Solar thermal is really not any better. It’s slightly less effecient than PV. It tends to be more complicated to maintain, because at least with PV it’s mechanically simple. Solar thermal has the one and only advantage that it can store some of the energy as thermal mass. It’s really nothing better than the previous.

Nuclear: Yes it can be very safe, and as you say, safety must always be issue number one. This is not because I think nuclear needs to be more obsessed with safety than other technologies, but if you’re doing it for the good of the enviornment and locals then safety is obviously the issue you need to be sure of. It’s just good responsibility.

The waste is a bit less of a problem than you might have been lead to believe. Right now, with technology that is in use, not prototypical or theoretical but in use, we can reduce the amount of waste by 99%. Yes, 99% The British do it to a point. The French do it with nearly all their waste. The Japanese are not far behind.

The remaining 1% can be embeded in synthetic glasses which are more stable than almost all minerals. Once diluted and converter it’s not all that dangerous. Very little sheilding is required. It will be decay and in a couple of decades it will not be all that much more radioactive than the original mineral materials that you started off with. In a couple hundred years it will be less radioactive. Storing something for that length of time is no sweat from a geological standpoint. Things might change geologically in millions of years and perhaps even in hundreds of thousands, but a couple hundred is no big deal. Even if it was unearthed, the glassy material won’t turn to dust. It won’t disolve. At worst it will fracture into little bits. Even then, the hazard is minimal and not that much worse than minerals that exist. And agian, this is only a couple hundred years before it’s no worse.

There are ways to have nuclear energy with zero waste and they have been proven though not used in scale applications. These involve using accelerators to transmutate all the waste with high energy particle and super high energy photons. At this point, this is generally thought to be unnecessarily expensive and complex a process given the fact that the current methods work so well, but it can be done.

The new thing solar thermal I don’t know. I’m honestly hopeful but skeptical about it, because I have seen the figures and it keeps saying it’s “almost there” and i’m feeling deja vu with it from what has been said as long as I can remember about solar and wind. I really think they might never make it and I’m concerned that we need to do something soon. Also, I have seen ethanol turn into a mess.

I think nuclear fusion would be the best thing, but now we can’t do that. (Will we ever???) So we have regulat nuclear power now. We can do it and it works. That’s great. I have two issues with it: Safety and waste. Safety I believe is a concern but I think we can do it. I think if safety is number 1 and we make sure to do it right and have all the safety measures and maybe more safety measures than we really need then it can be done safely. The waste is the problem I really have and I think it’s the achelies heal of nuclear power. Nuclear would be great without waste, I’ll admit right now. We replace one evil with another. So what do we do with it? We bury it. That’s all well and good and you might sya “let sleeping dogs lie.” As long as we burry it there’s a big sleeping dog that could wake up and thats why I worry. We have to worry about what will happen. It’s like a time bomb. It is fine as long as nothing bad happens to it. What if something does? What if someone gets into it? Then we’re in trouble or at leas they are.

This is why my thoughts on nuclear power is that we should use it if we have to as a last resort but keep it to the minimum just because of the waste issue. Also, I believe it should be done with safety as number 1 in the concerns and when we are not sure then don’t do it. Be 200% sure with safety.

Then what about the candles? Not only burning them. They’re probably made from petroleum-based wax. It has to be refined, isolated and so on. Then dyed, manufactured and there you go. Then add in transporting them to the store and all so on.

I’m not saying that candles are a horrible thing or that you should be so anti-consumer you don’t buy anything, but this goes to show how simplistic the logic is. Much of the savings are totally destroyed by something like going out to buy and burn candles and then having the hot air balloon burn methane which took energy to separate and compress and also contributed to methane leaking.

She thought of it as a small harmless symbolical gesture, but hadn’t thought of the extra CO2 emitted both by candles and her car (if you think that matters), the fire danger of having unnecessary candles with small children about, the increased likelihood of someone tripping and injuring themselves in the dark, the increased opportunities for burglars with reduced street lighting, etc, etc, etc.

Of course it makes sense to reduce energy use in sensible ways that add no danger, but we don’t need sanctimonious idiots to tell us that waste is not a good thing.

This idiocy was advertised in Sydney by a methane-powered hot-air balloon (more CO2) and recorded by photographers in helicopters (yet more ditto).

This is just a stupid idea in almost every way you can think of, and the more people who take it up the worse it will be.

        Soylent said:

Because the attention and planing that went into it could have been spent actually helping the environment instead of a self-congratulatory circle jerk that does close to nothing at all for the environment.

A circle jerk. That’s about what it amounts to. Congratulations everyone!

Yes, just leave those who shut off their lights in blissful ignorance, because apparently that’s the best policy. Damn, it’s worse than I thought!

        A Golden Guitar said:

Wow. I think you are all majority wrong about this.

Why does it matter so much to you to try to pick down how much might really have been saved?

You’re really down on this whole idea and so discouraging.

Because the attention and planing that went into it could have been spent actually helping the environment instead of a self-congratulatory circle jerk that does close to nothing at all for the environment.