And the profits grow

[Kevin]

How come you all believe that technological advance will solve all problems for nuclear power, but not for solar power?

Btw, notice how that 85 years is based on consumption in 2004? When taking progress into account, the article estimates supplies to be sufficient up to ... 2025. Anyone thinks we will have that super technology by then?

I'm not turning away from solar. There is a 17 acre field of mirrors in California that concentrates the energy recieved on an 80 meter tower to boil water, producing steam and driving a 10 Megawatt generator. Total solar energy that 17 acres recieves is just over 68 Megawats.

And there are parabolic concentrator generator stations in the Mojave desert built between 85 adn 91 ranging from 14 to 80 Megawatt with a total capacity across them all of 354 Megawatts. Similar plants are being built in Arizona.

For some parts of the world you can certainly build larger scale solar power stations with minimal environmental impact. But it's not something that can happen everywhere and you still have the issue that the generation isn't constant. Fortunately power consumption is lower at night than during the day, so that isn't so bad.

But like Pete said there are nuclear processes that are proven to work and the waste can be dealt with. The sooner we get off fossil fuels and onto anything else the happier I'll be. You can put nuclear solutions in place today pretty much anywhere, you can't do that with solar. You can put solutions in place today with solar in some locations.

Of course neither solution really works for the transportation industry. Purely battery powered vehicles and rapid electric power charging stations don't exist yet. Nuclear or solar can't solve either anytime soon. Biofuels are available now and can sorta solve the problem. They are at least renewable, though of course you have density issues and you'll still have cost issues. I'm still very excited about the hydrogen fuel cell vehicles that are out there, but they need a bigger infrastructure overhaul than a biofuel change would take. It's actually possible to scrub existing gas and diesel tanks over a period of time and make them usable for biofuels. You can't do that for hydrogen fueling.

I'm very pro any research into any means of energy generation. If you have cheap and clean energy generation many of the other problems humanity faces are a lot easier to deal with.