nuclear-news

The CO₂ emissions from a modest four-star house with modern efficient appliances are about 6 tonnes per year. Emissions from a typical car driving 10,000 km per year are 1.5 tonnes per year. Installing a 5 kilowatt photovoltaic panel will fully offset these amounts of CO₂ by reducing the need to operate a coal fired power station.

It is difficult to see how the nuclear power industry will cope with falling solar prices and increased perceptions of risk following the Fukushima accident. Solar and wind power will soon put the nuclear power construction industry out of business.

Solar energy is vast, ubiquitous and indefinitely sustainable. There will never be a major solar accident, there’s minimal waste disposal issues, and we will never go to war over solar energy. Solar energy systems utilise only very common materials that we could never run out of and there’s minimal need for mining (about 1% of that needed for an equivalent fossil or nuclear power plant)….

Solar industry is booming

Worldwide solar sales are 100 times larger than in the year 2000, and the industry turnover now approaches one hundred billion dollars per year. In Australia, industry sales have grown from 10 megawatts in 2007 to 350 megawatts last year.

It’s possible to estimate the cost of subsidising and accelerating solar technology to provide most of the world’s electricity. We add up the declining price difference year by year between solar and wholesale fossil energy, until it reaches zero. It would cost about a trillion dollars, spread over the next 20 years. That works out at $1 per week for each of the billion citizens of rich countries like Australia.

How do we store solar energy?

As the solar industry grows it will eventually be necessary to store energy. By far the largest energy storage today is pumped hydro – about three times larger than Australia’s entire electricity capacity.

During the day, water can be pumped up a 500 metre high hill with solar power, and released at night through a turbine to generate electricity. Pumped hydro doesn’t need to be located on a river, since the same water goes round and round a circle. Since storage is needed only for a day, the water store can be quite small….. http://theconversation.edu.au/solar-will-force-coal-and-nuclear-out-of-the-energy-business-2557