I coulda told you that - renewable energy department
From
Yahoo/Live Science:
Study: Renewable Energy Not Green
Renewable energy could wreck the environment, according to a study that examined how much land it would take to generate the renewable resources that would make a difference in the global energy system.
Building enough wind farms, damming adequate number of rivers and growing sufficient biomass to produce ample kilowatts to make a difference in meeting global energy demands would involve a huge invasion of nature, according to Jesse Ausubel, a researcher at the Rockefeller University in New York.
Ausubel came to this conclusion by calculating the amount of energy that each renewable source can produce in terms of area of land disturbed.
“We looked at the different major alternatives for renewable energies and we measured [the power output] for each of them and how much land it will rape,” Ausubel told LiveScience.
Ausubel is wisely promoting Nuclear power and the article quotes a few people who don't like Nuke power (despite the fact that the majority of France and Japan's power is from nukes and they don't have problems -- the problem reactors are the first-generation ones, the ones that were designed on a cocktail napkin in the 1950's)
Fun (and frustrating) to see the different voices. One sound-bite:
“I think the characterizations made that ‘renewables are not green’ and ‘nuclear is green’ sound provocative, but they do not accurately represent these technologies with respect to a comprehensive set of sustainability criteria and analysis,” Keoleian told LiveScience. “The treatment of renewable technologies [in this study] is shallow and the coverage of the nuclear fuel cycle is incomplete."
Read the article for more... Good stuff.
Posted by DaveH at August 2, 2007 9:58 PM
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