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Old 10-04-2003, 01:21 PM   #18 (permalink)
oberon
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Location: Denver
Nuclear plants may be more cost efficient, but they still have a stability problem. As I understand it, nuclear plants typically can't shutdown and startup within the same day (cooling down and heating up a reactor is a lengthy process). So they are only good as 'baseload' power plants. I think solar, geothermal, and hydroelectric are useful to supplant the base electricity load. And it'd be great if such energy can be utilized in machines small and cheap enough for normal people to buy and install near their homes.

Fossil fuel plants need to be retired. Hopefully, before long, nuclear fusion will be practical to deploy and we will then not need to worry about fuel supply and disposal.

BTW, solar panels are cheaper than that. 500W of solar panels costs about $2k these days. And the price is going down. But there's still a big problem: the sun isn't up 24/7 except in far north or south parts during parts of the year. So people have to buy large battery caches to be powered at night. And then there's days when the sun is blocked by clouds etc. etc. :\

For now, replacing many of our coal and oil plants with nuclear ones would be a good direction to go in. Even better would be if they used breeder reactors so the fuel can be reused to an extent.
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