I don't think there's any conspiracy.  Fossil fuels are simply great sources of energy. They're like energon cubes from the Transformers.  Very concentrated.

In the long run, it will be solar power, fusion, what have you. But right now, the technology isn't even remotely there.

I don't think most people realize just how inefficient solar panels are presently. I should have scanned the size of a 7.5KW solar array. It's HUGE and it worked out to something like 900kw/h per month -- about enough for a home during the summer.  Not the type of thing you'd want in your backyard.  To get the same amount of energy from coal, you'd need a small pile.  

This might be the case in the USA. But as utemia hinted it is very different in other countries Brad. In Germany for example wind energy covers about 6.4% of the demand already. Water 3.4%. The German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein is planning to cover all of its electrical power demand by means of wind power by 2020.

All this was supported and promoted by the government. So such a change is possible.

There are even countries like Spain, where at peak times wind energy covered half of the countries demand.

I looked up the numbers on Wikipedia (german).

Exactly.  

Considering all the ones built in this country were done when the 8086 was the cat's meow of processors (or before) for computers?  yea, I can go along with that.

Sometimes we have to see beyond the things we want to believe so that we can see that sometimes there is more than what we want to believe. Not only do these corporations not want to give up their monopoly (who would? would you?) but lets not forget that if they fall, their fall will be much worse than anything we saw in recent years. Obviously a person who builds a money making business would not risk losing it to try something that is not a sure fire success.

I'm all for going green, I just don't want to sacrifise everything just because a few people think the end is near if we don't change. We are more likely to be destroyed by a meteor that we may not even know it's on it's way than we are destroying our planet thru climate change or global warming.

We need to accept the fact that while there is nothing wrong with changing to alternative fuels that the change can not and will not happen over night. 1) because today's technology is not advanced enough to sustain our societies needs and even in 10 years it still will not be, and 2) considering those who invent it, those who build it and those who will sell it will all be looking into profiting from it; the technology will not be cheap and could cause more financial harm than good.

I would have thought we would have been more advanced in all of this by now but politics have made it impossible at this point. Just look at how quickly every car company came up with an electric or hybrid car out of thin air. Politics and money is the name of the gam anywhere on this plant.

Germany is alot smaller than the US. Texas is several times bigger than Germany - so maybe size is an issue in the distribution of energy. You probably know that Germany has passed a law to stop using nuclear energy in the future and to compensate that loss with "green" energy. Renewable energy is already providing 16% - and it is possible to increase that to compensate the loss of the nuclear power plants.

I am leery of nuclear power. One - the problem of nuclear waste hasn't been solved - a permanent 100% secure storage place for the highly radioactive toxic waste is nowhere in sight. There is also the issue of future generations and wether they will have the knowledge about the danger it poses - after all we don't know how long our form of modern society will last and how and if knowledge will be preserved in the future, say in 4000 years. Highlyn nuclear toxic waste from today will be dangerous alot longer than 4000 years. Two,  do you know how long it takes to debuild/take down an old reactor? Years and years and years. You can't just tear it down like a regular building.

Everything to do with nuclear power is connected with high risks, even if itis possible to operate a powerplant securely. When it is possible to create energy with other means, and enough energy at that - economic interests should not have the absolute priority. Germany is trying to make an example with their attempt to stop using nuclear power in the future.

The majorityof electricity is generated by coal/gas power plants and that won't change for a while.

Gas is dangerous. Every once in a while an appartment house explodes because of a faulty gasline. Just recently it happend in Lüttich in Belgium - 15 people died. 

I haven't heard of a way to mitigate the toxicity of nuclear waste. All you can do is bury it somewhere and hope that nobody finds it or stumbles across it. But such a place hasn't been found - most of the places in use or future sites pose some risk. It is fairly  difficult to find a place that is absolutely earthquake secure, has the right sediment that allows for a secure site and that will remain like that for a few thousand years.

Could we not fill abandoned oilfields with nuclear waste?

I'm not sure the toxic waste would be more dangerous than the oil (if we hadn't used it up) in a few thousand years so we'd simply be replacing one danger with another.

The way I see it is we don't have to store the waste for thousands of years, just until cost/pound of achieving orbit drops to levels at which commercial spaceflight is viable. All we have to do then is ship the waste to orbit, strap a booster onto it and point it at the sun/one of the gas giants.

That's assuming that there would be an equal amount of both.

I don't think the nuclear waste of one power plant is as dangerous a find as all the oil that would be needed to produce the same amount of electricity.

Nobody has to guarantee it. The knowledge will come to future humanity after the first few thousand deaths, just like it did to us.

That number is still a lot lower than the number of people we would lose if we didn't have access to the electricity or, presumably, if we keep producing CO2 by burning oil instead of using nuclear power.

Aircraft carriers are nuclear-powered and I understand they saved thousands of lives after the tsunami.  Did a single use of nuclear power here save more lives than all the nuclear waste from reactors will ever cost?

Do you know the impact of Chernobyl? It was 56 direct deaths and approx. 4000 cancer deaths (in 600,000 people exposed) over their lifetime.

I doubt that a nuclear waste site is more dangerous than an exploding power plant.

And I guess that a lot more than 4056 lives were saved in the Soviet Union because the country had access to nuclear power.

I never argued against finding a place to reliably store current nuclear waste, just over the length of time it would have to remain sequestered there. Obviously launching this material to space will require new systems to prove themselves before we put any waste up in them, but in the mean time we can utilize vitrification processes and reactors designed to consume nuclear waste as a fuel.

It is completely unreasonable to assume that the cost of spaceflight will never drop below what it is today. Currently it costs between $10,000 and $40,000 to launch one kg of material into orbit. The Falcon9 rocket, scheduled for its maiden flight sometime early this year(http://www.spacex.com/updates.php#Falcon9Update081507), has a listed price of $49,500,000 for 10450kg or about $4736.84/kg for a launch from Cape Canaveral(http://www.spacex.com/falcon9.php). Obviously, this is still ridiculously expensive compared to the cost of transporting the material across continents to an underground depot, but it is a stepping stone toward cheaper rocket based launch systems while other, less explosive methods for achieving orbit are explored.

Of all the manned flights performed by NASA, I can only find one catastrophic failure during liftoff resulting in explosion mentioned, or a 0.64935% chance of failure resulting in explosion, which to me is an acceptable percentage for launches.