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We're not using much in the way of renewable energy for good reasons. Simply: low and inconsistent output.

Solar: The absolute maximum upper limit is 1.3kW/m^2, the total solar energy hitting the Earth's disc. Realistically, you'll max out around 130W/m^2 under ideal conditions, dealing with atmospheric absorption, night, clouds, conversion efficiency, breakage, etc. Realistic norm is somewhere around even a tenth of that. Output storage & buffering is problematic, batteries using environmentally unfriendly materials requiring manufacture & replacement over a less-than-you-want lifespan. By the time an installation has become cost-effective, it's done and you'll have to re-install diminishing-return components. On a large enough scale to compete with other energy sources, you're performing "solar strip-mining" on the local environment.

Wind: Big turbines are costly, last about 20 years, annoy neighbors (I almost had a wind farm dropped on my town), and by the time those huge expensive generators wear out or burn up (!) nobody will have a financial interest in replacing/dismantling them. Likewise, inconsistent power output is a problem few seriously address. Converting large amounts of atmospheric movement to heat will itself result in "manmade global warming" type issues.

Old-form nuclear sucks. Between lousy ancient designs and sheer paranoia over "weapons-grade" phases, coupled with vast construction handling high-pressure extreme-danger contents, yeah there's a disaster waiting to happen - and as noted it just takes one to make the savings moot.

New-form nuclear has real potential. Small sealed units incapable of self-destructing, highly resistant to deliberate damage, and easy to transport make it entirely possible for a community to purchase one turnkey reactor and run from that for decades.

Oil/coal will remain a major contender precisely because the energy has already been gathered into convenient pumpable-haulable form, is shelf-stable over usage fluctuations, and has little discernible waste.

Renewables are just not viable, at least not yet. Despite huge piles of money thrown at it (by the current US administration in particular), nothing of marketable substance has emerged. If it were viable, it would be in widespread production. I'm looking to run my HVAC off solar if you disagree.

The bashing of nuclear is mostly limited to old-school hot-water active-cooling designs. Yes, they suck. Get over it and move on to modern designs held back mostly by regulatory concerns which apply those fears to inapplicable reactors without further consideration.

True-- for now.

The question is: is it better to spend billions researching new generations of nuclear reactors or to spend billions working on energy storage?

The former will lead to a switch from older, less concentrated fossil fuels to a newer, more energy-dense fossil fuel. But it's not without well-known problems.

The latter will result in a permanent, eternal solution to the energy problem.

There are limits to how much solar and wind is available, but those are orders of magnitude beyond our civilization's current energy requirements. Other limits to growth -- arable land, decreasing fertility with increasing wealth -- will likely prevent us from ever even approaching those limits.

Solve the energy storage problem and the industrial revolution becomes as permanent as the agricultural revolution. Nuclear power won't do that. So energy storage technology is IMHO a more prudent, higher dividend investment than better nuclear reactors.

In the meantime, "the latter" has well-known problems which are not being solved and which are being flat-out ignored by advocates. Those problems include the rarely-discussed (see, even you just shot right past them) "solar strip-mining" and atmospheric disruption issues.

Show me any form of serious progress on the energy storage problem, please. Tesla's $40,000 car battery is about the best there is, and that's not encouraging.

There are many problems not solved with new and old nuclear systems too. Case in point is the Southern California Edison plant which failed trying to upgrade an existing, known system on their nuclear plant.

I haven't really heard of solar based "atmospheric disruption" issue. On the other hand, I have wondered what the effect of releasing gigawatts (terawatts?) of heat (and electricity that will become heat) derived from nuclear power plants year after year. Solar is a closed system energy source; we're going to receive that energy one way or another whereas nuclear is adding energy to the system derived by converting matter - energy that isn't a normal input.

The problem is you're taking that energy from one area and shifting it elsewhere. Acres of untouched natural fields suddenly covered with solar panels wicking away the bulk of light & heat will wreck the local ecosystem. Sure it's not aggregating an undue accumulation of additional heat, but shifting it around in large scales does impact. Make those solar farms big enough, and you'll start seeing atmospheric effects akin to the "heat bubble" effect cities suffer.

No, if the panels are on rooftops, and the electricity is mostly used in the same building, you have the same net thermodynamic effect of the sun hitting the building. No additional entropy is generated.

If cities at large become net exporters of electricity it would in some small part alleviate heat bubbles.

If the panels are next the the city, you do concentrate heat more in the city as electric is delivered, but no more than electric supplied and consumed from non solar sources. If the panels are adjacent to the city, you again alleviate the heat bubble to some small extent because you're cooling one area and increasing the thermal gradient between the hot city and cooler solar panel farm.

I don't know how one would conclude that any of these effects are of a magnitude to "wreck the local ecosystem".

Pumped water storage is probably one of the better options out there right now. Of course, it's far from perfect, but it certainly beats batteries.

In addition for evening out dips and bumps in unreliable renewable energy, it's a good option for excess using excess capacity in nuclear power plants in order to deal with load variation. (Nuclear reactors don't like changing their energy production levels, so evening out the load on them by buffering with pumped water energy storage is a great benefit).

Flywheels are also another option, although I don't think they're nearly as popular.

Overall, purely mechanical solutions seem to be preferred over chemical energy storage for large installations.

Pumped-hydro suffers from a serious capacity lack.

Flywheel storage is OK for spinning reserve (responding to fluctuations on the order of an hour or two) but is too expensive otherwise.

My money is on thermal storage, and cheap-substrate batteries (molten salt, liquid metal) for longer-scale storage. For national scale grid storage there are many alternatives for which there's simply not sufficient material to create a feasible alternative.

Wouldn't it be nice to have guaranteed power for the next few thousand years while you work on the 'eternal' solution? I don't see why there has to be an either-or here.

I seriously doubt it would take us thousands of years to figure out how to store power at grid scale, especially if we got more serious about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_energy_storage

The other solution is large-scale intelligent power grids. The wind always blow somewhere and the sun always shines somewhere. The amount of grid-scale storage backing required for uninterrupted power is probably less than 12 hours. I'm sure someone has done a solid analysis on this.

The wind always blow somewhere and the sun always shines somewhere

Sure, but then your power supply is in the hands of other countries. What happens during war?

Would you wage war against a country that is essential for your energy needs and that doesn't store any energy?

History responds with a resounding "YES."

No different from wars over water supply.

> Converting large amounts of atmospheric movement to heat will itself result in "manmade global warming" type issues.

This single statement clearly indicates you have absolutely no clue whatsoever about anything regarding energy production. At all. It's like saying that you can't have an LED display on a space rocket because running it would use up all the fuel. Except, that doesn't even capture the scale of the energy disconnect. I can't actually think of an analogy that accurately demonstrates the level of sheer ignorance in that comment...

Fine. Enlighten me.

Calculate a relevant upper limit: if ALL current human energy needs were provided via wind power, how many modern full-sized turbines would be required? what would the atmospheric impact be, if any? at what point does that impact transition from scathingly negligible to "OMG we're destroying the Earth"? Compare said impact to that of fossil fuels a la "global warming" (a concept which itself would have been derided as "having absolutely no clue whatsoever about anything regarding energy production" just a few decades ago). Don't insult, quantify. I'm not looking for encyclopedic completeness, just a back-of-envelope ballpark akin to "the absolute upper limit for solar power is 1.3kW/m^2, realistic capture about 1% thereof".

Pardon me if I didn't perfectly articulate one of several points to authoritative completeness in a brief blog post.

And while we're at it, given robust suitable LEDs, how many homes could be lit for one year from the fuel consumed in one rocket launch? You might be onto something.

Really? You fire out a whole screed with pretensions of expertise and now it's up to me to provide figures?

Ok. World energy consumption is about 15 Terawatts.

Solar energy incoming is about 174,000 Terawatts.

Therefore, the percentage increase in energy output if we took all....actually, I'm sure you can work the rest out for yourself.

Oh, I'm no expert. That's what concerns me about so much of the babbling about renewable energy: if I can find such major underdiscussed flaws, either I'm confused or the experts aren't as expert as they claim.

If you're going to pounce on one sentence (and imply that somehow it should have been thorough when it was just one sentence), then yes I'd like you to back up your broad-brush insults with some figures (nothing difficult, just sensible ballpark framing).

OK, for all your attack verbiage we get one salient point: human energy use amounts to 0.01% of all Earth's incoming solar energy. So back to my concern: where is the tipping point at which shifting all our energy use to "renewables" starts adversely affecting the environment? "Manmade-CO2 based global warming" was laughable, now it's practically a religious doctrine. "Solar strip-mining" kills everything living under those panels, taking most of the light & heat. Hydropower wrecks wetlands by turning shallow warm muddy water (which life therein has enjoyed for darn near ever) into deep cold clear basins. Wind farms have their issues, but lack of sheer scale obscures them, and methinks we are ignorant of what effects vast fields of turbines would have (just as we dismissed the effects of other energy sources listed).

Blowing it all off as "worrying about an LED's effect on a rocket launch" is historically naive. Manmade CO2 is really just a minuscule percentage of total CO2, yet there's a vast movement to severely curtail human activity in fear of its accumulation forcing a "tipping point" toward global disaster. I'm not convinced that solar panels & wind turbines don't, on a comparably large scale, risk similar consequences.

> Oh, I'm no expert. That's what concerns me about so much of the babbling about renewable energy: if I can find such major underdiscussed flaws, either I'm confused

Yes, you can stop there. You are confused.

> "Manmade-CO2 based global warming" was laughable,

No, it wasn't. No-one thought you could increase CO2 levels by 70% and not cause an effect. How would the extra energy be removed? Magic?

And you're now trying to talk multiple points at once so that you can confuse the issue rather than clarify it. That's why I picked on one point. I wanted to see if you would admit it was wrong.

Actually, another thing. It was well known that the whole reason the earth is warmer than the moon was due to the "greenhouse" effect. The idea that we could safely increase the amount of our main greenhouse forcing gas by 70% without any impact, would be the one that was derided.

> Converting large amounts of atmospheric movement to heat will itself result in "manmade global warming" type issues.

The main problem is that even if you do nothing, after a while the air in the wind stop dew to the friction and all the kinetic energy is transformed into thermal energy. So using a windmill and connecting it to heater is global warming neutral, but stupid. Connecting the windmill to an engine is much more useful, and after a while all the movement will get transformed into heat, but the process is still is global warming neutral. If you connect the windmill to a laser, and point it to the space it's possible to remove some energy from the Earth and make it cooler, but the effect would be still totally absolutely completely negligible.

To restore faith in nuclear: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19710050022

Researched as a rocket engine (but equally effective for terrestrial power) over 40 years ago. Instead of taking 20,000 kg of fuel (which is about how much each Fukushima reactor had) and trying to prevent it from overheating, the nuclear lightbulb reactor (or rocket engine) takes 20kg of fuel, compresses, and heats the fuel to the point where it is a self sustaining critical reaction. If the chamber ruptures or power is cut, the core (which at this point is about 10,000 Kelvin and a black body radiator in UV-vis) expands, cools, and reacts with oxygen to quickly precipitate. If you combine this with a plasma window separated vacuum chamber with graphite or another neutron moderator, the second power is cut the entire chamber including the nuclear core is sucked into a safety chamber (plasma windows require multiple kilowatts of power per inch diameter so any failure causes it to die). Of course there are some material science problems to go over but with the progress we (Corning alone, really) made in the last 40 years, it is achievable.

Food for thought: the worst power-generation related disaster was by far Deep Water Horizon, which is turning the entire Gulf of Mexico into a deadzone (you could even see the oil from space! [1]). Hell, BP's fuck up wasn't even the worst case scenario (earthquake or something causing the entire subterranean pipe to expand past the point of closing with conventional cement) and we will be dealing with the aftermath for many decades.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spil...

A massive natural disaster hit Japan causing 15,883 deaths, 6,145 injured, and 2,667 people missing. It cost $235 billion dollars, making it the costliest natural disaster in world history. The nuclear power plant damage results in zero deaths (other than a handful of deaths from emergency crews unrelated to radiation) and a few billion in clean-up costs (the large majority of which is due to hysteria-provoked safety requirements which are vastly too strong).

And you take this as evidence against nuclear power? Not only that, you consider this so obvious that the debate is pretty much closed. I'm just baffled.

That's a non sequitur. The tsunami was a natural disaster, and was probably unavoidable.

The Japanese now have a 20-year radiation-spewing money pit, which was avoidable.

My post was mostly about the future. Why build more potential multi-billion-dollar 20-year money pits when there are alternatives that are almost ready and that could be brought to readiness with what are likely comparable R&D expenditures and infrastructure costs?

It's quite sequitur, because the existence of the tsunami means you only have acquired evidence that the reactors are dangerous in massive, already overwhelmingly dangerous situations. If a tornado destroys all the houses on your block, causing your car to roll out of your (destroyed) garage and run over a mailbox, no one goes around talking about how this proves the dangers of cars. (I exaggerate the comparison here, but you get the point.)

Yes, obviously the cost of these ultra-rare events needs to be accounted for in doing a cost-benefit analysis. But the billions of dollars it will cost to clean up Fukishima (which, again, are mostly unnecessary) is tiny compared to the total cost of nuclear power, or any power source, on a global scale. There are ~500 nuclear plants worldwide, each costing ~$5 billion each. This singular event is just plain not important.

The fact that it's "avoidable" is only useful on the scale of improving particular reactors or particular regulatory agencies. With regard to choosing sources of power, it really doesn't matter except to make nuclear more attractive. (If some nuclear power risks are avoidable, and therefore improvable, in a way that the costs of renewables cannot be improved, this is a point in nuclear's favor.)

The question of which types of power society should invest in is a complex one, requiring the careful weighing of various risks, technological uncertainties, and ethical questions. I certainly don't know the answer. But what I do know is that the pittance of money lost in this disaster does not play an appreciable role in that calculation, except insofar as it gives ammunition for some people to fearmonger.

If you want to get pedantic, we can avoid another tsunami disaster killing anyone. Evacuate the Japanese coast. No-one allowed live within X km of a tsunami coast. Simple.

I don't understand how an empirical analysis, such as this purports to be, could get around the fact that "conventional" power generation kills far more people than nuclear ever has.

I don't understand how people who keep bringing up that conventional power generation kills more people than nuclear ever has (yet!) get around having their nose rubbed in the fact that we haven't experienced a worst case nuclear incident yet and that we keep getting lucky and scraping past worst cases -- at least according to what I read about all those old fuel rods stored at Fukushima. People keep ignoring safety precautions and we keep getting lucky, but luck and hope is not an acceptable strategy when you can irradiate large chunks of countries as a worst case scenario.

@SuperChihuahua: I can't find the articles now, but just one failure case is there were pools with spent nuclear rods in them that required active cooling. Failure to do so produces a plume of radiation straight into the air. Of course you're never supposed to store that many fuel rods, yet somehow safety wasn't important and there we where with tons of fuel rods in pools that required active cooling and no real plan for what to do if, say, we couldn't actively cool them.

I didn't dismiss that argument, I simply said it doesn't have an empirical grounding despite the language that was used in the parent comment that made it appear otherwise.

(I don't agree with that argument though; we're going to have to figure safe nuclear out, because we can't keep dumping pollutants into the atmosphere).

What's the worst case nuclear incident in a modern reactor?

Someone steals Nuclear material and releases it over a large area. Or a design failure can lead to something about 20 times the size Of Chernobil and hundreds of times as deadly. Note Chernobil keep most of the radioactive material contained.

PS: Granted those are both vary unlikely, but if you want to talk worst case it can get really bad especially when you add in say a large earthquake on an unknown fault or a meter impact etc.

> Note Chernobil keep most of the radioactive material contained

And yet, compared to any other design still in use, it had virtually no containment. It had a concrete and steel lid for primary containment, but it's secondary containment was a corrugated tin roof, instead of the typical reinforced concrete that can take a jet impact (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25vlt7swhCM). On top of that, they disabled the safety systems deliberately because the reactor would normally not have allowed itself to be placed in the extremely unstable state that caused the disaster.

The Chernobyl accident can be compared to taking a car, replacing the crumple zones and roll cage with tin foil, cutting the brake lines, and then driving full speed into a wall in order to test the safety systems. Without using a crash test dummy. And then wondering why someone got hurt.

When people can do something as monumentally stupid and poorly engineered as Chernobyl and still keep most of the radioactive material contained, that really says something.

Which just goes to show if a safety system can be disabled it might be disabled. Brick walls on the other hand are hard to turn off.

That's exactly right, which is why you don't replace your crumple zones and roll cages (primary and secondary containment) with tin foil. That way, even if your brake lines are cut, you still have something protecting you.

Modern reactors are designed so that they will be passively safe. Even if the safety systems get shut down and the reactor core turns into a radioactive puddle of metal, it shouldn't be able to lose containment.

If a meteor hits, you have bigger issues than nuclear fallout, like tsunamis, earthquakes, vaporization of water for an ocean strike that leads to weeks of rain, dust from a land strike cooling the planet, etc.

It's all a question of size. A 1Mt impact outside a city would probably not be that bad unless it hit a nuclear power plant or other nasty target. Probably a 1 in 1+ trillion risk but if all your asking is what's the worst that can happen it's on the list.

In deciding what to build next, you would compare nuclear with the other future options, which do not include coal.

No one argues that solar or wind will kill anyone.

And, the real problem with nuclear is that it isn't cost effective. If the free market was operating, no plants nuclear plants would be built in the US. It is only with govt. subsidies making 90% the up-front cost risk-free there has been even a nibble of interest from free market investors. And even that interest has petered out.

We no longer have a capitalistic free market in the USA, so its kind of irrelevant. Crony capitalism all the way. We just built a govt subsidized coal plant about 30 miles east (thankfully downwind) from my house. Wind plants don't run on wind but on govt subsidies. This kind of massive corruption makes engineering decisions kind of difficult, given that the bean counting numbers are pretty much imaginary.

We've never had a free market. Perhaps we should, but so far it's never existed.

But if the free market was truly operating would we be building any wind and solar plants? When it comes down to it aren't coal plants still the most economical from a market stand-point?

Surprisingly, that's not so right now, wind is more cost effective.

The price of a new coal plant in the US has gone up dramatically due to the increases in energy and metals.

>aren't coal plants still the most economical from a market stand-point

only in the current environment there most of the cost of coal energy (green house gas and other pollutants emissions, environment destruction where coal is mined, etc...) is socialized

In a free market I doubt we'd have nuclear either.

All energy sources other than fossil fuels are the product of huge government R&D investments and huge subsidies.

If you were charged with building a city from scratch (unlikely, I know) and had to power the thing, the question wouldn't be "nuclear or solar/wind?". It would still be "Is this near a good damming location? No? So... do I want nuclear, or do I want to burn something?"

For renewable base load, your options are basically hydro or burning something renewable like ((farmed) wood, trash, or methane from trash). Otherwise, with current technology, you are left with either burning atoms or burning something made of dinosaurs that you claw from the earth.

Solar and Wind might be able to do some limited base-load with massive efficient energy storage schemes, such as pumped-storage hydro, but really I don't see that scaling very far. PSH is about as good as it gets for that, and it is highly dependent on local geography.. Other schemes like storing molten sodium or compressed air don't really operate in the same class as PSH.

Solar and wind do kill people. You can't build a lot of large things without people dying.

No one in the US is building new coal because natural gas is super cheap these days. Market conditions can change, though.

Plus, China.

>"conventional" power generation kills far more people than nuclear ever has.

and don't start on how many people cholesterol in burgers is killing

Do burgers kill a lot of vegans? Because coal kills a lot of people who aren't coal miners.

yes, they take society resources that could be spent otherwise on other issues, including whatever issues kill vegans

Are you being deliberately obtuse? Coal does the same thing, but also directly harms innocent bystanders. Burgers harm meat eaters directly and vegans indirectly. Coal harms both, both ways.

Do you even support coal? Your other comments on this thread suggest otherwise.

i just got tired of these trollish arguments like number of terrorist deaths vs. car deaths or nuclear deaths vs. coal - it is such a narrow and artificial dimension of comparing apples and oranges, and with that heavily depending on how numbers are calculated (for example, whether Iraq war deaths are added to the number of 9/11 victims or not we'll have either 3K or 103K victims)

The death toll from coal isn't a "trollish argument"; it's a simple fact. People ignore it, because coal kills people over a much longer period of time.

Two reasons why this is a red-herring argument:

1. False alternative. There are multiple alternatives to nuclear power, and I'm not aware that there are higher levels of death associated with most of them, coal being the notable exception.

2. The risk profile of nuclear power is not well-understood. Humans have hundreds to tens of thousands of years of experience with fire, water, and wind power. We've been toying with atoms for about three-quarters of a century, with commercial electrical generation for only about half of that. In that time large areas of land have been contaminated, and a number of serious plant or reactor accidents have occurred, several of them contaminating large areas of land until at least 2050 (64 years after the accident), possibly longer. The effects of the Fukishima disaster are still being revealed.

3. Few conventional power plants (natural gas plants with significant on-site storage being a potential exception) have catastrophic failure modes with more than a very small affected region. In terms of both longevity of effects and area, acute impacts are limited. By contrast, when things go wrong with a nuke, then tend to go very phenomenally wrong, and it can be unclear, even after a significant period of time, what the full consequences and extent of damage are.

Fukushima was an outdated design that was not safe under passive cooling (ie, it was physically possible for it to melt down). It's construction predated Chernobyl, and it's design was even older, and designed around a weaponizable fuel.

Fukushima doesn't represent the state of the art. It didn't even represent the state of the art a quarter of a century ago.

Hmm, if it is so outdated, should we close all 45 of the identical General Electric-design reactors operating in US cities soon?

Or, we could extend their operating license each for 20 years and see if they can handle it.

YES.

We should definitely be upgrading our nuclear reactors to modern designs. While the USA mostly isn't in an earthquake zone, which reduces the risks, the reactors are definitely past their useful life, less safe than they could be, and require more expensive, dangerous, and weaponizable fuel than then should.

The problem with upgrading, of course, is political. The amount of public outcry that would occur if we started to build new reactors, even based on better designs, would make things very difficult politically.

every time i drive to San Diego, i'm always struck at the view of this thing and how out of place it is and what could happen there. Seems common sense is winning as i heard they stopped reactors there and don't plan to restart.

We have spent decades and hundreds of billions chasing a particularly poor form of nuclear because of the US and Russian military industrial complexes. Dismissing nuclear because of horrible past decisions seems unwise.

Perhaps so, but at this point I'm starting to wonder if the point is moot. Solar is experience Moore's Law type effects in terms of cost per kW of installed capacity, and there is now immense R&D muscle behind energy storage due in part to the electronics industry.

The awesome power of exponential tipping points is not to be underestimated. When the cost/kWh curves intersect, it could happen fast. Look at the adoption of the Internet and smart phones for examples. Solar could go from <1% of our energy to >25% in 5-10 years. That might be conservative.

I'm seeing nuclear as a niche technology. In a post-fossil world I can see it for radionucleotide production (e.g. for nuclear medicine and space probes), maybe for a few really heavy industrial needs, and for some locations with very poor local renewable energy availability. But for the most part I see it as obsolescent.

I do think it might find its killer app somewhere else though: Mars. There are many reasons it would make more sense there.

China has 28 new reactors in the pipeline for a reason. Solar is nowhere near ready.

I don't see the actions of a huge, lumbering bureaucracy as a good predictor of the future.

Guyana has zero, if that makes you feel better.

You should study post revolution Chinese history a bit more, or at least click around on gapminder a bit. The idea that they're a lumbering ineffective bureaucracy is too simplistic to be useful.

Two examples: First, China doubled its life expectancy in a single decade, moving from one of the lowest to being at parity with the developed world. Second, in the early 1980s China implemented policies that moved them from having stagnant GDP per capita to steadily doubling it per decade, a pace it remains on since.

In fact, you could blame some of post revolutionary China's most disasterous events on the lack of bureaucratic inertia. The great leap forward was disasterous not just because the details of the plan were mistaken, but also because it was implemented so instantly and completely.

Anyhow, if you look at the data instead of repeating narratives that personify organizations, you'll see it's not quite so simple as saying that all Chinese economic decision-making can be summarily rejected as lumbering bureaucracy.

Sun radiation is limited. You get ~1.4 kW/m2 at 100% efficiency. You need enormous plots of land to get anywhere close to what a small nuclear plant can produce.

Renewables will only get so far if we don't stop increasing our energy demands exponentially every year. Since that seems unlikely, we will produce every single way we can.

That Elon Musk guy argued that if we installed solar panels all over the safety zones around a nuclear reactor, then those panels would generate more energy than the power plant.

If that's a profitable investment I'm sure it will be done.

Electric demand has been dropping for the last five or so years in the US. Not increasing exponentially.

You could cover 1/4 of the roof area in the US with solar panels and have enough power to close all other power plants. Add panels over parking lots and you get exponential demand back.

Doesn't matter, it's a global market.

Other countries have buildings with roofs.

Conveniently enough, the land for solar interception can be dual use with structures we already use and will build.

Sure. As I said, we will produce every way we can. Talking about the long term.

can't wait to find out what new failure modes your new "but it's really safe guys... this time I promise!" reactors have

Honestly, if the failures are on par with or better than Fukushima I'm really not worried.

Toshiba may have a decent answer for nuclear power, as described by one of the writers who investigated Three Mile Island, and whose friends helped battle Chernobyl many moons ago. A writer who just happens to not write under the name Mark Stephens ... namely, Robert X Cringely.

Here's what he wrote about Toshiba [0], ~ 2.5 years ago when Fukushima lit up:

But the new plants also have to show they can survive an 8.9 earthquake and reduce the number of critical failure points. Toshiba's 4S reactors, which have been around for several years now, though not yet commercially successful, do all that quite easily.

4S reactor cores are like nuclear building blocks, built on a factory production line and transported by truck to be installed 30 meters under the ground. Each 4S puts out 10 megawatts of electricity or enough for 2000 Japanese homes. Following this path means the lost 1000 megawatt reactors will need 100 4S's each to replace them or a total of 1200 4S reactors. 4S's are fueled at the factory, put in place to run for 20 years then returned to the factory for refueling. They are sodium-cooled and pretty darned impossible to melt down. If the cooling system is compromised they automatically shut down and just sit there in a block of sodium.

I admit I haven't followed the Toshiba 4S model's progress in the intervening time, but was fascinated at the idea when I read about it before. Cringely isn't a nuclear engineer, but he's no slouch, either. It's all worth a read.

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[0] http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/13/is-anything-nuclear-ever-...

... and here's more of RXC's writing on the topic. Fascinating stuff:

http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/11/flea-powder-may-be-saving...

http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/16/who-ya-gonna-call-superta...

http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/30/plutonium-is-forever/

http://www.cringely.com/2011/09/20/truth-about-fukushima-dai...

http://www.cringely.com/2012/05/24/the-next-japanese-nuclear...

Worse case accident for solar:

Ow. I dropped the solar panel on my foot.

For nuclear:

Oops, we destroyed $270B of real estate.

Can solar panels survive an earthquake?

Probably at least as well as the Fukushima reactors did.

To be fair, the reactors survived the earthquake just fine, as well as the tsunami afterward.

The problem is that the diesel generators that were supposed to provide backup power to the cooling systems got swamped, basically making meltdown inevitable with the design of the reactor.

Edit:extraneous words removed

Actual worst case for solar:

Oops, we spent $270B on solar panels that can't provide enough power.

The risks are small, but they are not so small that nuclear plants could get normal insurance from free markets. They have actuaries that can do the math. It all boils down to the expected value (= value*risk). Even if the risk is incredibly small the cost when the risk actualizes is so massive that it's deal breaker (alternatively, the cost of insurance from free markets makes nuclear energy too expensive)

This is why every country with nuclear plants subsidies nuclear energy with laws that limit the amount of compensation.

Ask the 80000 people made homeless by the Fukushima meltdowns how much the government or power company gave them.

It was a laughably small amount. I wouldn't expect any other 1st world country to much better.

> Even if the risk is incredibly small the cost when the risk actualizes is so massive that it's deal breaker (alternatively, the cost of insurance from free markets makes nuclear energy too expensive)

Do you have a cite for this? My understanding is that the risks from nuclear are simply too high variance (i.e., concentrated in a few huge events) for an insurance company to absorb, not that the expectation value of the cost is high.

I have friend who is a lawyer in the field of nuclear decommissioning. He said that contraray to what you might expect it's the small risks that are uninsurable, not the catastrophic ones.

What does that mean? You mean large risks of relatively small costs? (Small risks of small costs are obviously not important.)

This is directly contrary to hannibal5's claim, correct?

My understanding is that there is a chance that a small accident could lead to small compensation payouts for huge numbers of people, and the number is so huge that private insurance won't cover it, thus the government has to step in.

I'm afraid this is second hand info, so I offer it for entertainment purposes only!

> ... one singular bad accident can completely obliterate the economic rationale for nuclear power in a given country.

The anything-but-nuclear policy has caused fossil fuel wars costing hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.

The parent comment is not merely wrong, it is the opposite of correct. Having a Fukushima-size meltdown every few years would be an economic bargain.

This is simply unrelated. Fossil fuels are worth a lot of money and are frequently located in areas controlled by unstable regimes, hence wars. There are also wars over water, diamonds, gold, arable land, and any other high-value commodity located where the local political environment is unstable.

Using a lot of nuclear power would not alter this picture in the slightest. It might alter the landscape in terms of supply and demand, perhaps shifting fossil fuel demand from heavy nuclear users toward developing or lower-tech countries, but the basic equation of high value resources plus political instability remains intact.

California is highly oil-dependent and Texas has a lot of oil. So far California has not invaded Texas. That's because both are politically stable.

> shifting fossil fuel demand from heavy nuclear users toward developing or lower-tech countries

Right! Let someone else pour blood and treasure into the sands of the Middle East, while we enjoy a nuclear-electric-hydrogen economy. The goal is our prosperity, not the stability of a bunch of oily camel jockeys.