I generally liked this thought-provoking program, but I was saddened (though not surprised) to see no mention of nuclear power. Lots of nice pictures of windmills and solar panels, of course. And some nice shots of biofuel pumps. Problem is, those sources provide an almost insignificant percentage of our electrical power worldwide. Even if consumption in developed countries were cut as suggested in the program, conservation cannot take you to zero. Shifting transportation energy needs to the electric grid will increase electricity demand on top of the anticipated increases from developing countries such as India and China.

This is really the big flaw in the environmentalist's message that no one wants to talk about, so I will. Intermittent, diffuse sources such as wind and solar cannot provide more than about 20-25% of our electricity needs because they cannot provide baseload power, nor can they provide reliable load-following power. Beefing up the grid to distribute power across the continent would not eliminate this problem. We could overbuild renewables - given a capacity factor of around 30%, an overbuild of 3x the necessary average capacity could work, but only if we could find a way to bank the power during times of excess. Unfortunately there just isn't a good way to do that - the best current technology, pumped hydro, loses 40% of the energy, and of course only works if you happen to have a big reservoir nearby that you can pump water up into. Finally, it should be noted that these sources require significant areas be devoted to them.

Biomass fuels are promising but have numerous issues often glossed over in programs like this one. I'll lay them out for you, but in brief: they take a lot of energy to produce, and they take land away from food production. Most of the biofuels are the product of our current mechanized agriculture system, which is a heavy user of fossil fuels. Fuels are used to run machinery and transport both inputs and outputs. Fertilizers are produced from natural gas. Finally, processing raw biomass into fuels is extremely energy-intensive (e.g. distillation of ethanol). Overall, the energy payback from biofuels is extremely poor. Ethanol from corn, for example, returns 1.25 units of energy for every 1 unit of fossil energy consumed. Biodiesel from soybeans is better at around 3 for 1, thanks largely to less energy being needed to refine raw mass into fuels. This would seem to make soybeans attractive, until you look at how much land is required to produce a given amount of fuel (much worse per BTU than corn ethanol). Biofuels produced from waste products do make sense, but the total amount of this is will barely dent our transportation needs even taking into account huge efficiency improvements in vehicles. Research continues into producting fuels from cellulosic material, and this has the potential to improve the energy payback while reducing the land used, but it's still a considerable ways off from commercial reality. Likewise, research into producing biodiesel from algae which could be grown in ponds constructed on non-arable land shows promise but is a long way from commercialization. The main problem with the US's biofuels strategy is that it is not being run to optimize energy payback and land use, it's largely a big subsidy to giant agribusiness interests in the mid-west.

We absolutely should take the efficiency steps suggested in the program. And we should get what we can from a build-out of renewables, accepting that we'll have to pay higher electricity prices for some of them. Wind farms can be built on land that can then still be used for other purpose, such as grazing animals. And solar photovoltaic can be build on land already taken by human structures, such as home rooftops. Even after all these measures are taken, though, the remainder of our energy needs will have to come from somewhere. Environmentalists know that when push comes to shove (like, rolling blackouts), new power plants will be built, despite the consequences. So, at least in California, they've grudingly allowed plants that burn the most atmosphere-friendly fossil fuel, natural gas, to be built. The problem is, this fuel is in tight supply in North America, and even world-wide gas production will go into depletion within a decade or two. So, then what? Not to mention that gas is very versatile fuel that has far more efficient uses in homes and in industry - burning gas to generate power is silly.

In the end, it will come down to coal and nuclear power to meet whatever needs we cannot get from conservation and renewables. No energy technology is without problems, so before succumming to a bevy of the usual worries about nuclear power plants, I hope people will ask not whether nuclear technology is perfect, but rather how the technology compares to coal. The US gets 50% of its electricity from coal. France gets 80% from nuclear power. The brief bit on CO2 sequestration for coal was extremely misleading, but it's to be expected from people that will do absolutely anything to avoid using nuclear power. Sequestration is completely unproven commercially, and not even possible in most areas of the world. In the US, for example, how would we get all the CO2 from coal plants in New England down to abandoned oil and gas reservoirs in Texas? Also, I would remind everyone that coal, too, is a fossil fuel that will eventually go into depletion as well, probably before the end of the century, and again, my question is, then what?

Here's my prescription for combating global warming:

1. A big improvement in vehicle efficiency.
2. Shift as much vehicle energy demand to the electric grid via plug-in hybrids.
3. Implement the home energy use improvements well-known since the 1970s.
4. A major expansion of wind-generated power (target: 20-25% of demand).
5. Photovoltaic systems on rooftops in the southwest.
6. Aggressive shift away from fossil sources and towards nuclear for electricity.
7. Take whatever we can get from the most productive biofuel strategy.
8. Continue research into nuclear fusion, banking power from renewables, and biofuel production on non-arable land.

Some good thoughts. You're definitely right about the biofuels - it is ridiculous to use all that energy and water to produce plants to use for fuel, and it uses a lot of oil in the process. Also, a lot of biofuels have become popular because they are based on raping the rain forest and other areas for plants. This is hardly a solution.

As for nuclear, it does have some promising aspects, especially in the fusion form. However, one problem with nuclear is the volatility of the system (as we saw in Chernobyl). As weather becomes more violent, this becomes more of an issue. Can such plants be built to withstand devastating weather? Also, will the distribution grid handle it?

I believe the future of energy is on a smaller, local scale, which will be more resilient to climate change. For example, there are rooftop wind turbines available now for generating most of a home's electricity in some areas. They cost about the same as a central AC system, and last 5-10 years. They are not huge and unsightly, either.

Also, I think some developments in home energy production have been killed by the oil companies and others. They want people dependent - on the grid. That's where the profits are. I don't think energy really needs to be the big problem it is. I think we have created this not because there are no alternatives, but because the alternatives are not nearly as profitable to certain people.

Use of rail instead of trucks could also be a very effective energy saver. Unfortunately the U.S. has abandoned much of its rail system, while Europe has designed a new class of rail that is amazing.

All in all, I would say our biggest hurdle is social. Science is shackled to industry and energy giants that put profit ahead of everything. Until that social equation changes, our planet is being held hostage. When it does change, a whole host of energy alternatives can come online, creating prosperity for a greater portion of the population.

The weather is not our enemy. We are. It is not necessary to overcome nature. It is merely necessary to learn to live in harmony with it.

Localized electricity generation makes a lot of sense, provided it's not produced from fossil fuels. Otherwise, the pollution is localized, too, and it's not as effectively scrubbed as it is in centralized plants. The problem with localized production from renewables is intermittency. I will give you an example from personal experience. My modest home uses about 10 kwh of electricity per day. Here in sunny California, I could expect to generate about that much from a 2-3 kw rooftop PV array. The problem is, it would generate more than I need during the day, then nothing at night. There is also the fact that it would generate more during the summer than the winter. There is no reasonable way for me to "bank" power for the daily cycle, and no way at all to bank enough power for the summer/winter cycle. A very wealthy and super-greenie friend has a huge PV array and even he (with no budget limit and no square footage limit) concluded that it was impractical to bank power with a massive array of batteries. He opted instead for a grid-connected system, which is what I intend to do too. This works because not everyone does it. My friend supplies power to the grid that on balance reduces what PG&E needs to generate every day, so the carbon savings are real and his house really is carbon-neutral. But if every one did it, it wouldn't work because at some point the grid would be saturated during the day, and the excess power would just be wasted; capacity at night would have to come from some other source. Thus there is not a real "bank" provided by the grid, just a virtual one by displacing fossil energy sources, that works only up to a point. We should definitely expand our use of renewables, but unless a magic bullet is found for power banking, we need to accept that baseload and some load-following generation will be necessary from sources that aren't intermittent. Numerous utility experts have stated that 20-25% is the practical limit from intermittent sources. The practical experience of countries like Denmark also suggests that 20-25% is possible. The rest must come from somewhere else.

Fusion is not practical today, and may never be. There is an old joke that fusion is the energy source of the future, and always will be. We need to execute on something that we know will work with proven technology and will last at least a few hundred years. That's long enough for our decendants to make fusion practical, find a solution to electricity storage from intermittents, or find a way to produce biofuels without putting more pressure on our precious topsoil and water resources. Nuclear fission is the only power source I know of that meets all those requirements. Even coal won't last more than about 100 years if called upon to both meet expanding electricity demand and take up the slack from the transport sector as oil supplies start to decline in the next decade.

Nuclear has issues, but so do all energy sources. Third-generation reactor designs are inherently safer and robust against natural disasters and terrorist attacks - they simply can't melt down the way TMI or Chernyoble did. The waste problem is somewhat overblown - it's largely a political problem. BTW people seem to conveniently forget that coal has a "waste problem" too; besides CO2, it produces acid rain and is responsible (statistically, not specifically) for 1000s of deaths each year due to lung-related illnesses. A PBS special that you might want to look up describes France's experience with nuclear power, and in that the amount of waste (admittedly dangerous) produced by a family of four for 30 years of power would be a glass cylinder the size of a pen. Which waste problem would we rather have? I suggest people do the math, calculate the waste produced for a year's worth of electricity for a typical home as a solid mass of dry ice to be sequestered somewhere, then calculate the waste produced by nuclear fission. The difference is staggering even with the incredibly wasteful once-through fuel cycle the US now uses. France reprocesses her waste to recover unburnt fuel - this stretches the fuel supply by 25% and it eliminates the longer-lived isotopes from the waste. The waste is actually a mix of long-lived, low-level isotopes of Uranium and transuranics such as Plutonium, which can be reused as fuel, and high-level fission fragments that are clustered at 1/3 and 2/3 of the atomic number of Uranium. These highly radioactive materials have short half-lives, in the 30-40 year range; the source of the scary "1000s of years" numbers is the low-level materials that actually make up the bulk of the waste, and are in fact recoverable and reusable as fuel, or as feedstock for breeders. Reprocessing was banned by executive order in the US, so as a result we have huge piles of waste accumulating at reactor sites, and are making plans to try and store them (both the large amount of long-lived potentially useful stuff and the small amount of short-lived dangerous stuff all mixed together) in a central repository. Pretty stupid, huh? We should resume reprocessing and plan to store the relatively small amount of short-lived stuff in the central repository (Yucca mountain, out in the middle of a vast desert in Nevada).

Coal is a potentially valuable feedstock to replace oil for our chemical industries (the source of lots of useful stuff including plastics). Used for such purposes most of the carbon stays out of the atmosphere. We should avoid burning it up if we can.

I'm open to hearing that there is another way, but so far I don't see one. Unless there is a breakthrough (unlikely for decades), it sure looks like it's going to come down to coal versus nuclear power for the rest of my lifetime.

In case it's of interest, here's a quick recap of various means for banking electric power from renewables. There is a paper from Lawrence Livermore Labs on this topic that you might find interesting.

Pumped hydro: the technique of choice, about 60% efficient. Excess electricity is used to pump water to a higher elevation, where it's later run down through a turbine to recapture the electricty. A site-specific solution.

Compressed air: a technique that is now being tried, efficiency unknown. Excess electricity is used to compress air into a natural formation such as an underground cavern, where it's later recaptured through a turbine. Another site-specific solution (huge tanks or excavations wouldn't be big enough).

Batteries: a well-known technology that stores energy electro-chemically, about 80% efficient. Useful for localized (e.g. in-home) systems. The main problems are that batteries have short lifespans (1000 charge cycles, meaning they must be replaced every few years at enormous expense and with disposal issues), and they're very bulky.

Super-capacitors: a technology that's still in the lab. Energy is stored in electric fields. Made from relatively exotic materials, these are unlikely to be scalable for home power needs but could find a use in vehicles due to higher power densities and more favorable charge/discharge times. Not commercial at this time.

Flywheels: energy is stored by spinning a large mass, then drawn back from the mass through a generator. Although small systems are available, they're not really practical for most home installations, and they're incredibly expensive. Another problem with them is that the energy you can store in a flywheel depends a lot on it having a huge mass, and yet keeping a huge mass from spinning apart at high speeds is difficult. Plus,
it's hard to support a huge mass with bearings and not lose a lot of energy to frictional forces.

Hydrogen: electricity is used to generate hydrogen via electrolysis, and the hydrogen is then burned to recapture the energy. Extremely inefficient as there are huge energy losses in both directions. Hydrogen production makes far more sense if you plan to use the hydrogen for some other purpose. For example, it could be used instead of fossil sources to produce ammonia feedstock for fertilizers. Using it directly in the home or in vehicles is very problematic. As a gas, it's small molecular size allows it to slowly escape most containers and pipelines, and as a liquid it requires cryogenic infrastructure that is bulky and somewhat dangerous. Hydrogen could be combined with something else, such as coal or biomass, to produce a fuel such as methanol. While this would still lose some of the energy in the hydrogen, it would have the effect of stretching the supply of the other material by adding "free" energy to the resulting liquid fuel, sort of like "hamburger helper" for the underlying carbon-based feedstock.

Thanks for sharing that - very interesting!

The nuclear option makes me uneasy, I think mostly because I know how irresponsible humans tend to be. It is a technology that requires great care. But I also realize that in many ways it is efficient and clean.

I have read of developments in energy that are near, and some that have been deliberately delayed by the usual mechanisms. Imagine having a washing machine-size device in your home that cleanly produces your energy, using simply water. I realize such techonology is ostensibly not available, but I can also imagine it around the corner, providing that the social part of the energy equation changes (IOW, when we get the oil companies off our backs).

I think it is also important to remind ourselves that human life does not require electricity. It started as a novelty, moved to a convenience, and became a "necessity", all in the last 200 years. Like oil, we can live without it. Perhaps not on the scale we do now, but it is not a requirement for life.

Depending on how weather, diseases, and geo-politics go, we may find ourselves living more simply again. Perhaps with some technology, but not in the same dirty way we are now. In many ways, I welcome a transformation in this area, because I don't believe we are living sustainably or healthfully by any stretch of the imagination.

There is a very interesting book on the subject of oil and energy, how our current methods aren't sustainable, and what may occur in the future. The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler. I don't necessarily agree with all of it, but it is a very valuable read. Also, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann is also an amazing read into the subject of human life and history, especially as it relates to energy.

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I generally liked this thought-provoking program, but I was saddened (though not surprised) to see no mention of nuclear power. Lots of nice pictures of windmills and solar panels, of course. And some nice shots of biofuel pumps. Problem is, those sources provide an almost insignificant percentage of our electrical power worldwide.

What did you expect from the rabid environmentalists they interviewed? They are just as afraid of nuclear power as they are of guns, lead, mercury, and global warming.

I wonder what they would do if I ... BOO!!!!

If they had put real scientists on the show instead, nuclear power would have been mentioned.

i believe that neuclear power is the solution for global warming. every year we will need more power than the one before, even if every american buys a hybird and changes lightbulbs this will hold true. neuclear power remains the only energy source that works no matter how couldy windy or calm the ocean is.

the real tradegy is that if it werent for an image problem, neuclear power would lead to a better economy and a better enviroment. what solution do you purpose?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: kim g,

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As for nuclear, it does have some promising aspects, especially in the fusion form. However, one problem with nuclear is the volatility of the system (as we saw in Chernobyl). As weather becomes more violent, this becomes more of an issue. Can such plants be built to withstand devastating weather?

What did you expect to happen? Chernobyl was designed by government. The entire design was stupid.

But even Chernobyl was not an atomic-bomb type of explosion. It was a steam explosion and fire, followed by the core melting. There are no conditions which can cause an atomic-bomb explosion in a nuclear power plant, because there isn't that much uranium in the reactor.

They do have a reactor design which seaparates the uranium into subcritical masses if the core melts. But they never got to build one, because environmentalcases stopped all nuclear plant building.

Buildings can be built to withstand any kind of weather. The only question is the cost.

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Also, will the distribution grid handle it?

Again, it's a question of how much they spend on it.

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I believe the future of energy is on a smaller, local scale, which will be more resilient to climate change. For example, there are rooftop wind turbines available now for generating most of a home's electricity in some areas. They cost about the same as a central AC system, and last 5-10 years. They are not huge and unsightly, either.

But even if every house had one of those, it wouldn't meet the energy needs of the area. Also, small-scale devices tend to be much less efficient. Many places don't have the necessary wind. And all too often, government zoning requires planting so many trees that the wind turbine is useless.

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Also, I think some developments in home energy production have been killed by the oil companies and others. They want people dependent - on the grid. That's where the profits are.

Actually, the biggest problems with any kind of home energy production are:

- Getting efficiency on a small scale. A locomotive is more efficient than a truck only because it can haul a much larger load by building up speed slowly, and because it doesn't have to stop for truck traffic.

- Making the devices small enough to fit on a single plot of land is hard. Ask yourself why only the biggest dams have hydroelectric power.

- Nobody's going to buy a home-energy system if it costs 223 times what it would save in energy costs over its lifetime.

- Zoning regulations. "You can't put that on your lawn! It's ugly!"

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I don't think energy really needs to be the big problem it is. I think we have created this not because there are no alternatives, but because the alternatives are not nearly as profitable to certain people.

That's a load of mouse manure. The reason they don't have home energy systems on a large scale is because they can't get it to work efficiently enough. Solar panels are probably the most efficient home energy system, but they can't power an air conditioner, and one little hailstorm ruins them.

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Use of rail instead of trucks could also be a very effective energy saver. Unfortunately the U.S. has abandoned much of its rail system, while Europe has designed a new class of rail that is amazing.

You have to look at ALL of the economics of rail. In order for rail to be efficient, a lot of material or passengers must be moving back and forth between the TWO POINTS at the ends of the line. The locomotive costs a lot to run, and it costs nearly the same whether the train is empty or full.

So it is difficult for the only business in a small town to be able to afford rail service. The businessman must either have enough sales volume to be able to afford the entire cost of driving an engine to his town, or his town must be between two other towns, so other rail customers pick up part of the costs of running an engine.

The "US" hasn't abandoned its rail system, because in most cases, government doesn't own the rails. Private rail companies abandoned their tracks which didn't have enough demand on them to pay for the cost of maintaining the tracks and running engines on them. In many cases, it's because the primary customer on that track moved away or went out of business.

Rail does have one disadvantage: The railroad tracks are privately owned and maintained, while government pays for the "tracks" of all of the other transportation systems.

Railroad trains can't negotiate steep grades, sharp turns, or uneven terrain. So there are quite a few places the tracks simply can't go.

The same can be said for mass transit. Again, the same route must have enough passengers wanting to go between the endpooints to justify running the conveyance there. So only in the really big cities does mass transit become cost-effective.

Actually a good move for energy creation would be to focus on the creation of superconductors. Right now alot of electricity that is generated is lost during distribution through lines and transformers. A power plant could effectively increase power production 20-30% just by reducing how much is lost.

If we could get a superconductor to retain 100% of electricity without loss you could effectively store energy indefinately. Solar power then would be a very lucrative source and even lightning itself could be harnassed and distributed.

Fusion, superconductors, etc. are nowhere near ready to deploy. So while we talk about them or research them, we burn coal? Nuclear technology is ready to deploy now. Waiting for the "energy fairy" to come along with a magic bullet is a recipie for disaster.

You all need to check out this article over on the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/magazine/16nuclear.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

You may have to log in but a brief summary of the article is about reducing C02 and dependance on oil by using Nuclear Power and how no new plants have been built in 30 years and how much safer it is now compaired to the last 3 decades. Anyway, it's a really good read and I highly recommend it to everyone.

Come on folks; if we're going to solve this problem we need to stop thinking inside the box that got us here. While nuclear power is safer than it was there's still a serious waste problem associated with it. Spent fuel rods are still 90% radioactive. Add to that a very bad decision by the Department of Energy to decommission the only breeder reactor in the U.S., thereby preventing further radioactive reduction of spent fuel and we replace global warming with a widespread radioactive storage problem.

Scientists around the world have been exploring alternative energy sources for decades with very promising results; some of those could be implemented rather quickly sans the lobbying power of MNCs. Exploration in hydrogen energy sources are heavily backed by the current U.S. administration even though this is one of the least promising energy directions to date.

Finding in quantum physics support an entirely new energy paradigm and this science is solid. However, people must implement the solutions to global warming and that's going to require new thought patterns. There are solutions that include CO2 reduction without settling for an increase in nuclear waste.

Please re-read the original post. I'm not saying we shouldn't implement efficiency measures, nor build out renewables. We need to do those things but they won't be enough given what we know today. In the meantime, we burn coal for baseload power. In the decades that it will take to achieve breakthroughs in biofuels production and/or power banking for intermittent renewable sources, something needs to provide our power. The waste problem is overblown - take the trouble to read about it, then compare it to the problem of disposing of gigatons of CO2 waste from coal. Then factor in that the coal will eventually run out.

djmcmahon, I appreciate what you're saying and I agree that we need to provide alternative fuels quickly. But we should remember that acting without considering the longterm implications of a decision is what got us into this global warming mess in the first place. We should not repeat that mistake.

The nuclear waste problem is far from overblown. The public has very little correct information about nuclear waste. I worked on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation for seven years and am very aware of the issues associated with nuclear waste cleanup.

There are many things we can start doing right now to ease global warming. One of those things is to pressure MNCs to stop cattle grazing in the Amazon basin. Another is to stop the aerial spraying of herbicides on the northern portion of the Amazon rainforest by the U.S. government in the name of cocaine irradication. Each of us can change our minds about energy use and become more aware of how we waste energy.

We can't remove CO2 from the atmosphere but we can stop producing so much of it. Each one of us has a duty to do his/her part in reducing greenhouse gases. We need to change our thinking patterns about alternative fuels as well. MNC's have fed the public a lot of disinformation regarding alternative fuels. We need to become informed about the science of energy instead of listening to the hype spewed by MNCs onto the airwaves.

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However, one problem with nuclear is the volatility of the system (as we saw in Chernobyl).

hmmmmm, it might be worth noting that Chernobyl was a russian power plant.
Nuclear power is ALOT safer than people make it out to be. It should be worth noting that most of russia's engineering marvels have ended in disaster.
The ONLY other disaster most people know about is three mile island.
It should also be worth noting that it was NOTHING compared to the Chernobyl disaster.

After these disasters, a massive overhaul began to modernize and simplify reactor control rooms. Also worth noting is that american nuclear plants have a 14 foot thick concrete structure surrounding all reactors that are able to withstand a nuclear meltdown

Ememc2 :

Thinking inside the box ?.
Have plenty of electric is to stop haveing so many new babies as if we will run out of bigger population.

Increased human activity and wars will kill mothernature to feed us and fuel supply to run our factorys and cars will be just a memory for our grand children.

More new power sources ?. How much hotter will earth become ?.
But then we will all be dead and won't matter.

Can our air conditioner run to cool our houses be a sweat box in our last days ?.


John T.

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Originally posted by ememc2:
Come on folks; if we're going to solve this problem we need to stop thinking inside the box that got us here. While nuclear power is safer than it was there's still a serious waste problem associated with it. Spent fuel rods are still 90% radioactive. Add to that a very bad decision by the Department of Energy to decommission the only breeder reactor in the U.S., thereby preventing further radioactive reduction of spent fuel and we replace global warming with a widespread radioactive storage problem.

Scientists around the world have been exploring alternative energy sources for decades with very promising results; some of those could be implemented rather quickly sans the lobbying power of MNCs. Exploration in hydrogen energy sources are heavily backed by the current U.S. administration even though this is one of the least promising energy directions to date.

Finding in quantum physics support an entirely new energy paradigm and this science is solid. However, people must implement the solutions to global warming and that's going to require new thought patterns. There are solutions that include CO2 reduction without settling for an increase in nuclear waste.

I appreciate the problems at Hanford but Hanford was a very old facility for producing weapons-grade material. That is not indicative of the problems of handling reactor waste. That waste can be reprocessed to separate the relatively short-lived, dangerous fission products from the long-lived, low-level transuranics. The latter can be reused as fuel. (We banned reprocessing for political reasons in the 70s, so as a consequence a larger-than-necessary amount of waste has accumulated at reactor sites - even this is way less than the CO2, radioactive ash, and acit rain pumped out by the equivalent coal-burning capacity.) Adopting breeder technology would burn virtually all of the transuranics, leaving (by mass) a relatively small amount of waste. Check out the PBS special on nuclear power in France. The net amount of waste is extremely small.

People are not willingly going to drop back to pre-industrial life and switch off the electricity and running water. Exactly the opposite is going to happen - billions of people who don't have these things in India and China are demanding them. Environmental activists that oppose all hard-path generation technologies and push renewables as the only way forward need to show that those sources can meet the demand. Realistically, they cannot, and I think most of the activists know it.

This head-in-the-sand attitude may work for a while, forcing people to endure rolling blackouts with increasing frequency. Eventually, people will get fed up with that, and they'll wake up to the fact that the activists are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Unthinking support for them will collapse, and then, if given no other choice, they'll burn coal and damn the GW consequences.

Re. the population question, I think we need to accept the fact that world population is going to grow to 9 billion by 2050. The good news is that the growth rate had been dropping for decades, so the projection is for 9.5 billion by 2100. Short of detestable measures like genocide or totalitarian one-child policies, this needs to be accepted as one of the parameters of the current situation, against which proposed solutions need to be compared.

Skepticism bristles when people use the word "activists" to mean any notion offering a solution that upsets a personal paradigm. We desire to find solutions that don't cost more, don't change the way we live, basically those solutions that keep our personal futures locked into the current pattern because our current pattern is comfortable to us. This is a head-in-the-sand attitude and the most valuable condition of the human psyche to those who desire to exploit the world's resources for power/profit.

John D. Rockefeller and his Standard Oil set the stage long ago. JDR's activism change the course of human history through massive competitor exploitation without consideration beyond profit motive. The stage is already set to disallow all forms of energy generation other than fossil fuels on a wide scale. This is why alternative energy sources have not been developed more quickly. I hope I'm stating the obvious.

Industrialization leads to increasing demand for energy as jdmcmahon has stated. As China and India industrialize, assisted by U.S. trade, Standard Oil's progency gain power. Only when fossil fuels are depleted will Big Oil give up its death grip on the planet unless widespread "activism" takes place. That means recognizing that we can't release the death grip of Big Oil by continuing to consume their products at any price.

Environmental activists have no duty to prove that alternative energy sources can meet the energy demands of a burgeoning industrialized human population. Support for environmentalists is about looking at the current state of global impact. Most people don't want to face the fact that we have a crisis on our hands and anyone who says we have a crisis is resisted. This is non-critical thinking. Environmentals are not the problem and never have been. They're just an easy target for those who tend to cling their own comfort zone.

Exponential human population growth is certainly a factor that needs consideration. Scientifically, human population growth is known as the "current mass extinction." Resisting "totalitarian one-child policies" is an archaic and myopic viewpoint. An ecosystem can only sustain what it can sustain. When a species reproduces quickly enough to deplete resources, that species must relocate and ultimately all resources will be depleted and the species will perish. No species can consume all resources; no matter how much nuclear energy can be provided to maintain the current energy paradigm there is an end to it.

Much better to change the thinking patterns that go with energy consumption. That may not be possible in the U.S. but it is certainly possible in countries that are not as dependent or propagandized as we are. Since the U.S. consumes 25% of the world's resources we will have an impact on the planet regardless. I thank activists and the scientific community who are stepping up to the plate on this daunting task in the U.S.

Good luck convincing the Chinese and Indians that are living impoverished third-world lifestyles that they should resist what you see as the evils of industrial society. As for me, I look every day at the benefits of that society and I've concluded they're worth the cost. Many people I know would not even be alive were it not for high-tech medical care made possible by industrial production techniques, just to pick one example. No one's stopping you from going back to an agrarian lifestyle if you want to.

Environmentalists are just trying to improve things, not make them worse...and um ahem I'm sort of an environmentalist so to me those that say "environmentalists are the problem" is an insult. Why do you think they call them environmentalists? because they care about the environment and the world's needs. Also if most just think of electricity and fuel as a necessity as greentoad implied, things are not going to last long as the human race toxifies the planet. We should not have ever made gasoline or that in the first place that way probably the world would not be as bad.

I think the stone age ended not because there wasn't enough stones and because there was a better way to live and conserve energy.