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A Step Closer To The Optimum Solar Cell
An anonymous reader writes "Besides cost, solar cell efficiency is the second most critical criteria. Scientists from Berkeley Lab and other institutions, have announced a new solar cell material that may be able to achieve an extraordinary efficiency of about 50 percent -- twice the amount of the current record holder."
Actually MANY studies have shown that the waste from coal (coal has some uranium in it and other radioative materials) is significantly more dangerous than nuclear. The deal is, coal waste gets spread out through the air in small bits and scattered around the ground and water. It has a large environmental price but and one bit of waste won't really hurt you. Nuclear waste is collected and stored in one place and does not get scattered, but that resulting waste being consentrated is more harmful, though constentated coal waste would be much more harmful. All in all its an image problem, if we were just to scatter nuclear waste arond and bury it in small chucks there would be no hazard. But people would freak.
Since when is nuclear power dangerous? There have been two nuclear accidents that anyone remembers in the last half century. Once was caused by a piss-poor reactor design (Chernobyl) and one was caused when operators screwed up (but almost no radiation was released). You get exposed to more radiation on an *airplane trip* than you will in a nuclear power plant. And coincedently, you also get more radiation from a coal power plant than from a nuclear power plant; see below.
:)
As for the choice of a bucket of coal or fission waste, that's loaded. By the time you had a bucket full of nuclear waste, you'd have burnt about 3 million tons of coal to generate the same amount of energy. And those 3 million tons of coal, when burnt, released about 3 tons of uranium and about 10 tons of thorium in the process.
Run around in circles and scream! Coal power plants are a nu-cu-lar disaster!