Looking at mid term solutions: Nuclear fission is just not cost effective if you factor in all total cost of a building a secure nuclear power plant and safely dismantling it after its lifetime. Also uranium ore is a limited non renewable resource. Nuclear fusion looks similarly bad but at least deuterium and tritium is rather abundant.
Looking at ultra long term solutions: Wind power is nothing else than reducing the speed of rotation of the earth. This is similarly true for tidal power plants. Geothermal power plants will eventually destroy earths unique magnetic field.
Solar is the only true sustainable "renewable" way to produce energy in all scenarios for literally the next million years. So lets concentrate on that and not waste time on the other stuff.
Nuclear looks bad if you restrict it to 1940's technology. Which we have done. We don't allow ourselves to dream any more when it comes to nuclear. We are still building the same plants we designed for submarines and bombs, and wondering why they aren't great for power. There are safer, cheaper, lower waste alternatives if we'd allow ourselves to try them (Thorium reactors, for example).
Does wind power really reduce the speed of the earth? I'd assume wind energy comes from the sun heating the atmosphere, so wind power is really just solar power in a different form.
Solar makes me really sad. The amount of land it consumes is staggering. Land that can't be used for other living things. I saw the most beautiful farmland in Italy this month smothered under sterile black waves of solar panels.
> Nuclear looks bad if you restrict it to 1940's technology.
The research in nuclear is still been done very actively. My country is putting hundreds of millions per year into nuclear research. But even the new technologies are not competitive. The infrastructure and maintenance required for nuclear technologies is vastly more expensive than solar. The thorium hype is moot because nobody ever demonstrated a working molten salt reactor. And even if it works it is still very expensive, suffers from corrosion and produces radioactive waste that is expensive to dispose of. Nuclear technology is old. All the physics behind it is more or less known for 60 years. Very smart people had a lot of money available to come up with something during that whole time. I don't expect any ground braking innovation in that field any more.
> Does wind power really reduce the speed of the earth?
You can measure that by yourself. In my location the if you average over all wind directions during a year you clearly get very west wind bias. That is the amount of Energy you take from earths rotation.
> I saw the most beautiful farmland in Italy this month smothered under sterile black waves of solar panels.
Of course it is stupid to put solar panels on farmland. But there are so many desserts in America that America alone could power three globes only with solar power. Only half of the roof of my house is covered with solar panels and I would easily get through the summer. If I populate the rest of the roof I would get through the winter if there was a possibility for cheap storage that lasts half a year.
Also I find wind farms in nature equally disturbing.
"The rotation of the earth does have an effect on the direction of the wind, but it does not create it. Wind is primarily driven by differences in air pressure. These variations in air pressure are due to temperature differences caused by variations in solar energy received at the surface of the earth."
Conservation of angular momentum doesn't care about the origin of those winds. If you harvesting net average west wind you are slowing down earths rotation.
I think you need to retake that physics course where you learned about conservation of angular momentum.
Use of wind energy has zero effect on the total angular momentum of the Earth + atmosphere. It might cause a glitch as it ramps up and reduces average wind speed, but after that conservation of angular momentum ensures it cannot cause any further change.
Yes because Earth is not a closed system. If you reduce the speed of rotation and radiate the acquired Energy into space the total angular momentum (in the universe) stays the same but the angular momentum of only Earth + atmosphere changes.
Tides, I could see, maybe. But wind? How is this going to have any non-negligible effect? The gravitational coupling of the atmosphere to the Sun or Moon is small.
The transport of angular momentum from the Earth by radiation is very small, and the change in that due to changes in wind is even smaller.
Devastating! Chernobyl on the other hand is one of the most beautiful tourist locations to this day!
Really though, it baffles me how people can bring degrading postcard quality into a discussion with stakes of a few billion human lives with a straight face...
You said it yourself, nuclear is bad for the private sector as they can't rake the same returns as dirtier technologies. So why shouldn't we just let the public government do it? The U.S. Navy has more nuclear reactor experience than any entity in the world.
Yes, if you like communism then it is feasable to give away nuclear energy "for free". In the free market nuclear does not have a chance.
The military has specilized needs and is mainly interested in nuclear wheapons. Using the infrastucture to generate power is more or less a free "waste product" of maintaining that infrastructure.
Looking at ultra long term solutions: Wind power is nothing else than reducing the speed of rotation of the earth. This is similarly true for tidal power plants. Geothermal power plants will eventually destroy earths unique magnetic field.
Solar is the only true sustainable "renewable" way to produce energy in all scenarios for literally the next million years. So lets concentrate on that and not waste time on the other stuff.