How does solar even get kills on the board?

The problem that nuclear has that none of the other sources do is that it is X till it isnt. None of the others have till it isnt as an inherent factor.

Production of solar panels has a lot of pollutants (including green house gases) that kill.

it us X until it isn't.... you are not understanding even with the disasters nuclear has been safer and more environmentally friendly overall. You're basically saying you should play limit Holden despite lower ev/hourly because you never have to go all in and risk losing your whole stack.

Think we are very firmly in the cite zone for several claims.

Fossil fuels are harmful from day one. I'll accept the possibility of harm over the certainty of harm.

Renewables > Nuclear > Fossil

IPCC and EPA both believe nuclear CO2e is lower than or equal to wind CO2e, and much lower than solarCO2e.

I put in the bit you are clearly misunderstanding.

Also poker analogy,is like always, terrible.

Also I have not said anything about whether we should have nuclear or not.

And what does so far add to the discussion? Are you suggesting we don't have enough data yet or nuclear plants going forward are less safe than they used to be?

You seem to be assuming that we've seen the worst possible nuclear disasters already.

This is not even remotely close to being true.

I don't hold this view.

The only green source of energy that can produce without discontinuity is hydroelectricity.

Every other renewable energy will require either fossil or nuclear

100% renewable will be possible once we become elite at storaging electricity. GL with that

Any opinions on the Open Kyoto to Debate open letter that was sent to the Prime Minister of Canada?

I put a charity bet on with someone on another forum that the signatories on the letter would be similar to the type of characters that you find on the lists of people that reject evolution that are churned out by Answers in Genesis.

Dr Tim Ball is a bit of a character

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timoth...s_and_lawsuits

Solar plus battery storage will reach parity soon. It is becoming common already in places with high electricity costs and a lot of solar like Hawaii. Hawaii though has more need for storage than most places because it can't export power. This line of argument is a bit of a canard (probably not the right word) because there's a lot of baseline power to replace first.

There are already very large pumped storage hydro plants in California.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/...urned-negative

That's a bug... not a feature.

Bug or feature that there's a massive overcapacity of natural gas power stations?

http://midwestenergynews.com/2015/02...-overcapacity/

http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-f...city-capacity/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...struction-boom

A bug of the regulatory scheme, which includes subsidies for renewables, at least in the case of CA. Renewables adding variability to supply levels contribute to the need for excess capacity in other markets, although not CA (which really just has too much capacity.)

I'm not strongly against nuclear, but existing facilities are inadequate, like Hanford which recently had a tunnel collapse. Generally nuclear power being awesome long term only works in a world where progress, stability, technology and such are reliable for hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of years. I would think 2016 might cut back on humanity's hubris a little bit and give us pause that future generations may be less capable than we currently are of handling things like nuclear waste.

Well, if I ever stop posting for long it may be because solar killed me.

To pass the grid scale electrical production test:

1.The source must provide large amounts of electrons (it must be dense) -parenthetically, this is what makes petroleum derived gasoline and diesel such great transportation fuels. (along with portability).
2.The power must be reliable and predictable.
3.The electrons must be dispatchable (high or low amount must be generated on demand)
4.It must serve one or more grid demand elements(base load, load following and peak load).
5.The utilization of environment must be minimal and compactness is a must, or it is non-green and damaging the environment.
6.It must be economical

Solar/wind fail absolutely on 1 through 4, and are very questionable as to
5&6.

The inherent energy density problems with wind/solar cannot be overcome. Wind Turbine spacing is 1 per 50 acres. I'm currently working a 3,000 acre West Texas ranch for the development of horizontal oil wells. The ranch currently has 24 producing oil wells and 12 wind turbines. The incidental natural gas production from ONE of the oil wells will produce more electricity than all TWELVE wind turbines combined.

The efficiency of wind turbines is very good and approaching theoretical limits (Betz Limit). The only way really now to squeeze more electricity out of a turbine is to make the blades longer. At this point, the ratio to increased blade length to electrical production is about 3:2. Remember, that the longer the blade, the higher your spacing requirement between turbines. This makes increasing blade length a self-defeating proposition.

I read something about using battery storage of liquified air at below freezing temperatures. Seems like similar sized technology could support a bunch of places in Midwest pretty easily and get rid of coal.

http://energystorage.org/energy-stor...y-storage-laes

All of these storage options work, liquid air, pumped hydro, etc.; but they are still slaves to the inherent lack of energy density in wind and solar. Plus, you have to factor in the land use requirements of the storage system.

A significant amount of solar panels are going on rooftops, at the point of consumption. So energy density doesn't apply, since you are not plugging millions of homes to a single well. If anything you are providing power back to a single battery for later use.

Efficiency of wind is also weird. Yes it spans for acres but it's actually most efficient in places not competing with other industry. Crests of mountains, alongside major electrical grids, stretches into the ocean. It's literally the domain of public government to make good use of.