I love that the "greenies" here both mentioned Three Mile Island as examples of the evils of nuclear power. There were ZERO fatalities at TMI and the other reactor at TMI that was not involved in the accident continues to produce electricity to this day.

Even Chernobyl, the deadliest nuclear accident in history, only killed about 50 people directly. There is some debate about the numbers that died indirectly, but scientific estimates put it in the hundreds. There may be as many as 4000 early deaths in total (see linked report). Keep in mind that Chernobyl was plant built specifically for producing nuclear weapons material. At the height of the cold war the Soviet Union's engineers DID NOT take public safety as the primary consideration, and even then it took the plant's operators violating multiple safety procedures to get the plant to react in the way it did. (Over a dozen versions of the Chernobyl plant operated for decades without any incident.)

The reports you see (made by greenies like our friends here) that claim 10's or 100's of thousands of deaths are based on the assumption that every person who died in the effected areas since the accident (over 20 years ago) were due to the accident. That is ridiculous. The deaths they are claiming as accident-related are senior citizens who have since died of normal old age. Most reports point out that the medical attention that came to the impoverished area after the attack probably resulted in many more lives being saved by the application of normal preventative health care than were lost due to residual effects of radiation exposure.

You have to take into account discounting too: money spent now is worth more than money spent later, because if you'd invested the money now you would have got more money later from interest. You also have to include the likely cost of fuel in the future, maintenance etc.

The calculations are relatively simple if you just want to work out how long it'll take for a solar panel to pay back its cost. It's quite hard, so I'd rely on published work.

So look up 'electricity costs per kWh by source' or something like that!

Solar? Windfarms? Get a life already . . . it ain’t gonna happen . . . get over it.

It’s called arithimetic, ya fuckin dork!

Hydroelectric dams create lakes that change the natural environment and cover up heritage sites while making it more difficult for fish to breed.

Windmills are an eyesore and cause significant deaths to birds.

All of these are cons, but they are all containable and have options to get around them.

Okay you know how carbon credits work at offsetting your emissions so I won't spend any time explaining those, other than they're good but should ONLY be used as a last case resort (reduce your emissions first!).

Where green energy comes into play is that it's produced by renewable sources, such as wind, solar, hydro, etc. Simple as that.

So if you generate 4 tonnes on CO2 for burning the fuel in your car for a year, and another 4 tonnes from the coal burned to produce electricity to power your house for a year, you can use both Carbon and Green Energy credits to zero your emissions from both.

You can't buy green energy for your car (unless you have an electric vehicle…), so Carbon offsets are the ONLY way to do that. But you CAN buy your electricity from renewable sources, and by doing so your house power consumption hasn't contributed produced any CO2 at all. You can also use Carbon Credits to offset the house instead, but Green Energy is better if you can.

People get confused and think that there needs to be a separate 'Green' power cord to plug your house into. This isn't the case. What happens is that ALL electricity goes into the same grid and gets used at it's nearest point. The power itself doesn't know or care where it's being used. So the actual physical electricity produced by renewable power might be used by someone NOT paying for green energy, and if you're nearer to a coal power station, you'll be using power from there regardless.

But this is the important part. It doesn't matter where it comes from or goes. What matters is that there's a DEMAND for it in the first place. For example, if there's 100GW of power coming from coal, and 1GW coming from Renewables, and no one bothers buying green energy, there's no reason to make more Renewables. But if MOST people (like, 70GW's worth) said they want to buy green power instead of coal power, then a HUGE amount of renewable power stations would need to be built, and the coal stations could eventually be turned off. So it's EXTREMELY important and perhaps the best thing (and easiest) all of us can do. Right now.

But right now there's still only a tiny fraction of people buying green energy because they're either not aware of it, or they don't want to pay the 5c or so more per KW, or they don't think the world even needs clean renewable energy…

I'm aware of it, I don't mind the extra money, and I think it's essential that we switch to clean energy. So I'm one of those that buy Green Energy (as well as offsetting the other stuff).

Hope that helps.