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Edited on Wed Nov-22-06 10:40 PM by NNadir
I am also not interested in your theories and pretenses about government support.
My game, irrespective of what you think, is to slow climate change. Such a focus precludes forming friendships with people who are advocating doing nothing about climate change other than to recite mindless (and frankly now ancient) platitudes about solar energy.
If you tally the amount of money spent on solar research in the last 50 years and divide it into the amount of energy it has produced, and compare that with nuclear the numbers are pretty telling.
But then again you would have to know how to manipulate numbers to make the exercise useful, and, again, you don't know anything about numbers. I would do the exercise here but it would be a complete waste of time since your view of energy is inherently religious and does not in any way depend on facts or data.
Solar R&D is going on around the world and has been for some time. For all of the money invested, it has produced very little. Many billions of dollars have been spent on it in the United States, in Japan, in Germany and elsewhere, using both public and private money, and still solar PV energy has yet to produce a single exajoule in a given year. World energy demand, meanwhile is 470 exajoules. This is a serious matter and is not appropriate for childish thinking.
One of the ways to be politically popular is to advocate for solar power. Thus solar power has been funded far beyond the level at which it has returned. This has been true for decades. This does not necessarily mean we should cut off solar research, but only that we should be skeptical of claims that it is realistic to assume that it will be a panacea in the short term. The fact that it is effectively now, after many decades of exploration, a useless tool for addressing climate change must have something to do with the fact that investment in it is still mostly an investment in wishful thinking, the type of wishful thinking that will be fatal to humanity if it is transmuted into an appeal to do nothing.
Almost all of the energy actually produced thus far by solar PV has probably gone into powering up solar promotion websites.
Nuclear energy gives a far greater return. Nuclear energy provides about 30 exajoules of primary energy, and is currently growing at a very rapid pace on an exajoule scale.
There is nothing I can do about your fetish for so called "nuclear waste." Since nobody important on the planet is taking your fetish seriously however, your fetish's importance is null and of no practical consequence. You can whine all you wish, spend hours on the greenpeace and ratical website, but you cannot stop nuclear energy. Humanity as a whole has recognized the critical importance of nuclear energy in addressing climate change.
The fact is that you are not now and never have been able to produce a single person who has been injured by the storage of so called "nuclear waste," even as you assert, in an abuse of language, that it is "dangerous." Your assertions about "danger" are therefore purely absurd and arbitrary. You know zero about the subject. Muttering a crude suggestion about how I should "shove it" does not detract from these facts in any way. It is very clear that you arbitrarily do not extend your fetish about the products of nuclear fission to the products of fossil fuels. This is a profound moral problem, but I am not your mommy or your daddy and I have no responsibility whatsoever for your level of moral development.
Your continuing moral indifference aside, fossil fuels kill, every day, in vast numbers in normal operations. Nuclear power normally doesn't kill, except in the rare case of spectacular failure - limited more or less to a single event, Chernobyl. It follows that Chernobyl sets a limit on the potential for loss of life for nuclear energy, since nearly its entire inventory of fission products and fuel was released to the environment and because its effects have been characterized. It is thus easily shown that one Chernobyl a year would still be orders of magnitude smaller than loss of life from fossil fuels. However there is not one Chernobyl a year. In fact there has only been one Chernobyl event in the 50 years of nuclear operations and we now know how to avoid repeating that event. It follows that nuclear power saves lives. This is a fact. I'm sure you don't like facts, and its clear that you would rather substitute fantasy for facts but tough shit. Facts are what they are. The world is not going to be inspired to continue to kill because you don't get it. On the contrary, the world is building or planning or pondering over 200 new nuclear reactors. With these facts in mind, I am not likely to be inspired to seek your friendship or your respect. I am wholly uninterested in your opinion, since your opinion speaks for itself.
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