enough power. And I don't think I've ever even seen a hamster.
I'm currently in Japan, and the government is going on about increasing the use of solar and wind and other such. But I've never heard mention of geothermal power. Japan is in an excellent location for this, what with being on the border of three different continental plates and all. You'd think that in a country that has so many hot springs, the government would realize that it's possible to get power from the same source.
(Also, don't you love the misuse of words. Renewable, meaning it can be replaced (Wikipedia says "naturally replenished"), right? Except when it comes to energy, apparently. Because I can't see us replacing the sun when it runs out. I also have the same problem with the word "reclaimed" in relation to "reclaiming" swamps and other wetlands. The term really should just be "claimed".)
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Energy doesn't have to be sustainable past the point where everybody is dead, so the sun running out isn't a big deal from a renewable energy standpoint.
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By the time the sun runs out it must have been replaced long time, or mankind is gone. This as the sun in a later stage of its life will swell to a red giant, and becoming bigger than the orbit of our planet.
So for mankind to survive that (if we manage to survive that long to begin with) space colonisation is a necessity. We're already quite close to having enough tech to colonise the solar system (not bad considering the first time we reached space was less than 70 years ago - the German V2 missiles), so
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Now surviving the Big Crunch (the opposite event of the Big Bang), that's a whole different matter.
Well, we have the Multivac [multivax.com] to solve that little problem.
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Renewable refers to "renewable on a human timescale". Coal is "renewable" you wait millions of years for it to form. The kind of renewable we talk about are things that will replenish within the lifetime of an average human like trees or crops.
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The ground in Japan is very unstable, I don't think running pipes deep underground is going to be very viable. A medium sized earthquake could rupture everything.
Missing Option (Score:3, Funny)
It did say "favorite" (Score:2)
Is it anywhere near as efficient as the others? No. Is it the cleanest? After factoring in food and bedding, no. Is it even feasible, wide-scale? No.
But the poll asked which is my favorite, and just for sheer hilarity and awesomeness, hamster it is.
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Wind&Solar seem to have lesser side-effects (Score:2)
Once manufactured wind and solar have relatively minimal environmental impact - limited to maintenance, cleaning, etc. Hydro changes the environment and both hydro and geothermal have the possibility of catastrophic failure.
I worked in the solar industry for a while. The economic barriers to widespread deployment are almost gone, but the challenge of storage and distribution remain. Industry rules of thumb suggest that there will be no storage problem until transient renewables represent about 20% of the gr
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It seems that geothermal plants have exploded in the past. [newscientist.com]
You're drilling holes several kilometers into the earth, pumping water down and expecting to get back superheated steam. You have all of the necessary elements for an explosion. I'm don't claim that geothermal isn't worth the risk, just that there are risks involved, as with any other energy source. Of the environmentally friendlier alternatives, hydro and geothermal seem to have the greatest opportunity for mishaps.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnstown_Flood [wikipedia.org]
Im sure there are other examples out there. It just does not seem like the risk of geothermal is anywhere near that of carbon based or dam based power.
Geothermal can trigger earthquakes (Score:4, Informative)
Small earthquakes are commonly associated with geothermal sites. No one is really sure about the big ones.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/geothermal-and-tidal/earthquakes-hinder-green-energy-plans [ieee.org]
Hydro FTW (Score:3)
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Except we're not allowed to build any more dams, even in places that could use them. Some protected bug or fish is in the way. And not to mention the greenies wanting to tear down a few of the existing ones.
The most immediately doable? (Score:2)
Veggie diesel from algae.. It even grows in salt water.. So far there doesn't appear to be any shortage of either.. but it doesn't seem to have much appeal to big agribusiness or energy producers.. too easy produce and thus presents too much competition...
Because it's not easy to produce (Score:2)
Having said which - it may be in a race with thermal solar in which the winner will be the one that requires the least water input. Both in theory work best in arid regions with
Missing Option (Score:2)
He's not renewable, well not yet. We are working on having him cloned.
Missing options (Score:3)
Biomass - Burning wood, alcohol, etc.
Nuclear fission - Close the fuel cycle, and nuclear is renewable, like it was originally intended to be.
LENR - Low Energy Nuclear Reactions - previously misnamed "cold fusion"
Fusion - The energy source that is perpetually 20 years away.
the best (Score:2)
Hamsters, yum!
Missing option (Score:2, Insightful)
What about Negawatts?
Biomethane (Score:3)
It's renewable, works in most if not all currently availible ICE's so it's a great transition fuel. Fairly easy to store and transport. Easy to produce. Cheap. Local.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biogas [wikipedia.org]
Wind. (Score:2)
Was torn between wind and solar (Score:2)
...chose wind because solar generation cuts out at night and therefore requires more energy storage.
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From personal experience, I've noticed even very windy days tend to go calm at night.
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Energon cubes (Score:2)
OK, so they're only renewable when the transformers fill them from hydroelectric dams, but still.
When I was a kid I could never fathom why in those cartoons people were always fighting over energy. Energy is everywhere! And unlike the transformers, people can't even drink it, so they didn't really have an excuse.
solar roofs (Score:2)
Hamster power rules! (Score:2)
Generators breed, and you can eat the surplus generators!
Renewable? (Score:2)
So solar energy is renewable... I'm all in favor of a little human hubris now and then, but making the completely unfounded assumption that we'll have figured out how to renew the sun in the next 4 billion years seems kind of ambitious.
I mean really, if your standards for calling something "renewable" are so low, why not accept that today's landfills will be the oil fields of a few million years from now and call oil renewable too?
Wind, hydro, hamster, algae are all solar (Score:2)
And so are hydrogen and solar panels. They're all ways of capturing and concentrating solar power. Hydro has the advantage of being pre-concentrated. Wind and solar, not so much. Solar has potential if we get into space and start setting up large scale concentrative mirrors, but you can't sell that to the voters/rubes, so we're more likely to piss away precious resources going to Mars instead. While nuclear would also scale, it has been shown to have some minor disadvantages of late. Thorium nuclear plants
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Quite so, and naturally occurring hydrocarbons have been concentrated to the point where they has an astonishing energy density. Nothing else really compares from an energy return standpoint. It was all pre-made and all we had to do was mine it or extract it. Non-trivial, but it made industrial civilization possible for the past two centuries with perhaps as much as a half century to go.
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I doubt that it will be the breakthrough in nuclear fission. And by then it will still be so expensive that it cannot compete with renewable energies.
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Fukushima got so bad because of lack of regulation.
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I wouldn't put it that way. Makes it sound like it wasn't our fault.
Fukushima got so bad because the designers didn't design it to withstand tsunamis of the power they knew could happen there. Or because they built it too close to the coast. All to save a little money. Reckless.
Re:Nuclear (Score:4, Informative)
Fukushima was designed for the estimated worst case on a 250 year time scale.
Unit 1 was designed for a peak ground acceleration of 0.18 g (1.74 m/s2) and a response spectrum based on the 1952 Kern County earthquake, but rated for 0.498 g. The design basis for Units 3 and 6 were 0.45 g (4.41 m/s2) and 0.46 g (4.48 m/s2) respectively. All units were inspected after the 1978 Miyagi earthquake when the ground acceleration was 0.125 g (1.22 m/s2) for 30 seconds, but no damage to the critical parts of the reactor was discovered. The design basis for tsunamis was 5.7 meters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Power_plant_information [wikipedia.org]
The 9.0 MW Thoku earthquake occurred at 14:46 JST on Friday, 11 March 2011 with epicenter near the island of Honshu.[50] It resulted in maximum ground accelerations of 0.56, 0.52, 0.56 g (5.50, 5.07 and 5.48 m/s2) at units 2, 3 and 5 respectively, above their designed tolerances of 0.45, 0.45 and 0.46 g (4.38, 4.41 and 4.52 m/s2), but values within the design tolerances at units 1, 4 and 6.
The earthquake was followed by a 15 m (49 ft) tsunami arriving 41 minutes later which topped the plant's 5.7 m (19 ft) seawall
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents#Earthquake_and_tsunami [wikipedia.org]
They didn't know a 15 m tsunami could happen there or would.
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They didn't know a 15 m tsunami could happen there or would.
They should have known. There is evidence for such large tsunamis all over the place. They should have considered geologic and archaeologic records. Even in the historic record are many tsunamis larger than 15m. Japan, in 1854, 28m, and in 1896, possibly 30m. The 1923 Japanese tsunami is perhaps best remembered, and that was 12m, plenty high enough to swamp Fukushima. There is a 1993 tsunami in Japan that reached 31m. Now that was after the plant was built, but gave them ample warning that they need
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Its is not renewable so it is running out at some point and that point is by todays estimates in 100 years (when the number of plants do not increase) and might last 200 years when you establish some extensive reuse program. But in the end you still run out of resources. The regulations are in place so that you do not pollute the environment. In theory you can built any type of reactor. In practice they do not want to do so, because these reactors are extremely expensive. Even less secure version, like the
Re:Nuclear (Score:4, Insightful)
Thermal reactors burn U-235, of which with complete burn, using current reactor tech that is only a few percent thermally efficient, we expect might last a couple hundred years. Fast reactors burn U-238, which we have two orders of magnitude greater supply than U-235. Fast reactors also burn Th-232, which is again many times (conservative estimates put 4-5x) more abundant than U-238.
If we decide to hide from technology, and continue using the same light water reactors designed in the 60s, we will be looking for a new fuel source in a hundred years or so. If instead we continue developing new technology (and not that new since we've been operating fast reactors since the 50s), we'll have fuel for several tens of thousands of years. That seems renewable enough considering we only started heavy use of fossil fuels a few hundred years ago.
Re:Nuclear (Score:4, Insightful)
There have been several prototype reactor approaches for breeder reactors and a couple of other reactor technology. The research on them has been funded for decades. And it is still funded far more than renewable energy. However, they never were able to come up with really save concepts which would really work and still be cheap enough to produce energy in a range around 3-8 cents. Further more all the discussed concept produce radioactive waste and there were not able to provide a save waste disposal technology. Japan which is a (or at least was until recently) pro nuclear power society, they were not able to come up with a solution even there was no anti-nuclear crowd. So it is save to say that all discussed concepts are not ready for production use. And the third argument is, that even if a disaster is very unlikely to happen. It is a) still possible and b) we are not able to handle the disaster. Therefor it is better to use a wide variety of collector and storage technologies to use the fusion power of the sun also called renewable energy.
And the estimate of those 100 years is based on the assumption that the number of reactors do not increase. However, if we want to replace our coal and gas plants with nuclear plants and also all our car fuel with electricity then we have to increase the number of plants by 6 or 7 times of the present. In France that might be 3-4 times.
In the end we would have around 80 plants in Germany, which would be difficult to find enough spots even ignoring potential protests.
In dense populated areas, low risk technologies is much better suited for energy supply.
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Okay.
What type of renewable energy providers are you planning on using to provide energy to a metropolis of a million or more people, the businesses and factories?
The largest wind farm in the world can provide 780 MW [wikipedia.org] but takes up 400 km^2.
That's half the size of the city of Hamburg, and would be able to provide enough energy for about 625,000 homes, which would be about a third of what's needed for Hamburg metro area. And that's not counting offices and factories.
I like wind power. But it's a very low densi
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Fusion power is more renewable than solar and wind power
Correct. Of course we don't actually have fusion reactors right now so, for the moment, solar and wind *are* more renewable.
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While you're removing those regulations lets also remove the government subsidies. See if any nuclear plants get built when they can't get private loans without government loan guaranties or private insurance coverage.
Umm, safety? (Score:3)
Dude, did you just jump out of a time machine from 1950? Because the first sentence is suspiciously similar to "too cheap to meter" and the second shows a surprising lack of awareness of current events. If Japan had "just removed the regulations" that make nuclear plants safe(r) to operate, large(r) swaths of the country might be uninhabitable now.
Re:Nuclear (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, what? Where do you get more uranium when you run low?
Given reprocessing tech, uranium reserves, vast amounts of unmined uranium, and the plethora of other fuels.... we'll probably get overrun by robot overlords before we have to worry about running out of fissile material.
We'll probably have solved fusion by then anyway.
Sure, people will call for more nuke plants but "not in my backyard!"
I want a nuke plant in my backyard - if they give me free electricity.
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i want to build one in my back shed.
stupid council regulations!
Re:Nuclear (Score:5, Insightful)
Expand the timescale sufficiently and everything runs outs, so you need to run it on a 'reasonable' scale. If we won't run out of nuclear materials in the next 10,000 years, it should qualify under renewable.
Besides, if you expand the time scale to 'eons' fossil fuels are renewed.
Re:Nuclear (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's like saying "everything is just stuff"
No self respecting thing would ever let itself be called 'stuff'. You scoundrel.
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Without government subsidies however, it wouldn't be cost effective in most places still: fossil fuels are cheaper and easier in the short term.
and you think fossils don't receive any subsidy ?
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http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/en34-energy-subsidies/en34-energy-subsidies [europa.eu]
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We need to have a Man on the Moon moment or a Manhattan project dedicated to fusion.
a bunch of nations are working on ITER in France.
It doesnt have the weight of a "winning the war" of "beating the ruskies" effort behind it, but it is probably the best we can do, untill china starts building a fusion reactor and threatening the west with destruction by relentless fusion powered railgun bombardment
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You are a tool.
Manhattan Project for fusion? Why, are the fission bombs not big enough for you?
You do realize anything labelled "hydrogen bomb" is a nuclear fusion bomb right? fission bombs are old hat, and hardly used in modern day arsenals anyway. The US and Soviets detonated fusion bombs of respectively 15 (Castle bravo) and 50 (czar bomba) megatons in nuclear weapons tests. If you want to be even more shocked and upset about the times we live in, look up neutron bombs.
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That's nothing a little dye can't fix.
From burning a Bush? (Score:2)
I don't know, but I am certain that many are willing to experiment.