Solar Energy Advances Negate Nuclear Argument

For those continuing to advocate for a lifting on the ban on building new nuclear facilities (forgetting it could take as long as 10 years to get new plants online and the high cost of mining uranium) comes this promising news from the geniuses at MIT.

The argument against solar energy is that its too expensive now, there’s no way to store solar energy, to even death/injury from installers falling off rooftops.  MIT appears to have solves the first two issues.

Excerpts from this story in the Boston Globe after the jump.

Solar energy has been expensive and inefficient to use after dark, said Daniel Nocera, 51, the Henry Dreyfus professor of energy and professor of chemistry at MIT. But in an article published in the July 31 issue of the journal Science, Nocera and other Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers say they have found a simple, inexpensive process for storing solar energy.

Cost is the biggest challenge facing the solar energy industry, said Monique Hanis, spokeswoman for the Solar Energy Industries Association, an industry trade group in Washington, D.C.

“The industry is trying to cut costs and improve efficiency all along the supply chain,” Hanis said. “The cost of solar should be on par with sort of traditional fossil sources in about eight years,” based on the rising costs of other forms of energy and the trends the association has seen in cost reductions in solar over the last decade, she said.

Nocera and the MIT research group said they opted to publish their findings to allow the science community to work on the technology.

Consider this news and a campaign underway for renewable fuel from Mr. Pickens, and we could see affordable “green” renewable fuel in our lifetimes that doesn’t product a toxic waste byproduct deadly for tens of thousands of years.