Mueller did not say that Trump was immune from prosecution just by being president, he said the opposite, in fact, it says he explicitly was not found to have committed any crimes at all
Link to the Mueller Report, Quotes:
Page 220: "Under applicable Supreme Court precedent, the Constitution does not categorically and permanently immunize a President for obstructing justice through the use of his Article II powers." [...]""Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime..."
Page 2: "We applied the term coordination that sense when stating in the report that the investigation did not establish that the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government in it's election interference activities."
Page 220: "Second, unlike cases in which a subject engages in Obstruction of justice to cover up a crime, the evidence we obtained did not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference."
Page 9: "Second, while the investigation identified numerous links between individuals with ties to the Russian government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign, the evidence was not sufficient to support criminal charges. Among other things, the evidence was not sufficient to charge any Campaign official as an unregistered agent of the Russian government or other Russian principal. And our evidence about the June 9, 2016 meeting and WikiLeaks's releases of hacked materials was not sufficient to charge a criminal campaign finance violation. Further, the evidence was not sufficient to charge that any member of the Trump Campaign conspired with representatives of the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election."
Page 180: "The investigation did not establish that the contacts described in volume I, Section IV, supra, amounted to an agreement to commit any substantive violation of federal criminal law- including foreign-influence and campaign-finance laws, both of which are discussed further below. The office therefore did not charge any individual associated with the Trump Campaign with conspiracy to commit a federal offense arising from Russia contacts, either under a specific statute or under Section' 371's offense clause. The Office also did not charge any campaign official or associate with a conspiracy under Section 371's defraud clause. "
Page 183: "The investigation did not, however, yield evidence sufficient to sustain any charge that any individual affiliated with the Trump Campaign acted as an agent of a foreign principal within the meaning of FARA, or, in terms of Section 951, subject to the direction or control of the government of Russia, or any official thereof. "
Page 185: "The Office considered whether to charge Trump campaign officials with crimes in connection with the June 9 meeting described in Volume I, Section IV. A.5, supra. The office concluded that, in light of the government's substantial burden of proof issues on intent ("knowing" and "willful"), and the difficult of establishing the value of the offered information, criminal charges would not meet the Justice Manual standard that "the admissible evidence will probably be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction."
Page 9: "Former Trump Organization attorney Michael Cohen leaded guilty to making false statements to Congress about the Trump Moscow project."
Page 33-35: "The investigation identified two different forms of connections between the IRA and members of the Trump campaign. First, on multiple occasions, members and surrogates of the Trump campaign promoted- typically by linking, retweeting, or similiar methods of reposting- pro-Trump or anti-Clinton content published by the IRA through IRA-controlled social media accounts. Additionally, in a few instances, IRA employees represented themselves as U.S. persons to communicate with members of the Trump Campaign in an effort to seek assistance and coordination on IRA-organized political rallies inside the United States." [...] "The investigation has not identified evidence that any Trump Campaign official understood the requests were coming from foreign nationals."
Page 69: "Cohen was the only Trump Organization representative to negotiate directly with I.C. Expert or it's agents "
Page 70, proof trump declined to work with the Russian government: "In a second email to Cohen sent the same day, Rtskhiladze provided a translation of the letter, which described the Trump Moscow project as a "symbol of stronger economic, business, and cultural relationships between New York and Moscow and therefore the United States and the Russian Federation. On september 27, 2015, Rtskhiladze sent another email to Cohen, proposing that the Trump organization partner on the Trump Moscow project with "Global development group LLC", which he described as being controlled by Michail Posikhin, a Russian architect, and Simon Nizharadze. Cohen told the Office that he ultimately declined the proposal and instead continued to work with I.C. Expert, the company represented by Felix Sater."
Page 101: "The Mueller report firmly establishes there was no connection between Trump and the Russian government. There are claims made that many of the individuals within the campaign had connections to Russia, but that none were criminal in nature, at all, and not just related to a single specific crime."
Cohen was specifically charged with crimes with lying about the supposed "Moscow Tower" meeting on multiple occasions. Finally, the mueller report does state that the president can be charged with a crime, but says they failed to find enough evidence to do so. It's not that complicated, it's actually pretty cut and dry.
Issues with Mueller Report
The support was not just for Trump, Page 31-32: "For example, the IRA targeted the family of [Redacted], and an umber of black social justice activists while posing as a grassroots group called "Black Matters US".
While it is clear that the Mueller report did not establish ANY criminal connection to the and did not say the president was immune from prosecution so this is why they didn't prosecute, there are things in the Mueller report that seem false or intentionally misleading. The most obvious is the report of Michael Flynn who supposedly lied to the FBI, a charge which has thus far been dropped by the DOJ after it was discovered FBI agents intended to catch him int a perjury trap to get him fired, and make and off-the-books deal for him to confess to a crime he didn't commit in order to save his son from prosecution. This is evidence that was revealed after the Mueller report, and thus was probably believed to be true by Mueller and the authors of the report at the time, despite later proven to be false.
Another similar charge is that the Russian disinformation was clearly designed to help trump and hurt Hillary. However, after the facebook advertisements were revealed to the public, many were shown to be explicitly anti-Trump, including holding rallies to protest Trump, supporting Black-lives-matter, an explicitly Anti-Trump organization, and supporting Hillary by suggesting she would be pro-muslim. As these advertisements were declassified, Of these nearly 4000 emails and advertisements, roughly 100 dealt with either candidate, and they were both positive AND critical of both candidates, far from the argument that the Russians supported Trump over Hillary. In fact, it shows the Russians were most likely just trying to sew chaos. It's clear that only a heavily biased interpretation of this evidence would reveal the group, was was "one-step removed" from the Russian government and not even the Russian government, was deliberately pro-Trump.
Thursday, December 5, 2019
Tuesday, September 10, 2019
Debunking Various Myths about the Middle east wars (condensed)
1. WMD's Were Found in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Nonetheless, in response to a question from committee member Curt Weldon, Col. Chui agreed that the munitions met the technical definition of weapons of mass destruction. "These are chemical weapons as defined under the Chemical Weapons Convention and yes, sir, they do constitute weapons of mass destruction."" [1][2][3]
2. The oil is going to France and China, and american oil companies would have lost money if foreign competition was opened up, this is a basic law of supply and demand, to not want more competition. So not only did the U.S. not do this, but it wouldn't make logical sense. [1][2][3]
3. Iraq was not horribly destabilized by the U.S. intervention, and the war itself was not started by the U.S.
4. The U.S. did not kill hundreds of thousands of people, Saddam did.
5. Iraq's weapons predominately came from the soviet union. With the ak-47 being the most prolific gun in the world, next to other soviet or soviet-replica weapons such as the PKM, RPG-7, T-72 tank and so on, it should be rather obvious that the U.S. did not arm them or most entities. The cartels, terrorists and most dictatorships all use the Ak-47, with over 100 million in the world.
6. Iraq was Socialist, known as Ba'thist socialist, or literally "Arab National Socialist", or Arab Nazi. Created with the assistance of the Nazi's in the 1940's, the concept of pure Aryan, Persian descedence is still common in the middle east, including Syria and Libya, as is hating the jews.
7. Invasion caused ISIS to form
8. Perhaps the most hilarious argument is the idea that the war somehow was bad for the economy. Despite war historically almost always being good for the economy, and liberals making the dual argument that the war was for money and to make money, they also claim it was simultaneously good at making money but bad for the economy. While one could come up with no less than 1000 forms of mental gymnastics to try and prove this point, the objective reality is that it is false. Two factors must be weighed, initially, the cost of the conflict, and secondly the
9. Despite the notion that drones killed thousands of civilians, their design from the beginning was actually to reduce civilian casualties. Using the smallest plane with the smallest missile that removed as much human error as possible, via an unpiloted aircraft, the Drones have thus far had a civilian death rate of approximately 1% or less, with around 17 civilians killed out of 2000 strikes. While all civilian deaths are bad, it's better to reduce civilian casualties in any conflict, thus making such an endeavor useful. The media's incredibly misleading argument, such as Salon, the Guardian and others who claim 38 high-value targets being killed means the remaining 98% were civilians, is patently absurd, as these represent figures that were merely known about beforehand. By the very argument of these sources, the argument is that the 98% figure "must be" all civilians, despite them simply being those who were not terrorist leaders, merely terrorist subordinates. This disgusting and flagrantly misleading lie has lead many to want to discontinue the drone program, despite objectively saving civilian lives and being less deadly than other alternatives, such as using 3000 pound cruise missiles over 30 pound gryphon missiles which only kill a few people at a time.
10. Most of the world's dictatorships in the last 100 years were socialist or communist, be them the Nazis who were national socialist, the Communists and so on. Of these, the majority were assisted by the communists, usually in their direct creation, although, the Nazis and Italian fascists formed on their own, despite being allies and starting WWII in 1939 via the invasion of Poland. The U.S.S.R. stands for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the original party of the Bolsheviks, who would later take over Russia and form the Soviet union, were the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). The communists view themselves as a form of socialism, and believe that true Communism is essentially the spread of global socialism, and thus support socialist movements, as communism is a form of socialism, and view communism as the end state of socialism, eventually leading to global socialism, as compared to national socialism, such as with the Nazis or Italian Fascists. Most of the middle eastern dictatorships, be it Syria, Iraq, Libyia, Iran or others were formed with the direct assistance from Moscow, and the same can be said of most South American dictatorships, be it Venezuela, Argentina and so on. Be it their ideology, weapons, equipment, or primary source of funding, these overwhelmingly were not created by the U.S. Contrary to the idea most of the world's problem stems from the U.S. attempts to stop the communists, the simple reality is it of course, was the communists spreading socialist viewpoints over the world that lead to the rish of these dictatorships. While some will argue about the true nature of them being "socialist" or not, a seemingly always evolving, amorphous concept, the simple fact of the matter is it was promoted by the side of self proclaimed socialists, and they at least shared the same names and resources. It's difficult then to suggest the U.S. created all the problems by the very enemies we have fought for decades. The U.S. fought the rise of communism in Vietnam, in Cuba, in Iran, and so on, as well as socialism in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan. The central argument that is the basis of the entire anti-war sentiment largely comes from the largely incorrect notion that the U.S. somehow created all of these evil entities, instead of the Soviet Union, who supplied them directly with weapons and funding.
2. The oil is going to France and China, and american oil companies would have lost money if foreign competition was opened up, this is a basic law of supply and demand, to not want more competition. So not only did the U.S. not do this, but it wouldn't make logical sense. [1][2][3]
3. Iraq was not horribly destabilized by the U.S. intervention, and the war itself was not started by the U.S.
4. The U.S. did not kill hundreds of thousands of people, Saddam did.
5. Iraq's weapons predominately came from the soviet union. With the ak-47 being the most prolific gun in the world, next to other soviet or soviet-replica weapons such as the PKM, RPG-7, T-72 tank and so on, it should be rather obvious that the U.S. did not arm them or most entities. The cartels, terrorists and most dictatorships all use the Ak-47, with over 100 million in the world.
6. Iraq was Socialist, known as Ba'thist socialist, or literally "Arab National Socialist", or Arab Nazi. Created with the assistance of the Nazi's in the 1940's, the concept of pure Aryan, Persian descedence is still common in the middle east, including Syria and Libya, as is hating the jews.
7. Invasion caused ISIS to form
8. Perhaps the most hilarious argument is the idea that the war somehow was bad for the economy. Despite war historically almost always being good for the economy, and liberals making the dual argument that the war was for money and to make money, they also claim it was simultaneously good at making money but bad for the economy. While one could come up with no less than 1000 forms of mental gymnastics to try and prove this point, the objective reality is that it is false. Two factors must be weighed, initially, the cost of the conflict, and secondly the
9. Despite the notion that drones killed thousands of civilians, their design from the beginning was actually to reduce civilian casualties. Using the smallest plane with the smallest missile that removed as much human error as possible, via an unpiloted aircraft, the Drones have thus far had a civilian death rate of approximately 1% or less, with around 17 civilians killed out of 2000 strikes. While all civilian deaths are bad, it's better to reduce civilian casualties in any conflict, thus making such an endeavor useful. The media's incredibly misleading argument, such as Salon, the Guardian and others who claim 38 high-value targets being killed means the remaining 98% were civilians, is patently absurd, as these represent figures that were merely known about beforehand. By the very argument of these sources, the argument is that the 98% figure "must be" all civilians, despite them simply being those who were not terrorist leaders, merely terrorist subordinates. This disgusting and flagrantly misleading lie has lead many to want to discontinue the drone program, despite objectively saving civilian lives and being less deadly than other alternatives, such as using 3000 pound cruise missiles over 30 pound gryphon missiles which only kill a few people at a time.
10. Most of the world's dictatorships in the last 100 years were socialist or communist, be them the Nazis who were national socialist, the Communists and so on. Of these, the majority were assisted by the communists, usually in their direct creation, although, the Nazis and Italian fascists formed on their own, despite being allies and starting WWII in 1939 via the invasion of Poland. The U.S.S.R. stands for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the original party of the Bolsheviks, who would later take over Russia and form the Soviet union, were the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). The communists view themselves as a form of socialism, and believe that true Communism is essentially the spread of global socialism, and thus support socialist movements, as communism is a form of socialism, and view communism as the end state of socialism, eventually leading to global socialism, as compared to national socialism, such as with the Nazis or Italian Fascists. Most of the middle eastern dictatorships, be it Syria, Iraq, Libyia, Iran or others were formed with the direct assistance from Moscow, and the same can be said of most South American dictatorships, be it Venezuela, Argentina and so on. Be it their ideology, weapons, equipment, or primary source of funding, these overwhelmingly were not created by the U.S. Contrary to the idea most of the world's problem stems from the U.S. attempts to stop the communists, the simple reality is it of course, was the communists spreading socialist viewpoints over the world that lead to the rish of these dictatorships. While some will argue about the true nature of them being "socialist" or not, a seemingly always evolving, amorphous concept, the simple fact of the matter is it was promoted by the side of self proclaimed socialists, and they at least shared the same names and resources. It's difficult then to suggest the U.S. created all the problems by the very enemies we have fought for decades. The U.S. fought the rise of communism in Vietnam, in Cuba, in Iran, and so on, as well as socialism in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan. The central argument that is the basis of the entire anti-war sentiment largely comes from the largely incorrect notion that the U.S. somehow created all of these evil entities, instead of the Soviet Union, who supplied them directly with weapons and funding.
Friday, May 24, 2019
The insane amount of debt Europe is in
The insane amount of debt Europe is in
Luxembourg has nearly 7 million dollars in debt per citizen, which is 6300% of their GDP. The Netherlands has 265,000 dollars in debt per person, at around 522% of their GDP. The UK has 127,000 dollars in debt per person, which is 313% of their GDP. Greece is 240%, Belgium 265%, Switzerland 269%, France 213%, Finland 196%, and so on and so forth. The U.S., which by comparison is in the most debt it's even been in which has been considered a significant problem, has 115% of their GDP in debt per citizen, or around 60,000 per person. This is the amount of external debt owed to other countries and entities outside the country, and Public debt similarly is very high in these countries as well. In these EU country's, in seems many are in extraordinary amounts of debt, so much so they can never pay it off. Iceland recently had it's debt forgiven, but it was 11 times it's GDP, and many of these countries never seem to have recovered. This amount of debt is owed to various banks around the world, and as it's in the trillions of dollars, unlike the country of iceland which has 1/1000th the population of the U.S., the debt can't be forgiven without crashing the world market. So eventually, things will get so bad the debt is going to be forced to be repaid, or they will stop loaning to these countries all together, and hyper inflation is effectively inevitable, just like with the germans after WWI.
Not surprisingly a lot of these countries have a high standard of living, but this can't last forever; eventually, someone will expect the debt to be repaid, or hyper inflation will set in, and the economy of these countries will collapse. Whether you like the banks or not, the economy is dependent on them, and thus if they collapse, so does the whole economy so goes people's entire life savings. Europe has been stretched for over a decade now, and only seems to have recovered from the last financial collapse by getting in to insane amounts of debt. If they can't pay it back or it's forgiven, massive economic problems will set in, and Europe will quickly destabilize as the bubble pops. And what then?
I personally believe Europe is headed towards a major financial collapse, which they will blame on a lot of things, but in reality it's just overextending themselves and getting themselves in to insane amounts of debt. I don't think this is sustainable, and even if the economy doesn't collapse and even if hyper inflation doesn't set in, their standard of living will drop when they can't borrow endless amounts of money. Eventually banks will realize that helping the ultra rich get more rich isn't a good idea and will start giving money to countries like in Africa, or those that really need it, and Europe's way of life will be doomed. And what then? I don't see this being talked about by anyone ,but I predict Europe is destined to collapse in the next several years, probably less than a decade. And before someone tries to say there is a difference between public and private debt or you can be in large amounts of debt and pay it off with a growing economy, I know all that. This is external debt specifically, which means what they owe to other entities and not just themselves. This is untenable though, as they either borrow from other programs and eventually watch all their social programs collapse, and thus their standard of living, or their economy will continue to sink and it will be a moot point. For example the average GDP of most European countries has gone down in the last 10 years quite considerably. While the U.S. and UK used to have the same GDP per capita, in 10 years the UK has gone from 50,000 to about 40,000, and the U.S. from 50,000 to 60,000, giving us 50% more money than the UK. Norway has dropped from about 100,000 per citizen to 75,000 per citizen. In comparison to the dollar, the Euro has dropped in value by roughly 40%, which is quite a bit of inflation to have. Countries like Spain, Italy and France have seen a drop in GDP, while the U.S. and various other countries are improving. Except for a slight boost in the last 2 years, the economy of Europe seems to be falling, all the while they are racking up debt they can't possibly pay back, worth several times their entire economies. Something is about to give, and it likely is not going to be pretty for Europe.
Friday, May 17, 2019
The four key problems with solar panels
The four key problems with solar panels
There are four key problems with solar panels, the first being efficiency, the second being labor requirements, the third being price, and the fourth being the variability of the weather. The most obviously problematic of them all, which all sides seem to agree on, is the massive labor requirements. Solar panels require approximately 79 times the labor as coal to function correctly; as solar panels currently only produce 1.32% of our nation's power as of 2016 [2], but utilize 374,000 workers [3], in comparison to fossil fuels like coal and gas at 62% of our electricity and 1.1 million workers, and nuclear power which produces approximately 20% of our power and 120,000 workers. To replace coal, nuclear power and all other forms of electricity you'd need 75 times the amount of solar power generation, and accordingly 374,000 x 75 times the workers, or 28 million people. This would require approximately 10% of our population to work on solar power generation, which is an impossibly high amount of salary costs and labor input to functionally work for our society, and that's before getting in to trying to replace gasoline and other sources of power like natural gas for heating or cooking that is also present, that could easily double this requirement. As electricity only makes up approximately one third of energy consumption, when other forms of energy are considered (gasoline for cars, natural gas for heating etc.), it could possibly take up to 30% of our country becoming solar panel workers to completely replace all energy production with solar panels. It's just not practical to expect people to abandon their jobs and learn how to become a solar worker in these volumes, or pay for it, let alone for something with so little real world benefit, being more expensive and polluting as much.
Fundamentally beyond this, is energy efficiency, as the problem with solar panels being posited as "clean" energy is they're not particularly efficient or clean. Solar panels obviously do not come from thin air, and it's not just a matter of money or cost to create them. It takes an enormous amount of electricity produce solar panels, requiring the electrocution of sand at the right stages in order to turn it in to glass, with the same high energy requirements for producing their batteries. The solar panel industry consumes large amounts of electricity in the aggregate for solar panels to be created, and industry as a whole barely produces more electricity than it creates. Only recently has the industry surpassed the bench mark of producing more energy than it consumes, as of 2014, and this is largely due to superior placement of solar panels (in sunnier areas), and the use of more expensive materials. Regardless, this means that, if we were for instance to burn all the world's coal to create solar panels, we might get slightly more energy out after 30 years than we put in to it, or 10-20% more energy, which wouldn't be enough to justify the cost, labor requirements, weather variability and other problems. If we used nuclear power or another clean source of energy to create solar panels, we would be better off using this clean source of power to power society than dramatically increase the price and labor for a less efficient weather dependent system. This efficiency is set to improve in the future, largely due to better placement of solar panels (I.E. placing them in sunny areas), but nonetheless as a whole it still barely produces more than it consumes. We would first need a source of clean, abundant energy to reliably make solar panels, such as uranium in CANDU reactors, which if we had that, our problems would already be over. The added expense and difficulty of creating solar panels to gain slight bit of extra power during the summer likely is not worth it. Solar panels at their current levels of efficiency also cannot create more of themselves, or are not self-sufficient, as they'd have to produce twice as much as they consumed to be able to do that, that is to have enough power both to run society and make more solar panels, and even at this level it would not compensate for problems like very little sunlight during the winter and lots of sunlight during the summer.
Solar panels also have extreme weather variability issues, such as failing to work when there is little sunlight, like during major storms or other dark periods. When it rains or is foggy for long periods of time, or if there is hail or strong winds which might damage solar panels, solar panels cannot work. Snow, rain, hail, and other such things can disrupt the use of solar panels, as can simple things like winter. During the winter, sunlight is limited, and so the use of solar panels is more limited and ultimately less effective. A solar panel with a high solar efficiency, sufficient to power society at an "average daily solar output rate" on paper, is not enough in reality, as during the winter there would be less sunlight than the "daily average", and thus there is an intrinsic need for more solar panels. So, for a society to be able to use solar panels, they would need to reach a certain minimum to compensate for the winter and other dark periods. During the winter, you might need 2-3 times as many solar panels as you'd need during normal times, and thus would necessitate over twice as many solar panels than one would ordinarily need during an "average" day. As there is no consistent daily solar output, we would need to produce more solar panels than are needed on the "average day", meaning that even if we got to the perfect level of efficiency we needed based on average solar daily levels, we'd actually need more than twice as many solar panels to compensate during the winter. An example of such a problem is in Germany, who when attempting to power an entire city and large volumes of their country with solar panels, found they produced far too little power in the winter, but produced far more than they needed in the summer. [4][5][6] This german city found it almost impossible to power their city on pure solar panels, and found massive power surpluses during the summer and shortages during the winter; even if we wanted to build enough for winter, the amount of solar panels needed would be 3 times or more than what is normally necessary, so solar panels at best can augment existing power systems and not be a total replacement for them.
Batteries, which are needed for solar panels and, also electric cars, largely have their costs come from the price of electricity, so with higher electricity costs comes more expensive electric cars. But solar panels are not cheap regardless. They tend to be far more expensive than fossil fuels or nuclear power, although the price varies given location (places with more sunlight generate more solar power), subsidies, if power storage is present (such as batteries), and the type of solar power generation process. Solar panel prices vary considerably, and information about the real price of solar panels is often diluted because of this; for example, roof installation solar panels cost approximately 253 dollars per mw/h, while the cheapest variant of solar panels cost 49.5 per mw/h, and coal can cost 101.5 dollars per megawatt hour. However, solar panels are often subsidized and are only useful if storage mechanisms are present, therefore being responsible for the low cost of a very specific and particular form of solar power. Cheap solar panels are not protected against hail or other weather problems, and often are not efficient enough to produce more energy than they consume. Even if the cheapest form of solar power is chosen, it still invariably will likely prove to be problematic in some other way. Government subsidies *might* make it cheap enough for your average citizen to uses, but this cost is still paid by society, making the benefit essentially irrelevant, and only conceals the problem. For technology industries that consume high levels of electricity and who's prices are based on electricity prices, such as carbon fiber plants or computer manufacturers, solar would unnecessarily hemorrhage their profits and cause costs to sky rocket for these products. Government subsidies for coal or uranium might pay for relatively small start up costs, but do not pay for their entire operation, where as solar subsidies tend to pay for virtually the entire cost of solar power. Even so it's still proven to be fairly expensive, and this does not solve the problem to society itself; we still end up paying for higher electricity even if it's through a tax increase. Trading paying a company 4000 a year to trading the government 4000 a year does not change the costs requirements. Furthermore, it would be insufficient for large businesses who rely on electricity and consume the majority of our electricity, and bare in mind this massive increase in cost comes with massive labor requirements, variability in bad weather, and an only slightly mild increase in total energy output. In the end, solar panels are not a replacement for a decent clean, cheap energy source, like uranium or thorium. Comparatively, uranium could be as much as 6-8 times cheaper than coal, which would mean a technological revolution in this country allowing us to produce cheap technological goods and probably outsell china, making it the ideal choice.
Most Nuclear costs come from interest paid to banks on loans (70%) and insurance costs, two costs which can be easily eliminated through low interest loans and government provisions for any damage potentially caused by nuclear power. Rather than paying insurance companies enormous amounts of money on the potential of a total nuclear melt down, an event that has never occurred within the U.S., one could simply in the rare event shift the burden on to the government, and have the government provide low or no-interest loans for the start up cost, also ignoring the potential risk associated with nuclear. While the chance of a nuclear melt down is already low with American plants, with no serious melt down in U.S. history (with a few partial melt downs), and a melt down not leading to an explosion like in Chernobyl which was a steam explosion and not a nuclear bomb going off, CANDU reactors are incapable of having a melt down, and the coolant system itself would automatically shut down the chance of a nuclear reaction. Using .7% to 1.2% U235 uranium, the low volume of U-235 uraniumn makes a melt down impossible, as it's close to what is found in nature (which obviously isn't exploding at this moment). CANDU reactors are already 60% of the price of ordinary uranium reactors, so it is possible for the price to drop further. Other than the extremely low carbon emissions, it is also has the potential to be much cheaper and would be necessarily to make solar panels in any case. In short, there are better, more effective power sources available, and solar panels have proven to be hideously inefficient.
There are four key problems with solar panels, the first being efficiency, the second being labor requirements, the third being price, and the fourth being the variability of the weather. The most obviously problematic of them all, which all sides seem to agree on, is the massive labor requirements. Solar panels require approximately 79 times the labor as coal to function correctly; as solar panels currently only produce 1.32% of our nation's power as of 2016 [2], but utilize 374,000 workers [3], in comparison to fossil fuels like coal and gas at 62% of our electricity and 1.1 million workers, and nuclear power which produces approximately 20% of our power and 120,000 workers. To replace coal, nuclear power and all other forms of electricity you'd need 75 times the amount of solar power generation, and accordingly 374,000 x 75 times the workers, or 28 million people. This would require approximately 10% of our population to work on solar power generation, which is an impossibly high amount of salary costs and labor input to functionally work for our society, and that's before getting in to trying to replace gasoline and other sources of power like natural gas for heating or cooking that is also present, that could easily double this requirement. As electricity only makes up approximately one third of energy consumption, when other forms of energy are considered (gasoline for cars, natural gas for heating etc.), it could possibly take up to 30% of our country becoming solar panel workers to completely replace all energy production with solar panels. It's just not practical to expect people to abandon their jobs and learn how to become a solar worker in these volumes, or pay for it, let alone for something with so little real world benefit, being more expensive and polluting as much.
Fundamentally beyond this, is energy efficiency, as the problem with solar panels being posited as "clean" energy is they're not particularly efficient or clean. Solar panels obviously do not come from thin air, and it's not just a matter of money or cost to create them. It takes an enormous amount of electricity produce solar panels, requiring the electrocution of sand at the right stages in order to turn it in to glass, with the same high energy requirements for producing their batteries. The solar panel industry consumes large amounts of electricity in the aggregate for solar panels to be created, and industry as a whole barely produces more electricity than it creates. Only recently has the industry surpassed the bench mark of producing more energy than it consumes, as of 2014, and this is largely due to superior placement of solar panels (in sunnier areas), and the use of more expensive materials. Regardless, this means that, if we were for instance to burn all the world's coal to create solar panels, we might get slightly more energy out after 30 years than we put in to it, or 10-20% more energy, which wouldn't be enough to justify the cost, labor requirements, weather variability and other problems. If we used nuclear power or another clean source of energy to create solar panels, we would be better off using this clean source of power to power society than dramatically increase the price and labor for a less efficient weather dependent system. This efficiency is set to improve in the future, largely due to better placement of solar panels (I.E. placing them in sunny areas), but nonetheless as a whole it still barely produces more than it consumes. We would first need a source of clean, abundant energy to reliably make solar panels, such as uranium in CANDU reactors, which if we had that, our problems would already be over. The added expense and difficulty of creating solar panels to gain slight bit of extra power during the summer likely is not worth it. Solar panels at their current levels of efficiency also cannot create more of themselves, or are not self-sufficient, as they'd have to produce twice as much as they consumed to be able to do that, that is to have enough power both to run society and make more solar panels, and even at this level it would not compensate for problems like very little sunlight during the winter and lots of sunlight during the summer.
Solar panels also have extreme weather variability issues, such as failing to work when there is little sunlight, like during major storms or other dark periods. When it rains or is foggy for long periods of time, or if there is hail or strong winds which might damage solar panels, solar panels cannot work. Snow, rain, hail, and other such things can disrupt the use of solar panels, as can simple things like winter. During the winter, sunlight is limited, and so the use of solar panels is more limited and ultimately less effective. A solar panel with a high solar efficiency, sufficient to power society at an "average daily solar output rate" on paper, is not enough in reality, as during the winter there would be less sunlight than the "daily average", and thus there is an intrinsic need for more solar panels. So, for a society to be able to use solar panels, they would need to reach a certain minimum to compensate for the winter and other dark periods. During the winter, you might need 2-3 times as many solar panels as you'd need during normal times, and thus would necessitate over twice as many solar panels than one would ordinarily need during an "average" day. As there is no consistent daily solar output, we would need to produce more solar panels than are needed on the "average day", meaning that even if we got to the perfect level of efficiency we needed based on average solar daily levels, we'd actually need more than twice as many solar panels to compensate during the winter. An example of such a problem is in Germany, who when attempting to power an entire city and large volumes of their country with solar panels, found they produced far too little power in the winter, but produced far more than they needed in the summer. [4][5][6] This german city found it almost impossible to power their city on pure solar panels, and found massive power surpluses during the summer and shortages during the winter; even if we wanted to build enough for winter, the amount of solar panels needed would be 3 times or more than what is normally necessary, so solar panels at best can augment existing power systems and not be a total replacement for them.
Batteries, which are needed for solar panels and, also electric cars, largely have their costs come from the price of electricity, so with higher electricity costs comes more expensive electric cars. But solar panels are not cheap regardless. They tend to be far more expensive than fossil fuels or nuclear power, although the price varies given location (places with more sunlight generate more solar power), subsidies, if power storage is present (such as batteries), and the type of solar power generation process. Solar panel prices vary considerably, and information about the real price of solar panels is often diluted because of this; for example, roof installation solar panels cost approximately 253 dollars per mw/h, while the cheapest variant of solar panels cost 49.5 per mw/h, and coal can cost 101.5 dollars per megawatt hour. However, solar panels are often subsidized and are only useful if storage mechanisms are present, therefore being responsible for the low cost of a very specific and particular form of solar power. Cheap solar panels are not protected against hail or other weather problems, and often are not efficient enough to produce more energy than they consume. Even if the cheapest form of solar power is chosen, it still invariably will likely prove to be problematic in some other way. Government subsidies *might* make it cheap enough for your average citizen to uses, but this cost is still paid by society, making the benefit essentially irrelevant, and only conceals the problem. For technology industries that consume high levels of electricity and who's prices are based on electricity prices, such as carbon fiber plants or computer manufacturers, solar would unnecessarily hemorrhage their profits and cause costs to sky rocket for these products. Government subsidies for coal or uranium might pay for relatively small start up costs, but do not pay for their entire operation, where as solar subsidies tend to pay for virtually the entire cost of solar power. Even so it's still proven to be fairly expensive, and this does not solve the problem to society itself; we still end up paying for higher electricity even if it's through a tax increase. Trading paying a company 4000 a year to trading the government 4000 a year does not change the costs requirements. Furthermore, it would be insufficient for large businesses who rely on electricity and consume the majority of our electricity, and bare in mind this massive increase in cost comes with massive labor requirements, variability in bad weather, and an only slightly mild increase in total energy output. In the end, solar panels are not a replacement for a decent clean, cheap energy source, like uranium or thorium. Comparatively, uranium could be as much as 6-8 times cheaper than coal, which would mean a technological revolution in this country allowing us to produce cheap technological goods and probably outsell china, making it the ideal choice.
Most Nuclear costs come from interest paid to banks on loans (70%) and insurance costs, two costs which can be easily eliminated through low interest loans and government provisions for any damage potentially caused by nuclear power. Rather than paying insurance companies enormous amounts of money on the potential of a total nuclear melt down, an event that has never occurred within the U.S., one could simply in the rare event shift the burden on to the government, and have the government provide low or no-interest loans for the start up cost, also ignoring the potential risk associated with nuclear. While the chance of a nuclear melt down is already low with American plants, with no serious melt down in U.S. history (with a few partial melt downs), and a melt down not leading to an explosion like in Chernobyl which was a steam explosion and not a nuclear bomb going off, CANDU reactors are incapable of having a melt down, and the coolant system itself would automatically shut down the chance of a nuclear reaction. Using .7% to 1.2% U235 uranium, the low volume of U-235 uraniumn makes a melt down impossible, as it's close to what is found in nature (which obviously isn't exploding at this moment). CANDU reactors are already 60% of the price of ordinary uranium reactors, so it is possible for the price to drop further. Other than the extremely low carbon emissions, it is also has the potential to be much cheaper and would be necessarily to make solar panels in any case. In short, there are better, more effective power sources available, and solar panels have proven to be hideously inefficient.
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