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CD,
Here's some numbers for your alternate energy source, in this case wind. A while ago I was asked to do a quick look at using wind power to replace 1400MW of nuke power. Nothing fancy, just a quick assessment.
The current wind generators are rated at anywhere from 1/2 MW to 2 MW. Manufacturers are promising 5 MW generators in the future, so I used 5. They only have an efficiency of 30% at best so I used that. At 5MW and 30% efficiency you would need 960 windmill towers. They require a minimum of 5 rotor diameters separation between them and rotor diameters are about 433'. If you do the math that equates to about 472 miles of windmills just to replace one large nuke. If you used todays size generators it would more than double that. If you put the windmills in a farm pattern you would need in excess of 13,000 acres! And none of that counts the space required for the storage batteries that don't exist today to store the energy for when the wind is not blowing.
I'm for drilling for oil now, no matter what the quantity - and hey, what about coal.
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