insane

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Denmark does better on wind power - 39%

Not spectacularly expensive.

It makes sense in the short term - the population really doesn't like nucle ar, and the coal-burning plant is there to take up the slack. Apparently Me rkel and Obama signed some kind of deal for more renewable energy at the re cent G7. Tomorrow's newspaper will tell me more about it - but in Dutch, si nce I'm in Nijmegen at the moment.

Of course, if it was way more expensive they wouldn't do it. Servicing and build wind mills out in the water, has to be at least 2-3 time more expensive, and something closer to 10 wouldn't surprise me.

Yes!!! this is exactly what I'm saying. "the population" is silly over solar, and irrationally afraid of nuclear.

Nuclear waste is a very small volume, there it is. And don't bury it too deep 'cause in ~100 yr's we'll want to cook it again in breeder's. George H.

Apparently Merkel and Obama signed some kind of deal for more renewable energy at the recent G7. Tomorrow's newspaper will tell me more about it - but in Dutch, since I'm in Nijmegen at the moment.

But in reality you don't know and you are just pulling numbers out of your ass, no?

How about we give it all to you and let you and all your offspring deal with it for the next 10,000 years? You make sure it never impacts anyone else and you will receive a generous salary and benefits. But you have to keep it and all impacts to yourself.

Not sure what that means, but it made me laugh.

That's a thoroughgoingly impossible standard to meet.

I have a Billy Joel song, and I am not afraid to use it.

Oh yeah sure.. I should have said that. You can look up and find the "cost" of off shore is ~x2 that of land based. I was guessing most of that was due to having to fix things from a boat.

George H.

Wow, OK, look to me your words prove my point. You have this big fear. I'm not sure why that is. Do you know there are ~hundreds of cosmic rays going through your body every second? And ground radiation all around?

Are you happy they killed Yucca Mtn.? George H.

Ok, if you have looked it up and the people doing the offshore generation say it cost twice as much, fine. But otherwise your justification is weak. It assumes that a large part of the cost of generation is the actual site construction and maintenance. I don't know how the costs break down, but I expect a fair share of it is from the actual manufacturing of those bad boys in the nice warm, level, solid floor factory.

Yes, I have a concern with the safety of nuclear waste. More than the fear of a major accident from a reactor, which I have no doubt will occur at some time in the next 30 years. While we think we have the technology to produce nuclear waste safely, we simply don't have the technology to dispose of it for the requisite time period.

How could anyone not be happy that they made a sound decision? If it had been a good idea, it would have happened. There was too much pressure to accept a poor choice that had it been a good choice there is no way it wouldn't have happened.

It's subsidized. And faddish.

The real advantage to putting wind turbines offshore is that the fires don't spread.

And there are fewer NIMBYs.

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It's about twice the price at the moment. Off-shore windmills tend to be bi gger than their on-shore counterparts, and off-shore wind is more reliable. My guess is that they'll end up cheaper when we start building lots of the m.

uclear, and the coal-burning plant is there to take up the slack.

I'm afraid that you may be irrationally gung-ho about nuclear. Nuclear wast e may not take up much space - but it emits a lot of heat (at least initial ly) so you can't bury it too deep anyway - and a very small chunk of it can kill you.

The population may have been oversold on solar - it makes a lot more sense in the Sahara and in Arizona and Nevada than it would on your roof - but th e network charges quite a lot for distributing power - it's about half the cost per kilowatt hour in Australia (which reflects in part a failure in pr ice regulation, now being corrected)and local generation doesn't have be a cheap per kilowatt hours as a big, remote, generator to make economic sense .

And there's the long term point that fossil carbon is a finite resource whe re we've already dug up the easily accessible stuff, so the price is only g oing to go up. The sun just keeps on shining.

The neighbors don't complain about the falling junk, either.

Structures designed to survive in the sea - and that includes ships - tend not to. A big storm can apply an incredible amount of force to a structure. And the environment is notoriously corrosive; not just

Well I only have one data point and that is from the wiki link in my response to Bill.

I use to think windmills out on the water would be a good idea. We could cover lake Erie (near where I live) with them. But then you start thinking about the logistics of working on the water.

The put up a land wind farm nearby... ~100 wind mills. The construction went on for (maybe) 1 year. (It was pretty cool seeing the wind blades arrive on truck... those thing are f-ing huge.)

If you run breeder reactors,

The down side is that people can make bombs from the breeder material. Maybe in a few hundred years will all be mature enough to use them and not worry about wacko's making bombs.

.... Nahhh..... George H.

Not really.

(hit send before adding this)

So what? Extreme conditions destroy structures that weren't designed to cope with them. We don't lose many ships - or off-shore installations like oil rigs - and on land tornadoes seems to flatten everything they hit.

The fact that salt wave is corrosive isn't exactly news to anybody. You design your structures with that in mind - if you've got any idea what "design" means.

Build enough of anything, and what you build costs less. A factor of ten in production volume typically roughly halves the unit cost,. It's happened at least twice with solar cells, and seems to be happening with off-shore wind turbines.

You might be interested in "Super Fuel", by Richard Martin. Think Thorium!

Yep. Here's a time-lapse installation. About half a million pounds of steel, three hundred feet high, plus a bunch of concrete.

• Once upon a time, huge caves in large underground deposits were made, and tested for storage of nuclear waste, and the loong term geological stability was determined to be waay beyond our lifetime. In other words,it was found to be a good, workable and decent solution*. But the ticks of dogs (err..of polys) got in the way (you know, poly-ticks). So the radioactive drums are stored above the ground where (theoretically) anyone can get a nice warm bath.
• In either case, the drums break down and "rot" due to the high radioactivity and the sh*t pours all over the place. Nobody used their brains to consider (in this case) fused salt containers...or glass.

• Bad math: "That would cover about 70 percent of electricity needs for all households in Massachusetts, which translates to about 1.7 of the state?s 2 million homes, Mr. White said." Gradeschool math sez 0.7*2 = 1.4, NOT 1.7.