Castor, Radioactivity, Green Energy, Kraftwerk

[Martin Naef]

Hi Kai

On 09.11.2010 7:01, K9 Kai Niggemann wrote:
> I don't know about the Netherlands. But even in rainy Germany we get
> a mixture of wind and sun. Also when using distributed combined heat

Wind is good. Just not for the base load, because you can't control it. 
And no, it's not pretty, and not good for birds either. (But it's good 
business for my company...)

> and power plants, biofuels have a very good efficiency for CO2.

Biofuel sounds nice until you actually calculate the area required to 
grow it. I can't remember the exact figures, but I thought it was 
something like half the US to cover its energy consumption. It's the 
same issue with palm oil: It sounds great and green until you realize 
they killed most of the natural forests in Madagaskar to grow palm 
trees... It's a huge ecological disaster.

> I disagree. And so do many researchers. Nuclear might sound like a
> good idea until you start thinking of the waste. The only reason, in

Surely, that's true, and it's an unsolved problem. But given the choice 
whether I leave a tons of radioactive waste or a buggered up atmosphere 
for my son to deal with, I tend towards the former.

> Also, it seems we will need an intelligent powergrid and electric
> cars -- their batteries will serve as a huge, efficient and
> distributed storage for the power that is created but not used during
> those 22 hours a day that most cars are parked...

Yeah, there's a lot of talk about using car batteries for energy 
storage. It's a great buzzword right now, but nobody figured out how 
that's ever going to make sense economically. Given that batteries are 
the major weak point and cost factor of EVs, I wouldn't really want to 
use that precious resource for mass energy storage. Unless there's a 
HUGE leap in battery technology, the only model that makes sense is to 
use these batteries to stabilize the grid after they've lost too much 
capacity to be used in cars.

As for Smart Grids (that's the label for the grid technologies you 
mentioned), it's mostly a buzzword today. It's important, and a lot of 
bright minds are very busy figuring it out (some of them work in the 
office next to mine, and I do my share too). It's important to make 
integration of renewables feasible on a large scale, but I can assure 
you that it's no silver bullet.

> If you want green, you should go solar. get a provider that
> guarantees green energy. I am sure they exist in the Netherlands.

Where can you get solar in significant quantities?

As it happens, I believe that among the many projects on renewable 
energy, Desertec is among the few that actually offers a realistic 
solution. They'd need to cover something like a few percent of the 
Sahara desert with solar power plants to cover our energy consumption, 
but at least it's within reach from a technology point of view. See 
http://www.desertec.org/

It's those kind of initiatives that we should support. Once they're 
ready, we can shut down all our dirty plants. The current noise about 
nuclear energy doesn't help IMHO.

Martin