What about nuclear waste though? You end up with some tons of radioactive material which you have to store in high-security underground facilities with the hope that in some time in the future humanity will find a way to dispose it in a safer way.
here's what we've done: found a remote and isolated spot of land in the middle of a 3000km long highway. we've paid a pittance and reminded the small local indigenous community who actually own the land that they don't have any political, economic or social power. Their economic disempowerment was exacerbated a couple of years after they were targetted, when new apartheid-style laws quarantined welfare to natives. Their political disempowerment was reinforced by unprecedented laws that negate their rights as land owners and remove any possible legal obstacle to the dump plan.
Right, so with the social engineering out of the way, let's get into the nuts and bolts: we're gonna grade a dirt road onto a dry patch of land, and build a barbed wire shed. to hold the most highly radioactive nuclear wastes we produce.
I'm sure before too long the rest of the world will get on side to endorse the engineering, and of course site selection.
As we say down under, she'll be right mate!
http://scott-ludlam.greensmps.org.au/content/speeches/aborig...
Let's put it this way:
In exchange for clean, constant, domestically sourced, almost unlimited energy for an entire year, each person must dispose of or store their waste, which is the size of...
A pill of aspirin.
You could just put it in a little lead jar. That's all the waste. The alternative is fossil fuel waste, which would be...
10 tons of CO2 (volume = 5 American houses) which floats into the atmosphere, plus 2 tons of coal ash.
Of course, everyone can just pool their resources and put all the radioactive waste together. I don't consider it to be a very serious or unsolvable problem.
You make it sounds as if there were no other alternative.
The panicky nay-sayers of nuclear power are too obsessed with the risks of radiation, but there are a lot of other legitimate reasons that it might not have a place in our future. Uranium just isn't that plentiful, for example.
Well, this is exactly what we need. Power demand is fluctuating, but mostly averages out to something constant. It's easier to throw in a little buffering to compensate demand fluctuations than to wake up with half the power in the grid because it suddenly got cloudy. You'd have to store very large amounts of power, which is this "substantial investment in energy storage systems" GP was writing about.
> Uranium just isn't that plentiful, for example.
Here you are wrong.
Nuclear can certainly be designed to ramp power output up or down in response to demand. After all there are many applications of nuclear technology in fields that require rapid and immediate changes in power output.
Nuclear power generation plants are not typically designed to do this, but it's not because nuclear can't, it's because nuclear doesn't have to. The plants are built by the utility companies to act as baseload power generation and can normally afford to take hours to change power output if they wish. But if utility plants wanted a nuke plant that would change power output quicker, that could be arranged as well.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514331/wind-turbines-ba...
Don't forget that uranium is found naturally in the ground, in geologically vastly more unstable regions, with water flowing through it. What we're doing is concentrating the radioactivity, and putting it deeper and safer. If you're afraid of mankind finding these waste sites in the future, are you not afraid of them finding uranium in their drinking water?
Ideally it would be. But in many cases in practice, that isn't the case, because those facilities have either not been built, or not opened. In the U.S., since the long-planned Yucca Mountain facility has never opened, most nuclear waste is stored on-site at the reactor complex, in above-ground facilities. For the first few years it's immersed in cooling pools [1], and then subsequently is parked in metal/concrete cylinders [2]. This is considered interim storage awaiting final burial in geologically stable vaults, but without Yucca Mountain the "interim" storage has become de-facto permanent.
So now the plan is to retrieve all the waste and store it - this time better at an estimated cost of at least 4 - 6 billion Euro.
The general problem I have with nuclear power is that it's all fine and dandy as long as everything goes as planned. If not, then everything goes boom in a big way. And where humans and profits are involved, plans tend not to involve all failure modes: The explosions in fukushima could have been avoided using catalytic recombinators which are for example mandatory in germany [1].
[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaktorsicherheit#T.C3.B6pfer-K... (sorry, german)
Now obviously 100% clean means like wind and solar are preferred, but are those really viable at a global level?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor#Nuclear_w...