Energy Crisis: Nuclear vs Renewable Sources

[scottie]

IllegalPaladin said:

scottie said:
Hey, VGChartz girl!!

Not all countries have the capacity to use renewable energy. Those that do, should. In the end it's actually going to be cheaper, because solar and wind plants require less maintenance and waste storage.

Nuclear is just a terrible option, the waste takes 10 000 years to become safe to be near. Even ignoring Chernobyl it's a bad idea

There's still more to it than that.

If there were tons of solar farms for example, more sunlight would be reflected back into space (I don't recall exactly what it would cause). Then with wind farms, you need enough wind to keep the blades constantly turning, you need hundreds of them just to generate enough power to match something like a coal or gas plant, and then you need a ton of space to put all of those windmills.

The population will really have to step it up to clean things up in the world. Cleaner and renewable resources are only a small percentage of the total energy requirement of the world and the rest of it keeps on increasing each year.

 

 

Yeah, I know there's alot to it, this (and physics) is what I'm majoring in. Solar at least, we've not done much on wind.

 

Solar cells don't provide as much energy per metre squared as a coal plant, it is true. Even with proper funding to get the efficiency up further, it still wont. But you can put solar panels on every roof in a city, hence providing each house with most of its energy needs whilst taking up no room.

 

I agree it will be a long time until we can go 100% renewable, but we should be deffinately trying to get more and more each year.