Posted by Diarmuid on October 30, 2001 at 11:45:29:
In Reply to: Using Nuclear Power posted by JP on October 30, 2001 at 10:32:40:
And yes, it's efficient. They have working generators in Denmark (I think). Costs less than any other source too.
I read about it in the Guardian (guardian.co.uk)
The cool thing about wave power is that the tides are 100% predictable, unlike gusts of wind. If you have an almanac, you know exactly when the tides are coming in 400 years from now.
You just have to harness it on the way in and out.
: : And what do you think about using nuclear power as an energy source in general?
: Beats not having electricity I guess. Nukes provide 40% of the electricity generated along the East Coast.
: I think the lack of a plan for dealing with nuclear waste is regrettable and dangerous...but it's really only been in the past 30 years that ideas like "recycling", "ecosystems", and "pollution" have come into awareness. When nuclear technology was first developed (40's and 50's) none of the long-term effects were known.
: Every current form of generating electricity has a lot of drawbacks...burning coal is inefficient, produces a lot of pollution (acid rain, etc.), and of course requires that local ecosystems get decimated via mining. Hydropower irreversibly alters large river ecosystems. Natural gas I guess is fairly clean and maybe easy to extract. Wind and solar, while promising, don't have the cost and production efficiencies necessary (yet) to make them viable competitors.
: I guess I see nuclear power as a stop-gap measure. Ultimately we will master fusion or build orbiting solar collectors or come up with some alternate plan (I've seen promising research into capturing the energy of wave motion from the ocean). And of course we will continue to make great improvements in our efficiency-levels and recycling capabilities.