Last edited Wed Sep 30, 2015, 07:45 AM - Edit history (3)
The most prominent form of distributed energy is the automobile, which was one of the worst destroyers of the environment in the 20th century. It is just as bad, if not worse, in the 21st century.
What this particular form of distributed energy, the automobile, has left in its wake is distributed pollution. There are zero living things on this planet that do not contain molecular automotive waste.
In twenty or thirty years, as solar cells being manufactured today become electronic waste, they will not be located in a central facility. They will end up in landfills, where they will leach toxic materials into the environment for eternity.
Alternatively, they will be collected - using gasoline and diesel fuel to transport them - and shipped across oceans to places where poor people can "recycle" them, which is to say clean up the garbage left by stupid rich people who bought into this environmentally disastrous "renewable energy" scam, with the result that the poor people will end up with high serum levels of toxic metals, flame retardants and other serious health threats.
Science of The Total Environment Volume 472, 15 February 2014, Pages 354–362 "Associations of neonatal lead, cadmium, chromium and nickel co-exposure with DNA oxidative damage in an electronic waste recycling town."
What is happening in these cases of electronic waste "recycling" today is actually a crime against humanity, but predictably, our bourgeois clueless peanut gallery of poorly educated and poor thinking fans of "distributed this" and "distributed that" are clueless, as usual.
The great advantage of used nuclear fuel is that it is low in mass, highly concentrated, and centralized. It's not like dangerous gasoline waste, dangerous diesel waste, dangerous natural gas waste or dangerous coal waste can be maintained indefinitely at the site where they were generated.
One thing is clear. Anti-nuke rhetoric has nothing to do with the environment. In fact, it is mostly concerned with stumbling, with healthy doses of fear and ignorance, into the environmental abyss, which is, if one looks at the numbers, exactly where we are headed.
To address the personal remark about what I do and do not know, I would merely state that anyone clearly lacking in a scientific education is hardly qualified to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of my level of knowledge.
After several decades of study, I am convinced that so called "renewable energy" is not sustainable. It has a very significant energy to mass ratio problem and a thermodynamic problem, both of which translate into serious environmental problems. There is a reason that so called "renewable energy" was abandoned just after the 18th century. The reason was that most people on the planet - and there was less than 1/7th the number of people that there are today - lived short, miserable lives of dire poverty. All the rhetoric in the world cannot change this fact.
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