Solar potential

To the editor:

I concur with Russell Mesler’s “Wind won’t solve energy crisis” (Journal-World, Aug. 9). I, too, am an engineer – for some 60 years. My Cal Tech Engineer and Science magazine contains an excellent article, “Powering the Planet.” This article discusses the “scale of the problem, carbon dioxide, kicking the carbon habit and renewable energy.”

It concludes with the fact that there are only three major suppliers of energy: coal, nuclear fission and sun. The latter is the big card – “More solar energy hits the earth in one hour than all the earth consumes in a year.”

Until we can find a way to make solar energy cheap, scalable and storable, we need to push nuclear fission and clean coal plants. In today’s world, we have substituted electrical power for manpower and mechanical vehicles for animal power. There should be no turning back.

Vincent U. Muirhead,
Lawrence