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while I am a big fan on using nuclear energy in the way your suggesting, I'm also inclined to agree with Tsuki.

We get enough energy from the sun every second to power the earth for a month (at current home energy consumption rates). The technology is there to harvest and store that energy for use, why don't we do it?

How many thousands of dollars in tax money does the US government get from the oil companies?

We get enough energy from the sun every second to power the earth for a month (at current home energy consumption rates). The technology is there to harvest and store that energy for use, why don't we do it?

Source? Everything I've seen indicates solar energy is definitely not the answer. Nuclear power is the way to go.

Sunlight is incident on the Earth with an average intensity of 960 W/m^2, which if the collection was 100% efficient would be quite a bit of energy. The problem is two fold though, the first is that electricity is amazingly cheap. Even in Connecticut which has one of the highest rates in the U.S it costs about 17 cents/kwhr, which means that a 1 meter sq panel would save me about 17 cents per hour of daylight[edit: assuming the panel was 100% efficient, which it wouldn't be]. The panel would never pay for itself!
The second is that the manufacture and transport of solar panels isn't pollution free either. Even if we don't consider the economic side at all, we should still weigh the pollution involved in putting up solar panels against what they will offset. It isn't a guarantee (especially in a place like Connecticut) that solar panels will win out.

By the way, it may be of interest to you that photovoltaic panels aren't the only way to harness the sun's energy. There's currently a great deal of interest and research among synthetic chemists concerning the synthesis of fuel from CO2. Depending on the catalyst used CO2 in water can be reduced to carboxylic acids, alcohols or even hydrocarbons.

I heard river dams we were actually maxed out on. We can use tidal dams in the oceans but that's not as proven. Solar power works pretty well in much of the United States. I know its big in Hawaii. If the sunbelt states from southern Cal to Florida began putting them in then it'd help. But for much of the United States nuclear is the way to go. Wind works well in the midwest but not in a lot of the other sections of the country too.

Nuclear should be the way to go because of the availability of current technology for small-pellet reactors - which can be slotted in to the grid in many areas for a fraction of the resources or impact of traditional reactors - and fast reactors, which can actually burn the detritus of other reactors. However, enough work hasn't been put into these techs because of the lack of instant fiscal results, and because of the tie-ins to government which fossil fuel concerns have.

Rochey wrote:

We get enough energy from the sun every second to power the earth for a month (at current home energy consumption rates). The technology is there to harvest and store that energy for use, why don't we do it?

Source? Everything I've seen indicates solar energy is definitely not the answer. Nuclear power is the way to go.

I'll have to see If I can find that paper, I found it while preparing a speech over renewable energy.

Like Steven put, not all that energy would be able to be absorbed but if we can refine the technology to better use the energy we do absorb it could become energy effeciant.

Nuclear power does also have it's benefits as others on here have pointed out, I am a big advocate of that as well.

Photovoltaic cells are also highly inefficient so only a small fraction of the Sun's huge energy (which is over 10,000 times what's needed to power man's power needs as of right now) is recoverable in theory. Direct Energy conversion from light is tricky in general because sunlight contains a broad range of frequencies, but not all of them will be absorbed effectively. This is why plants are green: they absorb red and yellow but the green part of the spectrum they basically don't use at all. Traditional cells suffer from the high cost of silicon preparation, though there are lots of avenues being pursued for better ones.

(Traditional) Nuclear is a proven tech, but aside from the very high cost and extremely long time it takes to get a nuclear power plant online compared to a traditional fossil fuel power plant, Americans tend to be irrationally skittish (in light of the cold statistics) about anything "nuclear."

Traditional river hydro power isn't quite "clean" either due to its effect on the ecosystem of the river downstream, in fact I've heard of a program of dam closures here. Offshore tidal or wave installations have been built, though salt water corrosion and difficulty of maintenance are problems there.

Americans tend to be irrationally skittish (in light of the cold statistics) about anything "nuclear."

It's not just you lot. Nearly everyone over here freaked out when the Brits announced they were building a new nuclear power plant on their western coast.

ya, I'ver heard of Dam closings around here as well, the problem is when dam's are built they destroy down steam wetlands, which are good for filtering the water supply.

Rochey wrote:

Americans tend to be irrationally skittish (in light of the cold statistics) about anything "nuclear."

It's not just you lot. Nearly everyone over here freaked out when the Brits announced they were building a new nuclear power plant on their western coast.

Look at the mass hysteria that ensued when the incident occurred at Three Mile Island, which turned out to be a rather insignificant issue.

Hell, wasn't the TMI incident a case of the safety systems working just fine? It infuriates the hell out of me when people start screeching for something to be banned when they don't know anything about the matter at hand.

Honestly, you mention "nuclear reactor" to these people and they immediately think of Chernobyll.

Rochey wrote:It infuriates the hell out of me when people start screeching for something to be banned when they don't know anything about the matter at hand.

Uninformed opinions should be discarded as a rule.

Rochey wrote:Hell, wasn't the TMI incident a case of the safety systems working just fine?

Yep: the pumps in the reactor failed and the reactor immediately scrammed automatically as it was supposed to; a pressure release valve subsequently opened, but a simple mechanical fault kept it from closing. A very small amount of radioactive steam was released - and that's the whole thing.

wikipedia wrote:The "Kemeny Commission Report" concluded that "there will either be no case of cancer or the number of cases will be so small that it will never be possible to detect them. The same conclusion applies to the other possible health effects."[3] Several epidemiological studies in the years since the accident have supported the conclusion that radiation releases from the accident had no perceptible effect on cancer incidence in residents near the plant, though these findings have been contested by one team of researchers.[4]

and

The accident was followed by essentially a complete cessation of nuclear construction in the US.

According to the same wikipedia article, this was "the most significant accident in the history of the American commercial nuclear power generating industry" - a stance which is hardly contested. This wasn't no damn Chernobyl.

The most significant accident.....and everything was perfectly fine.