"NISA said the amount of radiation released into the atmosphere from the plant.. was around 10 percent that of Chernobyl."Of course, radiation is still being leaked, but "Radiation released into the atmosphere peaked from March 15 to 16. Radiation is still being released, but the amount now has fallen considerably."1
Just to have actual numbers involved, these are 2009 figures for energy produced (in millions of tons of oil equivalent):Per Wikipedia Germany is at 17% of electricity production, that discounts all transportation usage entirely however.
Oil: 3,882.1
Natural Gas: 2,653.1
Coal: 3,278.3
Nuclear Energy: 610.5
Hydroelectric: 740.3
Total: 11,164.3
Converting from MW to millions of tons equivalent gives me:
Solar: 17.3
Wind: 120.6
We went to the moon. The fucking moon! There were thousands who said it couldn't be done. They said we didn't have the technology or the engineering capability to do it. But we had a leader who was visionary enough (and a looming enemy shadowing over us) to cause us to reach for the stars.The big enemy isn't just one thing. There's also the countries, industries, corporations, and individuals that are heavily invested in fossil fuel production and consumption. They won't go down quietly, and as long as fossil fuels are projected to not run out in the next year, they won't care.
That's what we need now with green and renewable energies. We need a leader who will say "We can do this in 10 years" and who means it. We need our most brilliant and brightest scientists and engineers working on solar and wind and bio and gene-hacking to get us to that place. And we need an enemy like Russia. But we already have that with climate change hanging over us.
What the hell happened to the thinking that led to great projects like the moon landings? Instead of thinking big our engineers are now too busy saying it can't be done.
Germany's been flip-flopping on nuclear for a while now and there's no indication that they're going to stop. So who knows where it'll end.
Using this approach, a solar panel roughly one square meter bathed in water could produce enough hydrogen to supply a house in a developing country with electricity for both day and night, Nocera says.
...
John Turner, a research fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, says the ability to use a virtually transparent cobalt catalyst is a key advance, and the reported efficiency is promising. "He is getting most of the efficiency out of the cell," Turner says. "If he [starts with] an 11 or 12 percent cell, which is commercially available, he should be able to do much better. But we would need to see what he can do once he gets a better cell."
James Stevens, a research fellow at Dow Chemical, says the technology still has a long way to go. "There is a lot that has to be done before this could be practical," he says. "The efficiency is low and the capital costs of these things are very high."And I suppose the capital costs of nuclear tech and offshore drilling rigs are very low once subsidies and externalities are accounted for in-kind?
If we went for broke and maxed out our capacity to produce algae, we could cut petroleum imports by 48 percent, the researchers say. But we’d need several times our annual consumption of irrigation water to do so. It isn’t terribly practical.posted by saulgoodman at 11:40 AM on April 15, 2011
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posted by Chocolate Pickle at 6:22 AM on April 12, 2011 [2 favorites]