John McCain has called for building 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030 and 100 eventually. Barack Obama's Web site says, "It is unlikely that we can meet our aggressive climate goals if we eliminate nuclear power from the table." But to what extent can nuclear power really help achieve energy independence?There's a problem about nuclear energy that gets little attention. … [Read more...]
JoshS asks So…if you wanted to design the most energy efficient home, what shape gives you the best surface to volume ratio?
The answer is: ideally the best designed house would be as close to as sphere as possible. A Buckminster Fuller geodesic Dome is a pretty good approximation.Dan Botkin … [Read more...]
Can Nuclear Energy Solve Our Energy Crisis?
It has come as a shock to me that some of my fellow environmentalists, and one of this country’s leading newspapers, have recently begun arguing in favor of nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels and a way to fight global warming. Stewart Brand, according to a recent interview in the New York Times—which calls him one of the originators of environmentalism—is for it … [Read more...]
The Solution to our Energy Problem
ENERGY FOREVER: A SOLUTION TO OUR ENERGY PROBLEM Daniel B. Botkin Copyright © Daniel B. Botkin 2007The answer to our energy crisis lies in a farm field in Bavaria, Germany. There, sheep graze beneath an unusual crop: an array of black rectangles mounted on long metal tubes that rotate slowly during the day, following the sun like mechanical sunflowers. This is the world’s … [Read more...]
Energy Pros and Cons
Energy is the number one environmental problem today. But we don't want to minimize our use of energy --- abundant energy makes possible civilization, especially our kind of high-technology civilization. So the question is: how can we maintain abundant sources of energy without ruining our environment? Here is some information that can help. This post is under … [Read more...]
Energy and Civilization
Now that it is generally accepted that global warming is happening and is at least in part the result of burning fossil fuels, the question is: what do we do about it? One answer is energy sacrifice — that we try to use as little energy as possible, each of us, everywhere, forever. In my view, that’s unrealistic — consider how unsuccessful we are at depriving ourselves, even … [Read more...]
What is it like to be in a radiation-polluted land?
A Walk Through an Irradiated Forest With growing recent advocacy for more nuclear power plants, I have been thinking about a little-known, unique and curious experiment conducted in the 1960s and 1970s at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, NY: the laboratory radiated an entire forest. Back in those cold-war days the danger of a nuclear war and of other releases of … [Read more...]