Quote:
Originally Posted by SouthArk370Z
I'm not a NIMBY type person - when I lived in N IL, I could see the dome of Dresden nuclear power plant from my back porch - but nuclear is not very eco-friendly. Mining/refining the materials for the reactors produces a lot of pollution. "Disposing" of the spent material is just an accident waiting to happen; we can't build containment structures that will survive what Mother Nature can dish out over the millennia required for the material to decay.
The only real solution is a lot less consumption of energy. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how to get usage down.
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Increasing energy efficiency is a win win since it also saves you $$.
Fusion is much more efficient than fission but hasn’t been scalable up beyond the lab yet, we really need to push that since the waste is so much vastly reduced. Iirc, South Korea is leading the world in nuclear fusion development which is bs, USA should be working way harder on this.
Longer term a hydrogen powered economy is the real sustainable solution that won’t handicap amount of power production but again, we need to figure out how to produce hydrogen on a large scale w/o still using fossil fuels.
Solar is definitely a great addition in certain areas and like hotrodz said, eventually in the south west and Florida, every roof should have it. We also need technological breakthroughs regarding solar panel efficiency as well.
Basically we just have engineering and tech barriers which I’m bullish our country can overcome within the next decade or two.
In the meantime, we have plenty of oil and especially natural gas to bridge the gap without resorting to a omg, the sky is falling mentality, looking at you lefties.
