PV Gap

Greg Said:

What are other environmentally friendly alternative energy sources?

We Answered:

Wind turbine.
Tide machine
Wave machine
Water temperature differential machine.
Geothermal

Pros should be obvious. Cons, they are usually expensive, and do not operate continuously, except for the last 2.

PS, turbines are not environmentally friendly, they are used in all oil and gas and coal fired plants.

Miguel Said:

Solar energy impact on economy?

We Answered:

It would be very costly to switch over quickly. The cost of the panels themselves are prohibitive then there's writing off the investments made in coal, gas, hydro and nuclear power plants. Then there's the loss revenue in the supply chain for the various fuels and the decommissioning costs of the plants. All of these costs would have to be absorbed by the economy somehow, we've already seen what happens when the economy has to absorb writing off trillions of dollars in derivatives, the cost of a rapid changeover to solar would cause a similar recession. It's naive to believe that you could simply switch everything over to solar immediately, it would take decades for solar to takeover a significant portion of our power generation.

There are both winners and losers to every change and rapid changes tend to be more destructive to the economy then gradual changes.

Oh, and the US isn't the only country to use 110 VAC. There's Canada and even Brazil has 110VAC. Many countries like Brazil will actually have both 220V and 110V. I've seen 110V in Canada, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Trinidad. Trinidad was extremely varied as it differed building to building and some buildings actually had 110V at 50 Hz, I guess they wanted to be fair in being incompatible to both the European and North American norms. Our competitors smoked their computers installing them at a client site in Trinidad a week before we installed ours, I had purposely specified that some UPS's be modified to charge their batteries on 50 Hz 110V and to provide 110V 60 Hz from the inverters in order to avoid incompatibilities, unlike our competitors, we didn't start a fire at the client's office. Unfortunately, my boss wanted to redeploy those UPS's in Houston when the project was over, the modifications were based on the UPS's being considered disposable and the UPS when repaired and used as a UPS would momentarily loose power whenever wall power was restored.

Julio Said:

Why is Australia so Pro nuclear energy when they have so much green energy available like solar?

We Answered:

It saves on electricity. If everything is glowing anyway then you don't need streetlights. Bonzer mate!

Jerome Said:

Do the cons for nuclear power outweigh the pros?

We Answered:

People fear what they don't understand.

Burning something to boil water
to produce steam
to spin a steam turbine
to produce electricity is actually simple enough for just about anyone to understand. Splitting the atom to boil water, etc, is a concept that some have difficulty with.

The pros far outweigh the cons. The link below is an online free copy of a book about nuclear energy written by a very accomplished professor of physics. It is the single best pro nuclear source on the web that is understandable by the layman. Read and understand it and you will have a better understanding of the issues surrounding nuclear energy than 99.99% of the anti nuke kooks out there, and most of the people in the nuclear industry as well.

It seems that bobbobby has not read the book.

In the interest of full disclosure, I do not work in the nuclear industry, have no investments in the nuclear industry, nor know anyone who works in the nuclear industry. I don't want to work at a nuclear power plant for the same reason I wouldn't want to work at any sort of power plant: the hours. They're on for 24/7 and have to be fully staffed around the clock. I would have absolutely no problem living right next to any american nuclear power plant, or any sort of modern nuclear waste facility. I wouldn't want to live within 20 miles of a coal plant, though, unless I had to.