“Sustainable Energy without the hot air” by David JC MacKay
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/cft.pdf

MacKay paints a dismal picture of the prospects of renewable energy in the UK. The UK does have geographical limitations which we don’t have in the U.S, so he may be right as far as the UK is concerned.

It’s a pretty comprehensive analysis, but I (non scientist) found it lacking or questionable in some respects.

For one thing, his analysis of the prospects of nuclear power are much more optimistic than what I’ve seen at Climate Progress and contradicts what the author of “The Lean Guide to Nuclear Energy” says about future supplies of nuclear fuel.
What to believe?

He speaks tentatively of filtering uranium from seawater, which doesn’t sound practical to me. The Lean Guide says we would have to filter 40,000 cubic miles of seawater every year to supply enough uranium for 200 reactors.
By his own estimates it seems gargantuan.

“To power a once-through 1GW nuclear power station, we need
160,000 kg per year, which is a production rate 100,000 times greater than the Japanese experiment.
1GW would thus need cages having a collecting area of 4.8 km2 and containing a weight of 350,000 tons of adsorbent material – more than the weight of the steel in the reactor itself.”
This is projected from a small pilot study in Japan

In comparing land use for nuclear and land use for wind the author doesn’t include the land use for mining uranium or disposing of the waste. Nor does he include the carbon footprint of building and erecting these huge filtering systems in the ocean. Not does he figure in the fact that wind only uses abou 2.5% of the land it is sited on, thus being able to coexist with agriculture.

He uses the old canard that since people aren’t killed or made sick by nuclear power plants, like from coal, then nuclear is safe.

Obviously, it’s the one time catostrophic disaster that people fear. I don’t like nuclear weapons, even though we haven’t had a nuclear holocaust yet.

But he does include this anecdotal story of nuclear safety failure.

“The safety of nuclear operations in Britain remains a concern. The THORP reprocessing facility at Sellafield, built in 1994 at a cost of £1.8 billion, had a growing leak from a broken pipe from August 2004 to April 2005. Over eight months, the leak let 85 000 litres of uranium-rich fluid flow into a sump which was equipped with safety systems that were designed to detect
immediately any leak of as little as 15 litres. But the leak went undetected because the operators hadn’t completed the checks that ensured the safety systems were working; and the operators were in the habit of ignoring safety alarms anyway.
By April 2005, 22 tons of uranium had leaked, but still none of the leak-detection systems detected the leak.”

What he says about the potential of solar thermal in the desert contradicts what so many others have said.

“All the world’s power could be provided by a square 100 km by 100 km in the Sahara.” Is this true? Concentrating solar power in deserts delivers an average power per unit land area of roughly 15W/m2. So, allowing no space for anything else in such a square, the power delivered would be 150GW.”

The claim was that 92 miles by 92 miles would power the U.S.
Not that 100 km by 100 km would power the world.
The claims regarding the Sahara are that 1% could power the world.

Not that he doesn’t think solar thermal has great potential in deserts.

Maybe this could be the subject of an article.

If you really believe that coal has to go, then just look at >a href=”http://resourcescommittee.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=415&Itemid=27″>Rahall’s Agenda for Natural Resources for the 111th Congress.

Coal plays a major role in meeting U.S. energy needs and is likely to continue to do so in coming decades. Today, 50% of the electricity in the United States is generated from coal. At current consumption rates and with current technology and land-use restrictions, U.S. coal reserves are projected to last well over 250 years. And, with improved technologies, estimated recoverable coal reserves, at current consumption rates, are estimated to be sufficient for 500 years or longer.

Wes Rolley: CoChair EcoAction Committee Green Party US