Mercury pollution & Detroit green garage

[News]

The Environment Report explores the EPA's new plans to regulate mercury from power plants - for the first time ever - as well as sustainability efforts in the struggling city of Detroit.

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[danthebuilder]

Why regulate when you can just altogether ban coal. This would take the mercury levels down in our fish big time.

We also need to look at the big picture and just say what we all know. Solar isn't realistic & either is wind even when you factory in advances. The amount of land they take up for the energy produced isn't a good trade off. The wind doesn't always blow the sun doesn't always shine. The amount of transmission lines that will be to be built/added will be astronomical. Who wants more transmission lines? I know I don't... So you need to factor in the 10+ acres per 5MW wind machine + added transmission lines all across the country. People don't want to live near them as seen on this forum already.

Nuclear is dirt cheap but there is an option that is CHEAPER & SAFER than nuclear. Wind & Solar costs 3x as much as nuclear & even with advances in costs coming down we're still looking at 2x as much as a minimum. Do you want to pay 2-3x what you pay for electricity right now? That's what we're setting ourselves to do. Its stupid.

Thorium has no chance of melting down because it is already a liquid. If something breaks it turns off by design. Its like an electric stove. If problems happens and it losses electricity. It quits working. There is no runaway heat issues. The reason why we didn't built thorium in the first place was because it couldn't be used in a nuclear weapon. We researched it and proved it could work in the 1950s all we need is someone to invest the initial $1-2 billion to advance research then we're looking at ~$1 billion for the first reactor. No more worrying about fuel rods laying around that can be turned into nukes. No bank will write a loan for advancement of thorium because there are risks that costs could sky rocket on the first couple reactors built. It doesn't make sense to make the loan for $1 billion when they could come back and say its going to end up costing $5 billion. The government is pouring money into bad technology wind/solar it should step up and put a couple billion towards thorium and fix our energy problem once and for all.

BTW, the Chinese are currently working on building thorium. So worst case scenario. we can just buy plants in the future from them. That's what we really want right? To buy everything from china? When we're looking for ways for our government to boost the economy and put people to work. I feel that this a small investment in thorium would be a total game changer.

edit: Just want to point out this is not to be confused on the terrible idea bill gates is currently trying.