Thursday, March 6, 2008, I attended a seminar on solar and wind power at the Atlantic County Utilities Authority, ACUA, clean energy plant, hosted by Cassandra Kling of Clean Energy Holdings. It’s a small plant: 7.0 MW of wind and 0.5 MW of solar, it provides about 0.1% of New Jersey’s power. On the way back I drove into the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant in Ocean County, NJ, to look around and to get a visceral feel for the place. Oyster Creek provides about 10% of New Jersey’s power. (Click here for the official story or here for NJPIRG.)

There are armed guards outside the nuclear plant. There are watchtowers, presumably with armed sentries. They really don’t want people looking around, “getting a feel for the place”. They looked me over, looked at my driver’s license, searched my car – looked in the trunk, looked under the hood, looked in the front seat, the back seat, under the car, and then escorted me out of the complex. I felt like Arlo Guthrie in ” Alices’s Restaurant” (Click here for Arlo on YouTube“, here for Arlo.net) exceptin’ the fact that I wasn’t arrested.

There are no armed guards at the clean energy facility. There are wind turbines, photovoltaics, and operators. The operators are happy to talk, to show you how much power the plant is generating, and tell you how the plant works. They tell you how people love to park under the solar arrays – keeps the snow and ice off the car in winter, keeps the cars cool in summer.

Electricity is raw power. The various alternative technologies to generate that power offer choices about the society in which we live. On the one hand: polluting fuel based technologies of the past – nuclear, coal, oil, natural gas. On the other: renewable and sustainable clean energy technologies of the future – solar, wind, geothermal, hydro.

The fuel based technologies are expensive and polluting. Nuclear needs government subsidies, special legislation that eliminates insurance, and its own a special bureaucracy, the NRC, that is charged with managing the industry so it operates in a safe manner. (Altho when the NRC fires whistleblowers and ignores public opinion, it seems that it is more “Nuclear Rubberstamping Commissars” than Nuclear Regulatory Commission.)

The fuel free technologies are inherently clean – no fuel, no greenhouse gases, no toxic wastes, no radioactive wastes, no mercury, no oil spills, no coal mining disasters, no fuel to buy from people like Achmadinejad in Iran, Chavez in Venezuela, or Putin in Russia. We don’t needevacuation plans just in case of a catastrophic failure. They are not terrorist targets, so we don’t need armed guards outside wind farms or solar arrays.

I see it as a matter of time.