Reply #41: You analogy bears no relation to the question at hand. [View All]

In generating electricity, getting more out of a single investment is always better. That is, unless you want to pave over Nevada with solar cells. That 60-acre solar plant? To produce the same real energy as a nuclear reactor, you'd have to build a cutting-edge solar facility 5,000 acres in size, or a conventional facility 35,000 acres in size. Worse yet, a 150,000 acre wind farm. Care to destroy that much open land, when a 50-acre nuclear plant does the same job?

Despite the fact that we haven't built any new nuclear plants in almost 30 years, and we've been building renewable energy all that time, nuclear power still accounts for 20% of our national electrical needs, compared to 7% for ALL solar, wind, hydro, etcetera. That's a huge difference. The facts are even more apparent when you break it down by type. Hydroelectric power accounts for 6.4 out of the 7% of non-nuclear renewables. Solar, despite all those big expensive deployments, is only 0.01% of all US electricity.

To say that solar has a real chance of supplying US energy needs is to ignore the VAST amount of electricity that we as a nation require. You can talk about conservation like it's going to make the problem go away, but even the best conservation won't eliminate our large and growing requirements for energy. It's part and parcel of running the world's most technologically advanced civilization. Do you know how much energy we require? It's around 4,000 terawatt hours a year. To accomodate that demand, you'd have to deploy around twenty billion kilowatts worth of solar cells.