Why Cheney's Nuke Plan Will Not Solve Global Warming - But Solar Now Can!

Why Nuclear Power is Not The Answer to Global Warming

In “An Inconvenient Truth”, Al Gore makes it clear that global warming is a true crisis for humanity. Indeed it’s a calamity of unprecedented proportions in the history of our species. It’s even worse than most know, for if methane peat bogs in Russia and Canada ever melt and release all that methane greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, we are really cooked. Global warming is a misnomer as we are in reality looking at climate disruption followed by climate destruction.

So what can we do to survive? Nuclear power? Wind? Solar? What’s the answer?

Since 2000, the nuclear power industry has pumped millions into a PR campaign touting nuclear energy as the solution to global warming. Dick Cheney wants nuclear power everywhere, even nukes making "black hydrogen" out of oil sands. There have even been a handful of prominent environmentalists who have “reconsidered” nuclear power, primarily Stewart Brand, the editor of The Whole Earth Catalog.

Yet unknown to most, Brand is now a paid consultant to nuclear energy companies for the last several years, including PG&E, Southern California Edison and Duke Power. Another “convert” is Patrick Moore, who left Greenpeace 20 years ago, and is today paid by the so-called Clean And Safe Energy Coalition, financed entirely through the Nuclear Energy Institute.

http://www.laweekly.com/general/features/green-to-the-core-part-1/151/

Moore’s clients also include The Vinyl Institute, for his defense of the polluting plastic industry and he has spoken at public hearings for the timber industry, joking that “clear-cuts are just temporary meadows”. The late Hugh Montefiore is a third environmentalist, ejected from the UK Friends of the Earth when he went over to the pro-nuclear side, and then there’s James Lovelock, the co-founder of the Gaia Hypothesis. If we leave aside the two paid spokesmen, that makes only two prominent environmentalists, and only Lovelock is actually a scientist.

There’s good reason so few have changed their position on nuclear power.

How many nuclear plants would we really need to make a dent in global warming? The number is in the thousands. The total global installed electrical capacity on Earth is 3800 Gigawatts, while nuclear reactors worldwide were at 368 GW (installed in 2005). Installed wind power stands at 60 GW in 2005, while solar is a mere 5.5 GW installed. Hydro is 740 GW installed on Earth. Most of the rest is fossil fuel, especially coal and natural gas. A hundred new coal plants each are currently planned for both the US and China, which is true folly. Oil meanwhile primarily goes to heat and transportation, now being sucked up at the global rate of a billion barrels every 10 to 11 days.

Assuming we went from gasoline-powered to electric or hydrogen cars, we would need around 2,000 1 GW nuclear plants worldwide to really end the reign of fossil fuel here in the present. Yet the real carbon emission crisis lies in emerging Third World economies, which are projected to be half the increase in carbon through 2025. Thousands and thousands of dirty village diesel generators will soon be coming online, some funded by the World Bank and other agencies.

Any nuclear solution to global warming would thus have to replace these small diesels, which are spread out over vast regions. Many of the new nuclear reactors would need to be smaller 100 MW units, with construction of long transmission lines to all those villages and towns. After figuring in future needs and this Third World diesel village generator problem, we would need additional hundreds of big 1 GW plants and then several thousand smaller facilities spread out all over the Third World. But do we really want thousands of 100 MW reactors in places like Burkina Faso, Niger and Laos? And who would pay to construct those unprofitable transmission lines going everywhere?

In fact, trying to reduce carbon by building thousands of new nuclear power plants would clearly put us on the wrong road to planetary survival.

Here’s why. There is only so much high-grade uranium ore so far found on Earth, and its price has soared in recent years from $7 to $30 a pound, with some analysts predicting $110 a pound within 5 years. At current rates of use, all the known high-grade reserves are used up in a few decades. Having many new plants, producing for example 50% of the world’s electricity rather than 16%, means that the reasonably priced high-grade stuff will be used up in less than a decade. Then we are stuck with refining and enriching low-grade ore, containing the vast majority of uranium on Earth.

It turns out that with low-grade, we would have to mine 5 times as much ore, transport 5 times more, and process 5 times more--all done with fossil fuel for 30 to 40 years to keep the plants going. Uranium processing also releases tons of CFCs into the atmosphere, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Plus all nuclear plant construction would be accomplished with fossil fuel.

According to a 2003 study by Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith, when it is all added up, the high-grade ore nuclear fuel cycle produces only three times fewer greenhouse gases than modern natural-gas power stations. Low-grade uranium ore would make the carbon trade-off negligible. Nuclear is not greenhouse gas-free.
(http://www.stormsmith.nl/).

Another question arises over nuclear power. Is it wise to create more radioactive waste, when the Yucca Mountain Waste Site—legal capacity 70,000 tons--is already “full” thanks to the 80,000 tons of waste currently stored near the 104 U.S. nuclear reactors? And Yucca may never even open. How can we start producing many, many times the waste, when we still can’t open one single waste depository?

Given Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, part of the nuclear industry’s PR campaign is to convince a skeptical public there is a new design for a reactor that cannot melt down. This is the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor—but there are several issues the industry does not tell the public about the PBMR.

Pebble reactors work by harnessing the heat released by radioactive pebbles the size of tennis balls, which move slowly through the reactor core. It’s true they are harder to go into meltdown, but pebble bed nuclear reactors can erupt in a graphite fire. David Lochbaum of The Union of Concerned Scientists explains:

“There is no free lunch. While it may not melt down, it could catch on fire. The pebble bed is like the Chernobyl reactor in that it uses an awful lot of graphite. None of our reactors operating in the United States use graphite in the core. Graphite is just carbon. If the carbon catches on fire, it's pretty hard to put out. It's particularly hard if you're using airflow to cool the reactor, which the pebble bed does. If you have a fire and you stop the airflow, you also stop the heat removal. So you may stop the fire and start the meltdown. You may not be able to get `fireproof' and `meltdown proof’, you may have to pick one or the other.”

Unfortunately, pebble bed reactors also generate 10 times the waste for the same amount of electricity. When Stewart Brand was informed of this, he replied: “It may well be true about the pebble bed and waste. But then, okay, back to the old drawing board!" Yet Brand went right back to touting pebble reactors at the industry events he is hired to speak at.

Worst of all, the corporations and the government have convinced themselves that pebble nuclear reactors are “inherently safe”. So they plan to build each one without containment buildings--allowing them to add reactor module after reactor module. The truth is that PBMRs are air-cooled, so they need convection--which a containment building would hinder. The industry continues to tell the public the pebble reactors are “inherently safe”.

Yet as Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb said, "Sooner or later a fool will prove greater than the proof even in a foolproof system."

When the Germans built a working 300 MW pebble reactor, the lack of a containment building proved to be a real mistake on May 4, 1986, when a defective fuel pebble got stuck in the feeder tube and caught fire. It is in the end impossible to assure that every nuclear pebble is perfect, with no defects, and that’s what they need to be.

The resulting graphite inferno contaminated a 2-kilometer area around the plant on the Ruhr River in Hamm-Uentrop. Germany shut the plant down permanently, citing it as “unsafe”. Pebble reactor manufacturers have yet to address the possibility of graphite fires in any of their proposals to governments. They simply ignore it.

Another real issue is a terrorist attack Any nuclear reactor is subject to one. The government is predicting that the War on Terror is going to last decades. Unfortunately, in mock terrorist attacks conducted by the NRC, fully half of the terror gangs succeeded in gaining control of the plant’s safety systems. If they had been real instead of mock terrorists, control of plant safety could have lead to meltdowns or releases. Recommendations for increased security have included the National Guard being deployed around each plant to restrict land, water and air access.

On September 11, 2001, Mohammed Atta himself flew United Flight 11 right down the Hudson River, thankfully passing the Indian Point power plant. If Atta had decided to descend and had rammed the jetliner into the unhardened building housing the used fuel rod pool, the resulting catastrophe would have been centered in the Hudson Valley. The lethality of the resulting fire and its smoke, laced with the radioactivity of decades worth of fuel-rods, must be understood to comprehend what the threat of a terrorist attack is all about. Obviously, building thousands of nuclear plants would greatly increase the risk of terrorist attack or take-over.

Meanwhile, the top US climate modeler, Dr. James Hansen, gives us just 10 years to stabilize carbon emissions before warming is irreversible. If so, nuclear reactors are not the answer. Previously, it took 10 to15 years just to get a single nuclear plant permitted, and that would only be worse today. In addition, the new pebble reactors would require tens of billions of research dollars and decades of R&D to commercialize. It would all be too late.

Then there are the unfair subsidies nuclear energy must receive to make a profit, over $140 billion in subsidies over the years (NIRS). Even with these, no one has financed a new nuclear plant in the US since Three Mile Island released enough radiation to trigger the evacuation of small children and pregnant women from Harrisburg on March 30, 1979.

All this for a technology that was initially advertised as being a power source that would one day be “Too Cheap To Meter”. The catastrophic liability insurance, decommissioning, uranium enrichment and waste disposal tabs are mostly picked up by the American taxpayers, sometimes camouflaged by lumping them in with the nuclear weapons program. There should be a level economic playing field, without subsidies for obsolete reactors.

So if nuclear reactors are not the answer, what’s the solution to global warming? In fact, we need a mix of solutions: primarily conservation, wind, solar, some hydro and natural gas (with sequestered carbon).

Conservation is not “wishful thinking”, as Dick Cheney said. Europeans, for example, use half the energy Americans do. Conservation can reduce US energy use substantially, even more if we switch to plug-in hybrid cars that charge with the wasted “off-peak amps” produced by our base-load power plants each and every night. That’s right, every night there is excess base-load capacity, as much as 30% excess in most regions, which would easily charge much of the US commuter fleet for the average 25 mile per day trip. All without adding a single power plant or using any extra fuel.

Conservation equipment has been shown to cost only 2-3 cents a kWh, thus every penny spent on nuclear reactors wastes a least twice the money compared to spending it on switching to more efficient lightbulbs, building methods, etc. Amory Lovins of The Rocky Mountain Institute: “buying nuclear power instead makes global warming worse. Why? If delivering a new nuclear kWh cost only (say) 6¢, while saving a kWh cost (pessimistically) 3¢, then the 6¢ spent on the nuclear kWh could instead have bought two efficiency kWh.”

Meanwhile, wind power is predicted to far outpace nuclear power increases over the coming years. Amory Lovins explains the new shape of the energy market: “The International Energy Agency forecast in 2003 that in 2010, wind could add nine times as much capacity as nuclear added in 2004, or 84 times its planned 2010 addition. Eight years hence, just wind plus industry-forecast PVs could surpass installed global nuclear capacity. The market increasingly resembles a 1995 Shell scenario with half of global energy, and virtually all growth, coming from renewables by mid-century--about what it would take, with conservative efficiency gains, to stabilize atmospheric carbon.”

In addition, there is hydroelectricity, with much capacity around the world. 20 GW of hydro-electric power in the US alone can be supplied by current dams which right now have no generators (FERC), so no new dams need be built.

At the same time, modern combined cycle gas generators, with only a third the emissions of a coal plant, can support the bulk of the transition to lower carbon levels quickly. Natural gas is unfortunately necessary as a temporary measure in the response to the crisis of global warming. Natural gas prices will drop from current levels, as supply quadruples with the completion of several LNG terminals. Plus there are now sequestration methods that trap the carbon and inject it into underground geological formations, successfully done in Norway. Later, when we are creating “green” hydrogen from water, these temporary natural gas facilities can be converted to that.

The Solar Breakthrough of the 21st Century: Concentrating Photvoltaics

Finally, there is a fantastic new breakthrough in solar technology.

Solar power has just leapt from 11% efficiency to 40%. Just as a magnifying glass can burn a hole in a newspaper, a set of magnifying lenses can increase the amount of electricity produced by a special solar “chip”. In fact, a working prototype has operated for a year without problems in El Cajon, California, churning out 6.6 kilowatts from a 23-foot diameter, floating circular platform, which I confirmed on a trip to the West Coast.

Currently, five acres of panels are needed to produce one Megawatt. Within a year the new technology, from a company named Pyron Solar, will reduce that to a mere one acre per Megawatt. The National Renewable Energy Lab in July 2005 put out a press release predicting that concentrating photovoltaics will soon be cost-competitive with fossil-fuel, lowering solar to just $3 a watt installed. Ordinary solar panels today are $5 to $6 a watt or more--without any installation.

The great thing is, a practical concentrating solar PV device is here now, not 15 years from now. Plus the Boeing-Spectrolab chips work on gallenium, so there is no chance of being held back by the current silicon shortage that is plaguing solar power. In fact, the European Science Agency released a report in 2004 stating that nuclear power was apparently no longer needed to avoid global warming, as new breakthroughs such as the concentrating photovoltaic prototype by Pyron promised to alter the energy landscape.

So let’s not get distracted and waste our money on building thousands of pebble nuclear reactors that each generate ten times the radioactive waste, in a process that ends up emitting greenhouse gas anyway. The mix of conservation and the energy solutions given above makes sense and nuclear reactors are not needed.

Our country and the world needs to go on a war footing over global warming. If the Allies won World War II and beat the fascists, we can pull together in the same way and overcome this challenge with energy initiatives around the globe.

Let’s have community conservation drives. We can set local conservation goals and use the media, events and local organizing to meet them. And let’s spend our time and money on the real solutions of renewables, the emergency gas plants and especially the fantastic new solar breakthrough in concentrating photovoltaics.

For it is this exciting new solar technology that finally gives us a fighting chance against global warming. So get out your magnifying glass and take a closer look--because here comes the Sun!

Lots of good information here.

K&R'd

:kick: for solar power!!!

Over one-half of the total U.S. hydroelectric capacity for electricity generation is concentrated in three States (Washington, California and Oregon) with approximately 27 percent in Washington, the location of the Nation’s largest hydroelectric facility – the Grand Coulee Dam.

It is important to note that only a small percentage of all dams in the United States produce electricity. Most dams were constructed solely to provide irrigation and flood control.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids/energyfacts/sources/renewable/water.html

if the hundreds of dams just in the US were retrofitted to produce electricity, it would be a great leap forward.

in the US at dams already built and at dams where siting and transmission lines would not cause a big ruckus. There's another 16 Gigs at dams where putting in a generator WOULD be a problem.

20 Gigawatts is 10 Indian Points.

You can see how this would all work...

does someone have a conversion chart, I'm all confused.

2 Gigawatts.

http://www.garnersclassics.com/wavs/gigawa.wav



1.21 Gigawatts!!!

Thanks!



How many gigawatts does the US use every day? do you know?

How much is a 'quad'?

"Putting this in perspective, the US used 98.2 Quads of energy in 2003"
http://dwoolstar.blogspot.com/2006/06/great-information-from-original.html

"FERC estimated about 20 Gigawatts in the US at dams already built..."

gigs per day? year?

Figuring out capacity takes awhile. Look up US electrical generating capacity on Google.

> How much is a 'quad'?

A "quad" is a quadrillion (10¹⁵, = 1,000,000,000,000,000) BTUs of heat energy.

That's about 300 billion kilowatt hours of electricity.

That's about 17 Indian Point nukes running full-bore all year long.

Tesha

This article makes me think that this will be sooner than expected. :bounce:

Start celebrating in December 2007...

I'll add it to my collection on alternative energy.

Have ya?

I was there. It kicks ass!

The inventor is about 85 years old and is a genius like Tom Edison.

Spectrolab GaAs triple-junction cells, like those used in the Pryon unit, under 500 suns are almost 40% efficient. The GaAs cells, as used on satelites or the little Mars rovers are quite expensive. But the concentrator cells for terrestrial use allow many cells to be cut from a single wafer which drops the per-unit price a bunch. The fesnel lenses that concentrate the sunlight are cast from silicone which makes then very cheap. Concentrator arrays are already in use by utilities in Australia (in a mirrored concentrator susyem) and you will see other companies producing them as well. The corner has been turned on solar energy production with increases in efficiency and greatly lowered deployment costs.

Here are the utility mirror arrays. They use a single regular sized Spectrolad cell.

http://www.solarsystems.com.au/

Here is another Aussie firm with some great ideas for more residential and urban uses. This website has a shitload, an Australian shitload, which is larger than American or English shitloads, of interesting data.

http://www.greenandgoldenergy.com.au/


Naturally, alt energy should be aproached from all possible directions. Solar, wind, tide, methane from animal waste, ethanol from plant waste (not agrabiz corn) and biodiesel for transportaion and heating oil. There should be movements in ALL states to legalize industrail hemp production not just for fibers but for their excellent oil production. The brazilians are making ethonal from sugar cane waste. I think maybe that would be a better source here than corn, and would allow movement back to sugar instead of HFCS. Big agra is a problem. They must be destroyed. :-)

My only quibbles would be with paragraph about natural gas.


I'm very skeptical about carbon sequestration schemes. I'm concerned about the safety and long term stability of the repositories. A sudden massive failure of a large long-term depository could be disastrous for residents in the immediate area, and even a slow leak over time would end up putting all of that carbon into the atmosphere thus undoing all of the good done by the repository. Do you have any cites on what exactly Norway is doing with the carbon?

My other quibble is with the idea of "green" hydrogen from water eventually replacing natural gas in these facilities. Whatever method is used to crack the water, energy will be required to separate the hydrogen molecules from the oxygen molecules in the water. The energy gained by then burning that hydrogen (or using it in fuel cells) will always be at least slightly less than what went in to cracking the water. The energy that went into cracking the water, however it's obtained (solar, wind, etc.), would be more efficiently utilized if it went directly into electricity production rather than being converted into free hydrogen and then back into energy. (The only exception to this would be applications that require energy stored in portable concentrated liquid or gaseous form, such as aircraft).

I agree with you about sequestration. It has been done but it took a lot of science and the Norwegians had a convenient geological formation to inject the gas into. Been going on several years.

But even without that, trading a coal plant for a natural gas plant turns out to be a good deal in the end because they do cut emissions by two thirds. I hate all fossil fuel but even Amory Lovins agrees with me. This is the reality if we are to turn global warming around quickly.

You just don't have the solar PV capacity for several years and we only have 10 years to stabilize carbon emissions. Nor is there enough wind turbine capacity. We have to gear renewable manufacturing capacity up if we are to stabilize carbon emissions within a decade.

As far as hydrogen goes, by happy circumstance when you combine the Pyron tech with the new two-stack electrolyzer from the German Space Agency, you get a high enough efficiency to make green hydrogen and that of course is needed to power planes and eventually ships. Plus hydrogen plug-in hybrid autos looks like the way to go.

I wasn't questioning that, just the two points about sequestration and the use of "green hydrogen" in stationary electric plants.

I'm just full of them tonight. :)

Hydrogen fuels. How do we transport and store it? It escapes from such little spaces (compared to fuel). Wouldn't it take expensive upgrades to gas stations for this to be feasible? I have lots of questions about hydrogen if you have the time.

THis problem is not solved yet but companies are saying they're on track to have the answer. The main advantage for hydrogen is not today but several years from now when enough funding has solved these R&D problems.

Now that Pyron can make massive amounts of hydrogen cheaply enough, we do need to figure out how to cheaply store it and distribute it.

If you can figure out a different way, that would be great!

Maybe just totally gear up factories with concentrating photovoltaics everywhere. Actually does solve it. If we could do that, then the natural gas is needed much less.

The trick is to conserve and switch to renewables without depressing the economy.

http://www.llnl.gov/str/Johnson.html

"large-scale injection for the sole purpose of isolating CO2 from the atmosphere is occurring at just one place today: the offshore Sleipner facility, owned and operated by Statoil, Norway's state oil company. Located beneath the Norwegian sector of the North Sea, the extensive Sleipner West natural gas field is characterized by a high (9 percent) concentration of CO2, well above the 2.5-percent limit imposed by European export specifications. Statoil strips excess CO2 from the recovered gas in a tower on its offshore production platform before exporting the gas to the European community. Injecting the captured CO2 into a confined aquifer-800 meters below the seabed and 2,500 meters above the Sleipner West hydrocarbon reservoir-results in no tax on Statoil for its atmospheric emissions.

Since 1996, Statoil has injected about a million tons of CO2 per year and saved $55 million per year in taxes. "

The sequestration may work in this one case, I couldn't say, but I am skeptical about long term stability.

But note that this is not the sequestration of CO2 produced from burning the gas. If I'm understanding it correctly, they are stripping off excess CO2 that happens to have been confined in the same field with the natural gas. This is being removed before the gas is burned. Even if this particular sequestration works, what they're doing is not likely to be an answer to the CO2 that is produced by the end user of the gas.

Very few electric utilities, home heaters, and gas stoves will have such a unique geological resource nearby.

You are very smart...

:blush: I'm not sure if I agree.

Today's WaPo:

"At the end of last week, natural gas in storage amounted to 2.4 trillion cubic feet, up 23 percent from a year earlier and 38 percent higher than the five-year average, according to the Energy Information Administration. As a result, natural gas prices, which spiked as high as $15 a thousand cubic feet last winter, finished yesterday at $6.32 at Henry Hub, La., an industry benchmark.

The only things that can rescue natural gas producers from having to slash prices later this year: another big hurricane or a hot summer."

Gas will soon be cheaper than coal! That will help, but we still need to go on a war footing with solar, wind and conservation--and do it globally!

3,800,000 acres = 5,937.5 square miles. that's CT and RI added together completely covered.

Nuclear energy is widespread in Europe and generates the majority of electrictity for several modern nations in a safe and clean manner.

Solar power has it's uses but it simply is not powerful enough to replace traditional coal or natural gas power plants.

3800 Gigs is the entire world installed capacity, which includes over 800 Gigs of renewable energy already.

We don't need to do that over.

150 square miles or 1/10 the size of Rhode Island would be equal to all the installed capacity of nukes in the US. Of course they wouldn't make electricity at night. 600 sq miles, or about 2/5 of RI, would replace the coal plant installed capacity of the US.

Don't forget solar requires no fuel for 30 years. Plus it reduces global warming in the out-years, so how much money will that save?

Look at the acres we farm, and the concentrating PVs would be a fraction of that. So it's very doable. Obviously the solar farms would be in deserts mostly and first used to offset dirty peak power plants for air conditioning.

Also the French nuclear program is an immoral disaster, with radioactivity from waste sites and processing contaminating not only the coast, but also dairy from Normandy and now the contamination has the Champagne producers worried. In addition, the tailings from uranium mining have severely affected the health of indigenous peoples in Africa.

Nuclear power is immoral...

This just in!

Paris, France — Greenpeace today revealed that France's iconic sparkling wine, Champagne, is threatened by radioactive contamination leaking from a nuclear waste dumpsite in the region. Low levels of radioactivity have already been found in underground water less than 10 km from the famous Champagne vineyards.

Problems at the dumpsite, including water migration leading to fissures in the storage cells have been reported to French nuclear safety agency in recent weeks (1). Greenpeace has written to the Comita des Producteur de Champagne to warn them that their production risks contamination, as experienced by dairy farmers in la Hague, Normandy.

The waste dump, Centre Stockage l'Aube (CSA) in Soulaine eastern France, contains mostly waste from Electricite de France (EdF) and AREVA, but also includes foreign nuclear waste disposed of illegally under French law (2). Every week nuclear waste is trucked across France to the Champagne site. Once full, the dumpsite will be one of the world's largest with over 1 million cubic meters of waste, including plutonium and other radionuclides.

ANDRA, the national nuclear waste agency operating the site, stated that it would not release any radioactivity into the environment when given permission for the dumpsite in the late 1980's. Greenpeace research released last week showed levels of radioactivity leaking from another dumpsite run by ANDRA in Normandy were up to 90 times above European safety limits in underground water used by farmers, and that the contamination was spreading into the countryside (3). The Champagne site will receive a total of 4 thousand terabequerels of tritium; more than three times the amount of tritium waste as the dumpsite in Normandy.

"We have been told for decades that nuclear dumpsites will not leak and that the best standards are being applied. In reality the dumpsite in Normandy is a disaster, and radioactivity is already leaking from the dumpsite in Champagne," said Shaun Burnie nuclear campaigner at Greenpeace International. "The authorities know they have a problem in Champagne already, with mistakes in the design. This is only the beginning of the problem, the bigger picture is that France has a nuclear waste crisis out of control that is threatening not only the environment and public health but also the economy of the Champagne region."

In addition to the problems with the waste stores at the site, Greenpeace has learnt recently that French nuclear safety agency DGSNR has written to AREVA seeking clarification of the type of waste being disposed of at the Champagne site (4).

In addition to the low and intermediate waste site, a new high-level waste dumpsite is being planned in Bure also in the Champagne region, in which the most radioactive material in France would be deposited. Plans to build a high level waste facility in the Rhone Valley were scrapped a few years ago after strong opposition by the wine producers due to the threat to their vines and wine production.

"The Champagne producers are facing two nuclear timebombs - one already leaking at Soulaine, and one planned at Bure. The wine producers in the Rhone region stood up to the nuclear state in France and won. The Champagne region needs to act fast before it's too late," said Fred Marillier of Greenpeace France. "The French Government must stop this madness. The new facility must not accept any more waste, and an immediate investigation launched into how to stop further contamination of ground water."

Despite having a nuclear waste crisis EdF is seeking approval to build a new reactor at Flamanville, which will increase the amount of high-level waste. Today EdFs nuclear reactors produce 1,200 tonnes of highly radioactive waste every year. The waste expected from the new reactor would be the most hazardous waste ever produced in a French nuclear power reactor

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/press/releases/radioactive-waste-leaking-into

easily be installed on the rooftops of homes across the nation. In Germany, citizens who install solar panels are hooked into the city electric grid and the electric company must pay people whose panels feed energy into the grid at 3 times the going rate per joule. Why? The cost of building a new plant is equivalent to that rate - so the electric companies are paying to install plants on the tops of peoples' homes.

There are many 10'000's of acres of 'rooftops' across the US. :-)

Sorry if I've gotten any details wrong here - I am just repeating the story as Thom Hartmann told it on his Air America radio show.

Many regions in the US are obviously not great candidates for generating major power. Obviously states with more sunshine will do better. Roof top units are better for heating water, but even those have limits as to how well they operate, and they take energy to run water pumps.

If large power generating solar panel fields are assembled in southern states, and I mean large, we are talking square miles, you still have a distribution issue getting the power from the Southern areas to the North via transmission lines.

All i'm saying is solar energy is not a perfect killer app.