American Values Alliance | Practical voice for progressive valuesAl Gore is an idiot or an egomaniac. He really thinks that saying we can easily replace all of our fossil fueled energy needs with wind and solar in ten year. NO WAY IN HELL is that possible.
Let's take a very superficial look at how we use fossil fuels:
cars
trucks
trains
planes
asphault for roads
fertilizers for crops
industrial processes like:
steel making
glass making
light bulbs, EVEN CFLs
power aluminum furnaces
firing ceramics
tile making
and this is just off the top of my head.
We will NEVER, I mean NEVER eliminate fossil fuels from our baseline energy sources. And I mean NEVER!
Yes we need to expand alternative fuel development, wind and solar, but a rush to judgement sent us into the wall created by the corn ethanol mistake.
We need to expand nuclear power as well. The US has been storing spent fuel for over 30 years. The French have been reprocessing theirs over the same time period.
The uranium being stored on the plant sites is GOLD!
Uranium is now traded on the NYMEX (NY Merchantile Exchange for those of you new to commodities trading). Since October of 2007 uranium has quadrupled in cost!
We can reprocess our stored fuel and essentially have "free fuel" for almost 30 years! The French company Areva (www.areva.com)uses a process that is 96% efficient. For every 100 pounds of spent fuel they get 96 pounds of re-usable uranium fuel, plus 1% weapons grade plutonium (which scared the dickens out of Carter) and 3% actual waste. If you took all the waste from the French nuclear power program and put it in one place it would cover a football field (American football) only 6 feet deep. We can certainly find a hole somewhere to stick that much waste.
We need to quit thinking backwards in time and think forward in time.
Scotty?!? Where the hell are those Dilithium crystals ?
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