On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 21:40:57 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 8/1/2013 2:30 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
The disadvantage of gasoline is that in a sense we're
"cheating",
because the energy stored in it was built up over millions of
years by
ancient organisms that have long decayed, and we're only now
discharging
all that build-up. We didn't pay anything to put that energy
there,
that's why it's so economical.
Yet the electric power to charge the batteries comes from
burning coal and natural gas :-)
Yeah, I know, solar, wind, etc. But that's still way off in
providing base power.
Like I said, it ain't easy being green. It's hard to do a "dust
to dust" analysis, and most of the time people simply choose to
ignore costs that are hard to calculate.
That's in the US. Most of Europe is on nuclear power.
If we set aside controversies on the dangers of plant meltdown
(BTW, Fukushima was hit by a mag 9 *and* a tidal wave, just
saying), it *is* about over 9000 times greener.
IMO, nuclear power is like airplanes: Spectacular when an
accidents happen, but at the end of the day (IMO) safer: Coal
miners die by the 100's when a cave in happens, and thousands of
people die in china due to coal pollution.
