Reply #18: Um, really? The solar industry doesn't make this delusional claim. [View All]

[NNadir]

the fact that electricity has nothing to do with the long practiced industrial means of stripping carbon dioxide from gases.

As of March 2010, after 8 years that I've been here, reading thousands of "solar breakthrough" threads, and thousands of "solar soon to be competitive with the grid" posts the solar industry reports the latest solar energy cost figures as of March, 2010:

http://www.solarbuzz.com/SolarPrices.htm">http://www.solarbuzz.com/SolarPrices.htm

These are as follows: 35.88 cents/kwh residential, 24.85 cents/kwh commercial, and 19.37 cents "industrial" not that there is a single important industry in this country that relies on solar for it's energy output, since, as the link below will show, solar is a trivial form of energy as is wind. Both remain the fantasies of wishful thinkers and dangerous fossil fuel greenwashers, whose interests are mainly to maintain the odious status quo.

Comparable figures from the grid, including 20% nuclear energy are found here:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_3.html

As I love to note, France has the lowest electricity rates among major countries in Europe, but um...um...um...well, if one doesn't know what one is talking about then just make stuff up.

But what prompted the current exchange is the claim that "electricity is the best way to capture carbon dioxide." Um...um...um...

Um, we'll just take that fiat proclamation as coming from someone who doesn't grasp after years of similar oblivious statements that the stripping of carbon dioxide has been an industrial practice for many decades, if not (if one carefully examines the case) centuries.

Meanwhile, on planet earth, where the industrial practice of stripping carbon dioxide is understood by anyone with a shred of knowledge about the subject to be, um, thermal, a point I posted on the internet years ago, this on a website now funded by wind and related dangerous fossil fuel interests.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/6/17/19109/0486">The Utility of Light: Getting Real with the Existing Energy Infrastructure.

In it I reference a monograph that NOT ONE anti-science anti-nuke here is even competent to read, just as there are many anti-science anti-nukes here who believe that humanity should bet the atmosphere on their wishful thinking, denial, and record of failure to understand a single trend of the last 50 years.

Renewable energy has been subject to rote praise by non-thinkers for more many decades, including stupid claims by Amory Lovins, gas and oil company executive, that solar energy would provide 18 quads/exajoules of energy by the year 2000.

Quoth Lovins in 1976, using terms no different than is used by hand-waving ignorant fools today, 34
As I point out regularly, they are somewhat more honest than the dogmatic chanters here.

In June 1976 the Institute considered that with a conservation program far more modest than that contemplated in this article, the likely range of U.S. primary energy demand in the year 2000 would be about 101-126 quads, with the lower end of the range more probable and end-use energy being about 60-65 quads. And, at the further end of the spectrum, projections for 2000 being considered by the "Demand Panel" of a major U.S. National Research Council study, as of mid-1976, ranged as low as about 54 quads of fuels (plus 16 of solar energy).

Lovins, Amory, ENERGY STRATEGY: THE ROAD NOT TAKEN? Foreign Affairs, Fall, 1976, page 76.

Now were Lovins an 8th grade student, rather than a college dropout, his remarks would at best rate a B-, because like most other anti-nukes, he is loathe to reference his bullshit claims.

As a prognosticator and wishful thinker, the results of this claim, except for the part he lifted using remarks out of context from Alvin Weinberg, inventor of the Pressurized Water Nuclear Reactor and the Molten Salt Reactor, Lovins was off by a 17,600% in the "percent talk" so prevalent in the rote chanting of "renewables will save us" anti-science dogmatists, NOT ONE of whom makes a statement that is remotely connected with reality.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/alternate/page/renew_energy_consump/table1.html

So why 34 years later should anyone be inclined to believe the unadorned and unadjusted repetition of this pablum?

Basically the anti-nukes are full of it. They're grotesquely uninformed, oblivious, denialist, run entirely by emotion and emotional appeals, disingenous thinking and a completely solipsistic view of their own moral vaccuity.

For many decades they have been causing vast and untold needless suffering and death by diverting attention from their tacit support of the dangeorus fossil fuel industry by raising specious platitudes about the only realistic option to them, nuclear power.

There is NOT ONE anti-nuke who understands context, or who can do simple comparisons (as with numbers). But in context nuclear power saves lives, because nothing is as good as nuclear energy and therefore the use of anything but nuclear energy causes more deaths than nuclear itself causes.

The point is that nuclear power need not be perfect to be vastly better, on economic grounds, on sustainability grounds, on environmental grounds than everything else.

Nuclear only needs to be better than everything else, including all the stuff anti-nukes don't care about which, happily, it is.