RM> > Other than the nuclear waste issues..   Probably the best is Hydro Electri
  > > power but few areas have ideal places to set that up.

AR>A problem with hydro is that it requires the placement of dams, and that can
  >get... painful.

Yes, some areas (Niagara Falls?) are ideally situated for that, where it's
a big job to build the power plant but you're not flooding a lot of land to
create it. I live near a small town (6500 people) in north-central Ontario
Canada and there is a fairly big river flowing through the town. They
managed to build a power plant with very minor disruption to the surrounding
area, and I've seen similar things done on privately owned farms that had a
good sized creek running through their property but, like everything else, it
is not a perfect solution in very many places.

I've heard that a lot of places that went nuts putting up wind turbines have
regretted it ever since. One area I recall built enough of them to supply 26%
of their power needs, and had plans to build more, but once up and running the
actual power generated was more like 10% and the cost of maintaining the
system was so high they are basically waiting for them to wear out so they can
tear them down.

Solar could, in theory, be reliable with little ongoing costs once up and
running but the variations in sunlight and problems storing the power means
you can't rely on it 100%. You have to have another source of power when
conditionss are not the best, so it doesn't eliminate existing power stations
really, just lets them run at lower capacity more of the time. This, of
course, ignores the pollution and materials supply problems in making the
solar panels and batteries required to run the systems.

AR>There is a bit of political drama these days because the North of Spain has
  >excedents of water, as a result of Franco's dam plans. Meanwhile, the South i
  >chronically pressing their water budget tight. Many Sourthern Spaniards
  >complain that the North has soo much water and that they should share. The
  >Northern Response is a variant of "My family had to lose his home so we could
  >have water reserves. If you want water reserves, build dams."

Hard to have everyone get along.. We have oil rich provinces and farming
provinces and industrial provinces as their main production and there are
always fights over distribution of resources and products, and Canada is
roughly 20 times the size of Spain. Although you do have about 10 million
more people than we do so we have room to get away from each other..  B)

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 * SLMR Rob  * The best defence against logic is stupidity
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