"The destiny of humans cannot be separated from the destiny of earth." —Thomas Berry, historian. ![]() Proposals would turn highways into wind farms
Several recent student designs have proposed that major roadways be retrofitted with various forms of wind energy collection devices, such as overhead turbines that collect energy from quickly-moving cars. . " One 1.8 MW wind turbine at a reasonable site would produce over 4.7 million units of electricity each year, enough to meet the annual needs of over 1,000 households, or to run a computer for over 1,620 years. " - www.britishwindenergy.co.uk Fukushima is still leaking.
Fukushima radiation is spreading across the world, into the oceans and via air currents.
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RENEWABLE OR NUCLEAR ENERGY?
"Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline." - Lewis Mumford (1895 - 1990)
DAVID SUZUKI ON NUCLEAR ENERGY —YES OR NO?
“Nuclear energy has had several decades to develop and I am willing to consider it as a possible option. This is a mega-technology...this is big-scale. Philosophically, I prefer more diverse, small-scale solutions than the big-scale, technological fix. Before you even begin to seriously discuss nuclear energy as something you are going for, you have to answer some questions.
· Cost—The nuclear industry has bragged ever since its inception, that this type of electricity generation is cheap. This is the biggest lie ever perpetrated. They used to say it is going to be so cheap, they wouldn’t even monitor the energy in your home. It would be vast and it just so abundant, no problem. They would just make the electricity and you would just pay a set fee. Nuclear energy is the most expensive form of energy we have ever had. In Ontario (Canada’s largest province) , our industrial heartland, 40% of the electricity is nuclear. They have a debt of over 40 billion dollars that Ontario citizens are paying off every month in their bills and almost all of that 40 billion dollar debt is from the nuclear industry. So, first of all, if you are a fiscally-responsible government, I would think that the cost argument better be dealt with in a very serious fashion. This is NOT a cheap form of energy. · Reliability—When you put your eggs in the “nuclear energy” basket, you are depending on a mega-technology. If anything goes wrong, you are screwed. The experience in Canada, is that these nuclear facilities are breaking down all over the place. There are leaks developing, cracks, all kinds of accidental ventings of radioactive gas. And when the plants are shut down, then we have to buy our energy from the United States, or somewhere else. And after months and months, and costing tens of millions of dollars more, we eventually get them back on-line. This is a very risky technology. It’s expensive and it is not reliable. · Terrorism — We live in a world after 9/11, where terrorism is a very real possibility. Darlington is the largest nuclear plant in Canada, right next to Toronto. It has been shown, time and time again, you just have to have an IQ of five, in order to get in there. If someone wants to break into this facility to blow it up or steal radioactive material, it is easy. So if you are going to make a nuclear facility truly terrorist-proof, the cost of that is going to be enormous. And don’t say that this is not a real problem. It is! · Waste Disposal—What do you do with the waste? This problem has not been dealt with. The Americans have Yucca Flats in Colorado. They have said it is geologically so stable, that if they put radioactive material down in a mine in Yucca Flats, it will move at the rate of one centimetre every thousand years. A few years ago, they decided to do a test to see whether that is true. They took a great big slab of rock out of the mine and they injected a pulse of radioactive material at one end. And guess what? They had to stop the experiment. The radioactivity moved through that rock so fast, it would have moved a mile and a half in a year! (Over 50 000 tons of highly radioactive waste is already stored at Yucca Mountain. This type of waste remains highly radioactive, and extremely hazardous for tens of thousands of years.) “We are so ignorant about how the world is structured and we want to foist a technology whose waste will be around for tens of thousands of years. There are so many other options to consider. To come out, like that, I’ve suddenly been converted. Global warming is happening and here’s the solution—nuclear energy? That’s crazy!” - David Suzuki
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Unique Method Uses Solar Power To Create Hydrogen
In 2007, May 8th, Science Daily reported the invention of a unique photocatalytic cell. The cell splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using sunlight and the power of a nanostructured catalyst. This discovery provides a new, low-cost and efficient option for hydrogen production and can be applied to a variety of energy applications.
“Nano-Filament”
Solar Cell Breaks Efficiency Record In 2007, April 21st, researchers at the Wake Forest University’s Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials announced that they have increased the efficiency of plastic solar cells to more than 6 percent. Wake Forest researchers credit the record efficiency for organic or flexible plastic solar cells to “non-filaments” within light absorbing plastic, similar to veins in tree leaves.
A Japanese company has just developed a spherical solar cell. Much more efficient than the standard flat photovoltaic technologies, these cells are generated by melting silicon and subjecting it to free fall and microgravity, limiting the amount of raw materials wasted to create the final product. While standard photovoltaic cells need to be sited for maximum exposure to source sunlight or mounted on electronic tracking devices, spherical cells capture sunlight from all directions. Great news in the race to deal with global warming.
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