“Handling that amount of nuclear waste is also a trivial task…” How would that be a trivial task? There’s no terminal storage here in Germany because nobody can say if the proposed locations are really safe for the thousands of years that the waste still be highly radioactive. And of course no one wants to live next to one of those dumps, just as nobody wants to live next to a nuclear power plant.

And as for your “nuclear power is safe enough” statement, I suggest you visit the (huge) area that was contaminated by the Tschernobyl disaster in Ukraine and talk to the victims that are still alive (but most likely have cancer) about it. Just skimming through the (official) lists of malfunctions in nuclear power plants you can find on the net might prove to be somewhat enlightening as well (you wouldn’t believe how many times things ALMOST went seriously wrong).

Renewables are here now, they aren’t too expensive now and prices are dropping rapidly (unlike any other form of electric energy source). Even with a reduced decline of prices for renewable energy, they will have a “break even” with traditional energies within the next 5-10 years. If it weren’t for the crap that the lobby and marketing machinery of the nuclear and oil industries feeds us (renewables = de-centralazation = no money to be made by conventional power companies) we might actually start using them on a big scale and solve both climate and price problems in a time-frame that is much shorter than that needed to build a couple of hundred new nuclear power plants.

regarding corn: corn production, in the U.S. anyway, is heavily subsidized, and as such is artificially inexpensive. corn is a taxing crop. it shouldn’t be used for nearly as many food products as it is (high fructose corn syrup, anyone?), much less as a fuel source. there’s a reason why ethanol from corn is the only non-petroleum-based fuel source that bush ever mentions; certain folks he is sympathetic to stand to make a ton of money off of that solution.

i’m not familiar with switchgrass, but that sounds like a promising possibility. i also know that good ol’ marijuana (nee hemp) can produce a startlingly high amount of fuel per acre, and the byproduct of extracting the oil is a high-protein seed cake. early Ford cars were powered by hemp fuels. Henry Ford even made cars from hemp. there’s a famous photo of him taking a sledge-hammer to the trunk of a car made entirely from hemp plastic, see http://www.ashevillehempcompany.com/About_Hemp.html. you can find an abundance of info on this by googling for ‘hemp fuel’; the most useful page i found with a quick search is here: http://www.masscann.org/hemp/

regarding “energy theater”. i love the term, will start using (and propagating, hopefully) it immediately. and yes, it’s rampant. real conservation, like security, is hard. and complex. just like the total cost of ownership of software is rarely indicated by the licensing fees alone, neither is the total energy cost of some “green” initiative measurable by the energy expended at the end-user level; you’ve got to consider the whole picture. consider organic produce… in general, it’s a better environmental choice. but when your apple came from new zealand, then is it a better choice than the inorganic produce from the valley only 100 miles away? probably not, when you consider the total energy cost in getting it to you.

anyway, enough rambling… thanks for the fodder!

It’s true that people can be rather melodramatic about our problems, environmental or otherwise. But that’s not what I was trying to talk about when using that term.

I have no idea whether the increase in food prices has been taken into account in those EROI-just-above-1 figures you mention. But I would guess that it hasn’t, because it’s an economic cost, not an energy cost. It should be considered, though: anything that raises the price of food hits the poor much, much harder (proportionally) than the rich. What’s the energy gain for that economic cost, and could that same energy gain be realized through other means with lesser costs? (Such as, for instance, replacing coal plants with nuclear reactors, as has already been mentioned).

Really, the sooner people can figure out viable generation from nuclear fusion (aside from solar generation, of course), the better, but the vested interests do seem to love pushing their non-solutions like biofuels, presumably because there’s money to be made in appearing to be doing something for the environment whilst switching pet special interest groups from one form of subsidies to another.