Solar panels arent free and they dont come falling out of the sky when and where they are convenient. Solar panels are as of the moment quite cheap because they dont cost a lot to make. Solar panels use silicons
Sun is free though, once you have the panels in place.
Very optimistically speaking, solar panels have a maximum lifetime of about 30 years and dont produce energy at night. Windmills have worse lifetimes, dams require maintenance (altough dams will probably be very efficïent).
The process of fission certainly does not generate a significant amount of pollution. Mining and enriching uranium does produce pollution and at the moment still uses fossiel fuels. In addition nuclear power is quite risky as the involved material is vulnrable to terrorism and public opinion (public opinion is sobering up on this, though).
Right but once the dependence on fossil fuels is reduced, the mining vehicles will be electrical. Actually most of the big open cast mining machines already are electrical and pretty much all underground vehicles have to be. The trucks that transport the stuff out of the mine site aren't though. But they could be.
A modern nuclear power plant isn't anything like as vulnerable as the popular press likes to make out. They mostly use very low enrichment uranium which couldn't cause a nuclear explosion no matter what happened to it. There could be potential radiation leaks if terrorist could get a bomb into such a plant but most likely nothing particualrly serious. Something like Chernoble would be damn near impossible in a modern power plant
Trucks dont run on electricity, I think you are underestimating transporation, it doesnt run on electricity and it probably wont be in the near future. Ouer food travels more then 500 miles before making it to ouer stomachs, for example. Conveniantly large suplys of uranium arent located everywhere.
Also the electricity of the mining machines is not the fuel itself but rather the fuel that the electricity in the first place.
Issues with nuclear plants include what is exemplemantary in Iran right now: As fossil fuels run out political pressures will grow and nuclear power plants become desired everywhere. A nuclear plant is a big leap closer to nukes.
Even then, nuclear power plants require about 3-5 billion dollars to construct and thats completely forgetting when we have to decommission then. The plant itself doesnt produce the the fuel for cars, boats, planes and trucks. Pressure on the uranium resource would explode if we managed to build the thousands of required nuclear plants.
Actually most existing cars would run on hydrogen right now with only some very minor adjustments to their ignition systems. Hydrogen burns in a very similar way to vaporised gasoline.
even if car engines were modified to run on hydrogen, hydrogen at roomtemperature is a gas (with a very low energy volume) and must be compressed in safe fuel cells before it can be used as a fuel conveniently. The fuel cells are the smack in the face for hydrogen based engines as they cost to much to be a convenient replacement for every vehicle currently on the highway or even every vehicle in the future. The fuel cells require platinum, silver and copper in order to be a safe fuel cell. These 3 resources have already become scarce and will certainly become even more expensive if we were to build all the required fuel cells today. Fuel cells themselves dont last much longer then a few years, either.
Nuclear power plants take about 10 years to build and dont power the billion cars, millions of planes and boats by themselves.
There are only four original sources of energy on this planet: the sun, gravitational forces, earth's interior, or nuclear power.
This is just plain wrong!
Only 3 of these are correct. There are no such thing as "Gravitational forces"
He goes on to say that hydro electric power is "Gravitational". But the movement of water around the atmosphere can also be traced back to solar power. The sun evaporates the water and gives it the energy to rise into the clouds. then it falls as rain and provides power to Hydro plants. All "Gravitational" forces in this case are actually Solar.
Hydro electric power plants produce energy out of nuclear power, the sun commits to fusion, emits energy and causes clouds (building up the amount of gravitational energy) to rain on mountains which in turn produces rivers that produce electric current with the help of hydroelectric plants, ultimately by nuclear power.
The author may not have had his facts perfectly straight, accurate and clear but I dont think your argument holds.
There is also another energy source which he doesn't mention.
"Kinetic"
The Earth, Moon and planets have momentum and this can be converted to usable energy by tidal dams and various other devices. Tides are moved by the Kinetic energy of the Moon as it travels around the Earth so converting this to energy via applying resistance to tidal motion is actually going to slow the moon down very slightly.
Tidal power plants have very few feasible locations and will very probably not make a significant contribution to a hydrogen future. We might also cause the moon to break orbit but thats a lunatics thought at the moment ^_^
I googled 'tidal power' to type a remotely educated response to this.
All birds release energy every time they poo, if we catch the kinetic energy from the falling poo we can turn it into energy, but it wont make a significant amount of energy. Now tidal power isnt best compared to this but I hope it clears up my opinion on tidal power. It can be combined with other alternatives but that is the limit.
I'v still posted a message about tidal power as an alternative on peakoil.com because it wanst mentioned yet, hoping to get some better answers there.
The rest of the article has a good bit of fact in it but is approached from an extremely over-critical way.
take this passage..
Even using turkey offal, one must account for 1) the feed, 2) what fertilized the feed (natural gas), 3) how the feed was planted, 4) harvested, 5) irrigated (oil and gas), and 5) how the turkey got to market (oil). Thermal depolymerization should be more properly viewed as a form of recycling. But this process will never have the net energy of the original fossil fuels. As fossil fuels dwindle, so will the source material.
This is ONLY true if the turkeys are farmed for no reason other than to collect their poop. In actual fact turkeys are farmed and will continue to be farmed whether we collect it or not. The poop is a complete by-product of a food growing industry which will continue regardless. With that in mind the poop is actually completely free. It costs nothing extra to produce yet it could yield a very large payback.
The using of the poop would still require an extra investment that may well cost more then it produces. And will probably cost more energy then we can get it out of it. Even if it nets positive energy return it will not be within a remote proximity of oil.
I also believe it deserves a notice that transition to alternatives will probably not be remotely peacefull, considdering the big oil countrys basicly lead ouer countrys with ouer massive oil dependance of the moment.
The article is very un-necessarily negative and takes no account of many highly important factors. If this were being submitted for peer reviewed publication it would never make it past my desk for one.
I agree the article is not very extensive, but I believe it was kept this way because it is relatively short so that people would put effort into reading it in detail.
The article isnt particularily optimistic but I fail to understand how the article is over-critical or how any other article can be over critical.
I believe that the articles I linked are clearly not something you want to read or know :lecture: . I believe that the named phenoma go against everything you, your friends and the media want and you for that reason choose to deny it wether you consciously know it or not.
But I would love to have my statements discharged because I hate the future I imagine right now.
I will try to reduce my use of double quotes.
Goodnight everything.