Department of Agriculture

[Lissa]

1: no single power source can help us get through life....you always need a combination of things.

Really? The French seem to do pretty good with 80% of their power coming from Nuclear (and if they had their drothers, they'd probably be 100%.

2: nuclear is not a structural solution because we all know the disadvantages (waste, danger, scarcity, only a few countries that will own the fuel etc.. in 100 years you have the same problem as with oil)

Wrong on several counts. Waste is a problem only because of non-proliferation. The majority of the "waste" that comes out of a nuclear reactor is usable fuel (about 95%), but because of non-proliferation, we cannot reprocess said fuel back out. If reprocess was allowed, only 0.5% of the waste from a reactor would be true waste (couldn't use it for anything) and that waste would be down to background levels in about 700 years (7 half lives). Nuclear also isn't dangerous if you spend the money as there are now designs that take an act of sabotage to cause them to go into an accident status above level 2, level 4 is what's known as LOCA (Loss of Coolant) and Three Mile Island was considered a 5, and Chernobyl and Fukashima were considered 7s. Scarcity is not an issue either as you can create more fuel than you expend using breeder reactors, we can literally produce an inexhaustible source of fuel, but again, non-proliferation rears its head. So, no, you're pretty much wrong on all accounts there.

Solar and wind are the future; doubting this will only increase the time of innovations and full scale use.

Again, wrong. The future is Fusion which again, is inexhaustable. The problem, people are putting money into other things instead of pushing for this. Fusion has the capabilities to produce more power than the entire world could use with a clean source of power. Fusion, like Fission, is highly dense power thus allowing you to produce a large amount of power in a small space, not muddling up the environment.

Take solar; already now, in large parts of the world using solar panels on roofs of family homes can harvest enough energy for an average family to live off. Of course there is the issue of no energy at night or less in winter, but first you have the el-net to buffer this, and second in only a few years the first energy storage systems will become commercially available.

As I said in my initial post, solar works great on the small scale, put people here were looking at large scale, ie, cities, not individual homes. The amount of space required for cities is huge compared to what would be needed for a home.

The coming generations of organic or DS solar cells are a factor of 10 (at least) cheaper than Si, way compensating their (for now) lower yields. These cells will be so cheap you can coat any surfcae with them.
And what about integrating in windows generating energy only from IR and UV light and letting pass through the rest.

There are a lot of technologies available, the thing is to determine which would pose both the cheapest and most dense, right now that belongs to nuclear, especially to Fusion if that starts moving along.

The only reason we don't use more solat energy at the moment is pressure from conventional energy companies and poltical ignorance and unwill.

Again, not true. The reason we don't use other alternative sources is:

1) They aren't dense enough for a city, for a home, great, for a city no.

2) Their efficiencies are horrible to proven technologies. The best alternate source right now has an efficiency around 27%, the best normal source of energy right now, sadly, is coal at about 40% (nuclear is around 37%). That difference in efficiency is huge when you start talking in the MW and GW ranges.

3) Most alternates only work in certain areas or at certain times of day which makes them bad for "peak" times where you have to fall back on other energies source for when you need to get up to power quick for peak demand (this is done normally by use of gas turbines burning methane).