I have a customer base who have reduced their energy cost and carbon footprint and are satisfied with their decision to move away from fossil fuels to solar. It may not be perfect, but if you think nuclear is, try doing a cost analysis of the waste disposal and service required over the life of the generator, and then tell me how "inefficient" and "polluting" solar is relative to the alternatives. Education = understanding. Proud graduate of Holland College in PEI Canada.
To start with, I'm for solar power. I particularly support solar pre water heating, and use of PV panels in rural or non static installations.
However, I suffer from no delusions that it's an appropriate technology to replace coal, oil or gas as the bulk source of power for the modern world.
The "cost" of nuclear is almost entirely due to fossil fuel and "green" energy lobbying, as it has the potential to practically end both industries.
The problem of nuclear waste is massively overstated. Modern reactors that aren't literally designed to produce plutonium (due to weapons demand from the cold war) produce waste that, even without fuel recycling, can be reduced to 0.1% of it's radioactivity within four decades.
The fact that humans continue to use coal, gas or other methods of bulk energy generation after harnessing nuclear power for the better part of a century would be one of the most ghetto things possible to an outside alien observer.
Things like solar, hydro, geothermal, wind etc. are all supplementary/local sources of power, there needs to be large scale baseline generation for the grid, as clean as possible.
That or reduce the human population by a factor of 10, but I don't advocate for the various ways that would be possible.
There is no discussion or debate about this in my mind. Realistically we can build nuclear or we can faff around with other "renewables" that have not (for the past several decades) and will not surpass 10-20% of our energy needs for the foreseeable future.
The anti nuclear crowd in my view is responsible for the majority of carbon emissions of the last five decades. Either directly or indirectly influenced by massive lobbying efforts by the fossil fuel industry to smear nuclear, or portray maintenance and manufacturing intensive, low energy production alternatives such as wind or solar, which are not well suited to large scale power generation when considered against their cost.
In fact, on a per kWh of energy produced basis, both the European Union and the Paul Scherrer Institute, the largest Swiss national research institute, found an interesting trend regarding the fatalities attributable to each energy source. Remarkably, nuclear power is the benchmark to beat, outranking coal, oil, gas, and even wind by a slight margin as the least deadly major energy resource in application (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: The figure is based on estimates from Europe Union, which account for immediate deaths from accidents and projected deaths from exposure to pollutants. These estimates do not incorporate fatality rates in countries such as China where cheap coal combined with poor regulation are causes of considerably more fatalities.The nuclear industry is constantly developing innovative technologies and protocols towards making the energy production process failsafe. Newer generations of nuclear reactors, particularly what is called a pebble-bed reactor, are designed so that the nuclear chain reaction cannot run away and cause a meltdown – even in the event of complete failure of the reactor’s machinery. Geological stability considerations will also likely play a bigger role in approving new sites of construction. And although long-lived nuclear waste may remain dangerous for considerable periods of time, that timescale is not prohibitive. In fact, even without recycling the fuel, which would further shorten the lifetime of radioactive waste, the radioactivity of the waste is reduced to around 0.1% of the initial value after about 40-50 years.
Given that, in 2015, we released 2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from electricity generation alone, and fossil fuels accounted for over 99% of these emissions, a great place to start would be to begin replacing fossil fuel power plants with alternative energy sources.
sitn.hms.harvard.edu
As for the fiscal "cost". Perhaps people should look into the level of subsidies the fossil fuel industry currently gets.
The reason I've put that in quotes is that I believe it's a false economy to say nuclear is "expensive". The raw materials are plentiful, needed in small amounts, and the specialist training required to operate can be given in a standard university course. Besides, I'd consider it much more expensive to lose habitability of much of the prime real estate of the planet due to climate change, which is the alternative.
The fact that private corporations are literally at the point of building private nuclear reactors for their own energy needs should tell you all you need to know about the economic viability of alternatives.
https://www.thecgo.org/research/energy-superabundance/ - some good points about the cost of energy and how it affects the economy, and the approach of making things more "efficient" rather than focusing on infrastructure to produce clean energy at a large scale (instead of the somewhat pathetic single digit % we generate today).
