USA needs nuclear to achieve net zero, says US Energy Secretary Granholm

[NNadir]

56. The short life span, the destruction of pristine wilderness, the entrenchment of dangerous...

...natural gas as a back up, the obscene materials requirements because of its low energy to mass ratio, and the fact that its waste profile represents distributed pollution.

I feel that mining should be the last resort, and it behooves us to close material flow systems. Subsidies to the so called "renewable energy" business are mining subsidies, and I note that almost all of the world's steel, including that in wind towers, is still made using coke formed by heating coal with coal generated heat.

The cost is another factor. We have spent trillions of dollars in this century on solar and wind with no result. If the goal was to address climate change - it wasn't actually - it's a very, very, very expensive failure. If you need to have a two systems, one of which is redundant, to do what one can do, the result is both economically and environmentally onerous. If you pretend that making electricity worthless on a bright sunny day with a wind blowing is a good thing, while ignoring the whole system, you're not paying attention.

There is a reason that the highest consumer electricity prices in the OECD are in Denmark and Germany.

Once again, it represents the bourgeois rich doing their thing at the expense of the poor.

The automobile was the first major industrial distributed energy system. It was a wonderful solution to the problem of horse manure in cities, but it turned out to be a much greater risk to the environment than the problem it solved.

We should learn from our mistakes. We don't, but we should.