Via small dead animals, a link to a well written, comprehensive and accessible essay at Energy Tribune explaining why E=mc^2 and the related E=mv^2 will always trump any attempt at fulfilling our energy needs with renewable sources.

If you really want to understand why reliance on wind, solar and even hydro power can only really work if we all end up back in mud huts then I urge you to go and have a read of the full essay.

As a taster here is an extract on the difference between coal and nuclear :

One elementary source of comparison is to consider what it takes to refuel a coal plant as opposed to a nuclear reactor. A 1000-MW coal plant – our standard candle – is fed by a 110-car “unit train” arriving at the plant every 30 hours – 300 times a year. Each individual coal car weighs 100 tons and produces 20 minutes of electricity. We are currently straining the capacity of the railroad system moving all this coal around the country. (In China, it has completely broken down.)

A nuclear reactor, on the other hand, refuels when a fleet of six tractor-trailers arrives at the plant with a load of fuel rods once every eighteen months. The fuel rods are only mildly radioactive and can be handled with gloves. They will sit in the reactor for five years. After those five years, about six ounces of matter will be completely transformed into energy. Yet because of the power of E = mc2, the metamorphosis of six ounces of matter will be enough to power the city of San Francisco for five years.

This is what people finds hard to grasp. It is almost beyond our comprehension. How can we run an entire city for five years on six ounces of matter with almost no environmental impact? It all seems so incomprehensible that we make up problems in order to make things seem normal again. A reactor is a bomb waiting to go off. The waste lasts forever, what will we ever do with it? There is something sinister about drawing power from the nucleus of the atom.

How effective a generation system is all comes down to the energy density of the “fuel” source as explained in this very important snippet :

The release of energy from splitting a uranium atom turns out to be 2 million times greater than breaking the carbon-hydrogen bond in coal, oil or wood. Compared to all the forms of energy ever employed by humanity, nuclear power is off the scale. Wind has less than 1/10th the energy density of wood, wood half the density of coal and coal half the density of octane. Altogether they differ by a factor of about 50. Nuclear has 2 million times the energy density of gasoline. It is hard to fathom this in light of our previous experience. Yet our energy future largely depends on grasping the significance of this differential.

That is the real reason why our preoccupation with windmills (ignoring all the other drawbacks such as backup generation, unreliabilty etc etc) will leave us in the dark in no time at all and is akin to pissing in the wind as they say in these parts.

Unfortunately, we are paying for it and we will be the ones shivering in the dark in a not so distant winter.

Someone should sit Huhne and co. down in a locked room and make them read the essay again and again without rest until they finally get the point.

Or alternatively, just strap them to a blade on one of their bird mincers with a disconnected feathering mechanism and pray for a gale.

Image pinched from Watts up with that article - here