Idiots of course don't realize that energy, all of it, costs trillions of dollars. They think that pointing to one or two billion dollar failures is impressive. Well so far, fossil fuels is a 200 billion dollar failure and that's Iraq. Solar PV's failure is only measured of course, in a few hundred million dollars, but mostly because no one has been so stupid as to invest more. The nuclear industry, meanwhile
produces 100's of billions of dollars of product year after year with very little cost to the human race. Solar only idiots of course selectively focus on a few small nuclear failures by pretending that other energy technologies are NOT failing.
Twits...
Unremarked by anti-environmental anti-nuclear "solar only" twits is the fact that the nuclear capacity of the United States has been
increasing. Nuclear capacity has grew throughout the 1990's through improved performance, and now typically runs at close to 90% of capacity. There has not been an unscheduled scram in a nuclear reactor for more than three years.
Since 1973, US nuclear
production was less than 100 billion kilowatt
hours. In 2004, US nuclear production was almost 800 billion kilowatt-
hours. Note that these figures are in unites of energy, not power under ideal operating capacity, and thus are unambiguous except for twits whose minds are too weak to understand the difference between peak power and total performance Thus nuclear capacity has risen by 800% since 1993. Moreover, in spite of not one new plant being added the capacity nearly
doubled since 1990.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/nuc_generation/gensum.htmlNow, I recognize that the religious opponents of nuclear energy, who clearly are incapable of thinking, hate to attach the word "success" to performance like that, but for everyone else, doubling production in an already
existing plant would certainly be characterized as "success." These solar only twits try to say "three mile island" over and over and over and over and over, so we all are stuck in 1979, when people actually believed that solar power would provide an appreciable energy source by "the turn of the century."
Of course the century turned 5 years ago, and the solar only twits probably need to go back to 1979 in order to sound credible. Because in 2005 they have a quarter of a century of balderdash with very little to show for it.
Now, anti-environmental anti-nuclear twits like to pretend that there is just oodles and oodles of solar capacity being installed. They want us to keep those solar rosary beads out and in our fingers. They lie to themselves and everyone else with twittery in which they rate themselves in "watts," and by demonstrating an illustrative inability to compare two integers, even when they differ by factors of 100. For instance, I actually had one such twit announce to me that the Rancho Seco plant (983 Megawatts) was replaced by 2 "megawatts" of solar power. The moron in question reproduced the PR marketing picture showing the (low capacity) solar cells in front of the shut plant. What the moron in question did not tell anyone, as usual, is that solar cells operate typically at 15% of the rated ("rating" in this case being another word for "bullshit") capacity.
After more than 4 decades of "solar only" proselytizing, empty promises and blab and blubber, here are the
real energy outputs for various forms of energy:
http://www.cmu.edu/all/Lecture711.pdfRead 'em and weep. Nuclear power produced 8.0 quadrillion BTU's, representing 66% of the total
domestic oil production of the US (12.1 quadrillion BTUs). (Oil imports represented another 31 quads.)
Solar? 0.1 billion quads, all highly subsidized.
Wind? 0.1 billion quads.
The world capacity of nuclear power is about to rise by 15%, to an incredible 410,000 gigawatts operating in the 80-90% capacity range. Proposed reactors will add another 15%, if humanity survives coal apologists, including the retards in the Greenpeace "solar only" crowd who want us to fall back on coal when, as they have been doing decade after decade after decade, they fail yet again to deliver on their big, hollow, global climate change enhancing promises. In contrast, the new nuclear capacity, is not represented by some garbage about what "could" happen or some dumb blurb from Greenpeace illiterates about what
might or can represent 25% of world energy demand in 2050, after Bangladesh has gone under water, but by real capacity that is either under construction or on order.
Solar twits with weak minds who understand zero about energy might like to pretend that a "shortage of solar cells," is some kind of achievement. What it really says is that the solar industry is so withered and weak that it can't address a tiny increase in a tiny existing capacity. In the double standard of this crowd, this is some kind of success, while the nuclear capacity that cranks along happily increasing production, producing nearly a fifth of the world's electricity, year after year is a failure. To make this "brilliant" analysis, of course, "solar only" twits, who keep decade after decade crowing how the "cost of solar power is coming down," ignore totally that their pet industry is still a weeny sized industry that has done next to zero to attack the existing and immediate crisis of global climate change.
They think loud-mouthed crying about 30 year old accidents and promising something they
say30 years from now will stop global climate change. They are, as always, completely dishonest. In fact they are every bit as dishonest as the coal pushing Bushies and other Repukes who keep signing meaningless and useless "tax breaks" for solar (think trillion solar roofs bill), as if everyone can just whip out 20 or 30 grand in hopes of a 3 thousand dollar tax rebate from a bankrupt government. Well maybe the rich ill educated guys swilling beer in a bar after the Greenpeace meeting can afford these sorts of things using money from daddy's trust fund, but most of the rest of the world is compelled to live in reality. The global climate change crisis is not going to happen when "solar only" scientific illiterates learn the difference between power and energy.
It is happening now.
Anti-environmental anti-nuclear weak thinking "solar only" twits don't want anyone to worry about global warming of course, because global warming cannot be solved by their religious incantations and religious recitations. If, however, they would simply stop saying what they "can" "might" "could" do, and do what the nuclear industry, a huge success, has done
by producing, there wouldn't be need for all the promises. Instead there would be praise for their success, and maybe even gratitude for it as well. The solar PV industry would simply exist on a
grand scale, and be of huge economic importance, even if, as a fully functioning industry it would lose its need for constant doublespeak and cheer leading. There wouldn't be a global climate change crisis. People would be happily installing their solar cells from Home Depot, as a matter of course. In short, there would be the solar nirvana promised way back in the 1960's and 1970's.
Instead all actually exists is talk, more "could" and "might."
Oh and selective finger pointing too.
Repeat after them: "Chernobyl! Chernobyl! Chernobyl! Three Mile Island! Three Mile Island! Three Mile Island!" If we chant these words enough times, maybe we can really make these disasters seem like the world stopping event that a runaway greenhouse effect would represent. Chernobyl Chernobyl Chernobyl Three Mile Island Three Mile Island Three Mile Island are clearly much worse disasters than say, the melting of every mountain glacier on earth would represent. That's why everyone in the Ukraine and everyone in Pennsylvania is dead. Why, because anti-environmental anti-nuclear twits say so.
Twits...
The "solar only" crowd can't shut up, of course, because they are too stupid to know how stupid continual over promising and under delivering actually sounds. Unfortunately, they can't put up either. And given the immediate collapse of the atmosphere, that's a
real problem.