The eneregy problem is one that will be won with a lot of little solutions. We certainly can't just switch to another form of energy quickly. Look what would happen if electric vehicles became popular. The electric grid is running at close to maximum as it is. Tax the grid with another 20% load and the grid would be down.
Actually, no. They did a study on this. Current power plants are vastly underutilized overnight. IIRC, the study determined that if all transportation (or maybe it was all personal vehicles) changed over to electric vehicles charged overnight, something like 73% of the need would be met without building another power plant. Considering how many years it would take to convert over, I'd say there's plenty of time to build a few more power plants for the other 27% or so.
Also, how would you make the electricity? It has to come from somewhere. Nuclear is extremely expensive to build, and what do you do with the waste? (currently it costs far more to refurbish a nuclear reactor than the price we paid to have our last one built)
But probably less than the cost to build a new one today. And a lot of that expense is due to rules that were instituted to make nuclear power less likely, not safer, IMHO. Nuclear power has settled down, technology and cost wise. It is safe. With reprocessing, there is an unlimited amount of fuel. Again, some have successfully pushed to have reprocessing in this county outlawed, so they can say there's only a few years of fuel left, and we are all safer for it. Yet the rest of the world is not so stupid. France, in particular, does a
LOT of reprocessing. And guess what? No CO2 emissions from nuclear power, and
that is our biggest pollution problem today.
Plus, there are now a few "passively safe" reactors available today. Picture a pebble bed reactor, filled with hundreds of thousands of golf ball sized "fuel" pellets, bathed in helium for the heat transfer medium. Terrorists attack- there's no concrete containment vessel! What happens? Do we all scream, run, die horrible deaths? No. The balls may roll around, but the reaction stops, the heat dies down, and cleanup is with a shovel and scoop loader.
And waste? Who's kidding who, with this 10,000 year half life of plutonium example? Do you really think in 100 or 200 years, we won't have a way of further processing the wastes, and retrieving valuable isotopes- or even just making it safer? So build containment that lasts 500 years.
CO2 pollution is a problem. A
REAL problem, not an imaginary, scare mongered problem. We should have been building nuke plants fast, and doing away with coal. And later, doing away with natural gas even.
It is a major problem today. If the demand for electricity goes up, so will the price. Electricity rates could rise as fast as oil. Some will say that corn alcohol is the answer, but just how much of the country needs to have corn growing to even make a slight dent in the oil demand. How much energy does it take to produce the alcohol from corn? Natural gas supplies are running out as well, so what is the next form of energy? Algy is being worked on for fuel, but is it the answer? We are probably going to have to have many different solutions to solve this problem. Even little changes in lifestyle by enough people can have a big impact.
***note...this is just my opinion and no I don't have any facts to back any of it up... so take it for what it's worth
Yep, algae and "whole corn stalk" ethanol would be a big improvement. Using other biomass materials will help. But let's not starve out the world over it. The new processes using microwaves to break out oil from oil shale may well work, and make Canada rich. But even that is not enough, there's still pollution. Solar and indirect solar energy (wind, tidal) will contribute, but never dominate.
It always comes back to nuclear power.
