AutoblogGreen

It would make more sense for Hawaii to use nuclear power to generate all of its electricity and use the excess electricity for powering a fleet of electric cars. It would be a lot cheaper than using petroleum.

Wind, solar and geothermal can supplement the energy needs of the island, but you need cheap, uninterruptible power supplies like nuclear to guarantee the grid will have plenty of supply.

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Geothermal and solarthermal could give you much more power than you need in Hawaii. Geothermal in Hawaii would be very efficient. In some places on some Hawaiian islands you can boil water with just digging one meter below the surface (volcanic activity hooray). So you could heat up enough water to run very strong turbines and supply the island with power.

On Hawaii a big solar thermal power plant could you more power than an average coal power plant.

The third thing is that a new nuclear power plant isn't cheap. The costs of a modern nuclear power plant are extremely high. Maintainence costs are very high too because you need strict expensive safety regulations, which you wouldn't need for solar.

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Well, the maintanence cost of Nuclear is actually quite low. As is the fuel cost.

Everything else though, including Capital, Insurance, Waste Handling, and Decomission is quite expensive.

As such, Nuclear power plants can't get a thin dime of capital financing from Wall Street.

The entire burden is put on tax payers.

Which isn't too surprising, since in almost all countries with significant Nuclear programs, the power plants are owned as Federal Monopolies.

US/Japan merely just toss huge ammounts of tax payer dollars at it. And allow private firms to collect rents on the cheap parts.

Operation&Maintenance, and Fuel Enrichment.

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Back to the topic at hand...

Maui's trade winds, sunshine and tides are plenty to power the island. As the article states, locals are against geothermal and nuclear is NOT GREEN.

Need storage? Oh yeah, an island full of EV's might help!

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It makes a lot of sense for communities to harness and use whatever alternative power source is available to it, in order to create sustainable energy sources. For example Santa Rosa, jas undertaken a Geysers' wastewater-to-electricity project. Under this project 12 million gallons of wastewater the city is pumped to the steam fields daily which is then converted into 85 megawatts of power, enough to power 85,000 homes.

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