Preaching to the choir! But sadly, the pushback is immense and it got worse because some people in Japan decided that building a nuclear plant on a seashore with inadequate tsunami protection and wrong placement of backup generators was a good idea ...
Anything with a 'free' resource and centralized control is the go to choice for those oligarchical players that benefit, with the added enticement of publicizing costs while privatizing profits.
If we look at each of the main energy sources:-
Nuclear = free dumping of waste. It doesn't stack up once the true costs are added in. The US also has some wonderfully tsunami prone locations. The HLW created to this point in time is an intractable problem.
Wood pellets = free forest resource, even waste resources should be composted to return nutrients to the soil that were extracted, no sustainable operations otherwise.
Biofuels = even worse again.
Hydro = free destruction of downstream rivers and upstream riparian areas.
Shale Oil and Coal Seam Gas = free permanently 'fracked' landscapes.
Tar sands = free yuk.
Coal = free damage to aquifers and hydrological cycles - this in itself upsets the carbon cycle adding to the factors allowing huge bushfires.
Wind = 'free' bird carnage (though with the right locations, protocols, systems, would at least seem.more manageable than nuclear)
Solar thermal = bird risk, but manageable with the right sites - it's just that such 'desert' locations are far away from most traditional population centres which need water. Storage options are better than some other generation sources. Same goes for geothermal.
Solar PV. The only truly egalitarian distributed sustainable power generation source is solar PV. Every building humans build as shelter, certainly residentially and more or less commercially has enough surface area on the building envelope to power it with Solar PV if other building efficiency measures are employed. They can probably also run a fair chunk of related transport too. Even the UK etc with only half the per annum sunshine hours of places like Australia etc, are viable with the right design and paradigm shifts.
Some industrial sites will need additional energy input. The big issues for PV overall are:-
* Loss of control and profits for existing energy sector investors.
* Required investment in distribution network infrastructure and operational control and markets to allow multidirectional flows of excess energy.
* There is a recycling/ integral battery industry issue to be sorted out (again, much easier than nuclear)
Human's energy problems aren't technical (acknowledging that a heck of a lot of buildings have been built facing the wrong way) , they are investment, governance, and market related.
In this country, any wood pellet type proposals invariably want to use public forests in order to be commercially viable. It is unacceptable. I really think we have to rigorously scrutinize any 'greenwashing' that negatively impacts biodiversity - because that is what will see us out the back door minus a shirt ......
Chosun :gh: