Germany and California could already have near-zero greenhouse gas emissions from power production: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/09/11.... The technology already exists. The problems are chiefly political.
We should just build a lot of nuclear reactors somewhere in Germany that's hundreds of kilometers from anything we'd care to lose.
The other point is that fact that you need the distance in case the plant blows up. Which implies it can blow up. Which is true as well (unsinkable Titanic, tsunami safe Fukushima, you name it) as technology can and will fail.
As a side note, I once saw an emergency plan for the nuclear power nearby where I life (it is still live). Quite a shock to see that in case of a bad enough emergency nobody would have bothered to evacuate me to begin with. I get the logic, but still kind of shocking.
For real data on how dangerous nuclear energy is, please look at https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
That we should IMHO get rid of coal earlier isn't exclusive, so.
There are ways to help solve the waste issues, and ways to make plants safer.
Given the near infinite latent power in nuclear, and the fact that it's Co2 free ... we should probably be considering this strongly and putting a lot of effort into researching it.
The reactor of Chernobyl did blow up. Just not like a nuclear bomb, if that's what you meant. Which may be a bad thing, Hiroshima is actually inhabitable.
>People are unreasonably scared of nuclear energy, and we might lose a planet because of this.
People are quite reasonably scared of nuclear energy. What's unreasonable is that they are less scared of global warming.
Your data is not convincing -- in fact, I think it does not address the danger of nuclear and fossil energy at all. Using fossils kill a fairly predictable number of people each year. For a country, let alone humanity as a whole, that is not a danger but a cost.
Nuclear plants do not "blow up".
Chernobyl was a coal plant them I guess.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...
1. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2016.1...
The equation does change when taking climate change in account. But that does not mean renewables are preferred to nuclear merely for "political reasons". Being better than coal does not remotely make it acceptable.
What we need is safer fission reactors, preferably unpressurized and without graphite moderator that burns or molten sodium or potassium that ignite in contact with air. Gas leaks. Some molten salts are probably fine, not too corrosive. Water needs to be pressurized but PHWRs (Candu) and smaller PWRs, both US and Russian and French designs have good track records.
A) dumping in the ground and hope for the best
B) some magic tech will pop which will solve the issue.
In 2010 the International Panel on Fissile Materials said "After six decades
and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the
promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to
commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries"They apparently don't make economic sense since Uranium is cheap, and there is a risk of proliferation. It's not the case that the technology doesn't work.
You could just keep it in a bunker and pay a crew to dust it off and repackage it when needed for the next 1000 years. But no, for some reason it needs to be taken out of the environment, like in the famous Australian sketch...
EDIT: The business is ugly, not the fact that it is in the UK.
/end sarcasm. Didn’t work out well for Futurama.
Nuclear fuel reprocessing plus breeder reactors. They burn virtually all of the usable power in uranium leaving little waste behind.
It's an economic problem, and an arms control problem, not a technological one.