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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Same here.

I used to be a big supporter of the local green party but since they've gone against windmills due to the 'visual pollution' I've turned away from them.

They're now effectively causing the deployment of more nuclear power in the mid to long term. Meanwhile the Germans have outdone the rest of the world in both deployment of solar and wind power.

Wind power is there now on average 6.5% of all energy produced, in Sachsen-Anhalt (sp?) it is over 40%!

The sad thing about this oil spill is that is is a double whammy, not only ecologically is it a disaster of enormous magnitude, it also hits the region that is still recovering from the hurricane disaster only a few years ago.

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Like every good liberal, I'm not crazy about the idea of nuclear power, but from an objective standpoint it's relatively safe and it's incredibly clean compared to just about every other viable alternative (at least in the short term).

Of course, if we had fusion we could easily solve this problem, but that's a good 40 years away.

Just curious, but where did you get the 40 number from?

The joke is that it's always 40 or 50 years away. According to the plan for the ITER project at least, the first fusion plant should arrive mid century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

> Like every good liberal, I'm not crazy about the idea of nuclear power

Pardon me, but I'm a liberal and I support nuclear power.

you can be 'not crazy about' something, yet still support it. He's not necessarily saying he doesn't support it. Are you saying you love it? That you have no reservations, no wish in the back of your mind that there was something better?

(Not that it's not the right choice, of course.)

Oil man George W. Bush's ranch can run totally off the grid with solar panels. http://www.off-grid.net/2007/02/18/meanwhile-back-at-the-ran...

Inconvenient truth spokesman Al Gore's home uses twenty times as much energy as the average. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/02/28/politics/main25228...

I built a house and the off-the-grid installation that went with it, it's another 20 to 30 years to payback time for the new occupants at the current prices. Solar panels are expensive, and so are small scale windmills.

I take it that George Bush and Al Gores houses will not be that far apart in total energy consumption.

Al Gore should be ashamed of himself and his energy footprint, but that goes for every joker that went to the climate summit by plane.

If there was one place where they could have shown that they were serious about the subject matter and invest a bit in video conferencing that was it.

"I take it that George Bush and Al Gores houses will not be that far apart in total energy consumption."

Just to clarify, do you mean grid energy consumption? Unless I read incorrectly, George Bush's Crawford ranch house is twice as small as Al Gore's house. Does that not matter much in terms of total consumption?

I believe Bush owns a huge home in Dallas, and it seems obvious that the ranch was a PR vehicle, so I doubt his combined personal energy footprint is worth talking about, but based on the article above his Crawford ranch is impressive.

Grid energy consumption is not what it is about in off the grid houses, that's a big fat '0'.

The amount of money spent on the installation and insulation of the property is the big factor, and I suspect that if grid power was available where that farm is located that it is nowhere near cost effective.

The house I built was to learn, not to save, just to give you an idea of how inefficient going off the grid if grid power is available is.

If grid power is not available, in other words if you do not have any other options then it is a totally different matter.

The total cost of a 10 KWh/day installation in the Northern latitudes of Canada was 5 years ago about $CAN 60,000, probably in Texas where you have much more sunshine the cost will be significantly lower, but you still have to factor in stuff like the cost of charging / discharging batteries, which alone already costs more than using the grid...

It's not that easy!

This has nothing whatever to do with (1) the comment it's notionally a reply to or (2) the OP.

Only problem is it's not completely perfect, and no matter how awful the current situation, due to lobbyists and special interest groups, we'll never be able to replace oil with something short of COMPLETELY PERFECT, until it simply runs out.

You'd think people would realize that while nuclear, or wind, or solar, are imperfect, each one is better than fossil fuels.

Except in terms of migration cost.

This is a relevant point, but 1: that's not their objections 2: it will have to be done sooner or later. If the cost is fixed, do it sooner and rack up more savings during 'later'.

Now, if you can show me that migrating to wind or solar or nuclear will be much much easier, cheaper, simpler and more efficient if we do it 10 years from now instead of next year, then it might be a good idea to wait.

For solar that might actually be true, for wind I'd be more surprized if we went from the current cost per Watt of installed power to a much smaller fraction.

> Of course, if we had fusion we could easily solve this problem, but that's a good 40 years away.

I'm not sure if Fusion would be much better than fission (which isn't to say that it's not good, just that it doesn't seem nearly as much of an improvement as some would want us to believe (many of those people writing grant proposals)):

http://www.rationalfuturist.com/writings/fusion.html

What I'd really like to see is a liquid-fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR). Check out this Google Tech Talk about it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8

That first link is filled with lie's and half truths.

EX: H - H fusion in our sun is a vary slow and stable process. But that's simply based on the conditions of our sun, under other conditions H - H fusion can be extremely fast.

EX2: Under specific conditions the Uranium in a fission power plant can generate an explosion equivalent to a similar mass of TNT. It's not what we think of as a nuclear explosion but it's not exactly peanuts either. The basic problem is creating a film of boiled water see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjsMV1MglA4&feature=relat... for some simple related experiments.

EX3: Lithium isotopes are either stable or far to short lived to be radioactive. At worst your dealing with a half life of 840.3 ms which means it does not accumulate in the reaction chamber and within 1 minute of shutting down the reaction it's hard to detect.

The problem with nuclear power nowadays is not so much the safety, but the cost.

It's not clear what nuclear power costs[1] and so it's difficult to say if it's a better investment of public resources than wind, solar, geothermal, etc.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_...

> Of course, if we had fusion we could easily solve this problem, but that's a good 40 years away.

Funny, I've heard people tell me that's what they said 40 years ago.

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