Quote:
Originally Posted by PKFFW
I saw an interesting documentary the other day called "Can we make a star on Earth?" which briefly discussed alternative power sources.
The documentary was about nuclear fussion. However a couple of guys briefly discussed what we would have to build in order to supply every person on Earth with 6 Kilowatts of power from sources that do not produce CO2(and are doable now) within 20 years.(they did not state if that was per day, week or what though) Mind you the average usage in the industrial world was 11 Kilowatts and in the third world about 1 Kilowatt. So this idea was about a more equitable distribution and a possibly sustainable amount. Those in the developed world would have to get used to using about half what they do nowm, which is a big ask. They looked at all sorts of "clean" sources and tried to figure out how much we could concievably get from each source and they disregarded the whole "nuclear waste" aspect of nuclear fission.
Anyway, if my memory serves me, globally we would have to build 1 new nuclear power plant every 5 days(or thereabouts) for the next 20 years! That was only to get about 1/2 the power needs too! Then for the other 1/2 we would have to invest in all the other types of clean fuel.
So long story short, "nuclear power" as we are able to do it today, is not an alternative at all really. It just isn't doable at our present energy consumption rates.
The only true alternative, the "get out of jail free card" as the doco presenters put it, is nuclear fussion. We are close to doing it too. Every scientist in the production agreed that fussion would be a reality within 20-50 years. Sooner even if the world made a truly co-operative effort to properly fund the research. It even has the benefit of being truly "clean" in that there is no CO2 and also no nuclear waste that needs to be stored for thousands of years.
Is that close enough to make a difference on global warming though?(assuming GW is human caused of course) I don't know.
Not sure that really has much to do with the discussion but I found it interesting so thought I'd share.
Cheers,
PKFFW
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The problem with that scenario is that it presents an all or nothing calculation. If we build nuclear plants and develop wind farms and tidal generators and low head hydro elactric and roof top converters and many other types of alternate ways of getting electricity, then we would be using less natural gas and coal to generate electricity. The NG could then be used as a means to power transportation and we have plenty of that in our own country, as well as ability to produce methane by processing the garbage we throw out every day. That would lead to diminished foreign oil and some improvement of air quality.
I'm not up on what we can do with coal to decrease CO2 emmisions, but some bright boy will figure that out eventually. What we need is to convince Big Oil that they need to pioneer the movement away from their current product into what could easily be their "new product." They're just rather hide bound at the moment and have not yet started to shift that direction.