Aileron

food digesters won't work for my house. We FINISH the food we start eating. There usually is SOME left, but not enough to power anything for any reasonable amount of time. I figure, if you are going to be wasting food, you might as well designate and process it for burning. What I am referring to is obviously corn-based alcohol which not only is a feasible power source (for transportation moreso than electricity), but would also solve the economic problems with farming.

Well, there IS a limit to how much energy conservation is desireable. You don't want to spend $10 to save $1 of electricity. Businesses will either apply energy conservation at a 1:1 ratio or they will be eventually forced out of business by compe!@#$%^&*ors that do. The tricky part is getting energy conservation at home. Now that's just sick. The problem with that is that would have to store the waste until it can be used. If you can think of a way to store the sh*t in a fire-safe manner that seals odor, go ahead. Knock yourself out if all that methane doesn't do it first. Also, it is illegal to use human fertilizer. Spreads disease and it really stinks.

For the first part - no, that won't be enough. For the second part, true, but the US is the most industrialized nation in the world and the southern part of Canada isn't far behind. It is mostly industry that consumes power. Basically, use of the alternatize sources of power and energy consumption is universally respected as the first thing we should do. However, even if we did both of those things, we would still have to build more traditional power plants as well as modernize the power grid. Basically, evenyone agrees on step one, but we are discussing step two. I meant relative to solar. When comparing wind to every other type of power plant you are correct.

The problem with those ideas is that those are chiefly experimental. The satelite idea doesn't even work, because either we will need a very loooooooooooong cable and loose most of the power on the way down, or we will have to figure out a way to "beam" it down, which there is no device capable of doing that, let alone safely. In my opinion, nuclear plants, when modern safety proticals are applied, wins hands down. Also, wind and solar are not completely safe to the environment either. Both require huge amounts of area to collect power. Not so much for wind, but if we were to attempt to build a power system on solar alone, we would have to destroy a few ecosystems to do it. As for nuclear storage, the new project is an old salt mine in Utah I believe. The old salt residues will help hold it in, but it's chief safety feature that it will simply be too deep underground to get out. How deep is too deep? Well, it is under a mountain and still below the water table at the base. Thus, since water flows downhill, even if there is a leak(it will have to leak for several miles), water will only be able to leak IN to the site, not out.

After the recent blackout, it has become clear that we need to modernize our power system. One thing we will have to do is build more plants. I have purposely left out alternative sources of energy such as wind and solar. They seem to be only applicable in certain locations and certain amounts. It is obviously preferrable to apply these wherever they can be applied, but we can't build an entire system on these.