Reply #17: This is relatively easy to calculate.

[NNadir]

I personally have come to understand from my reading of the literature that nuclear energy has the lowest external cost of any form of energy on the planet, meaning it has the best environmental profile of any form of energy.

People like to talk about conservation, but usually the people doing the talking are fat cat Westerners who wouldn't dream of living with the energy consumption of a Chadean, or a citizen of Thailand even.

We may argue - with a valid point - that energy should be redistributed. It is obvious that in the Western world, for instance, we consume more energy running servers for websites devoted to saying how great solar energy is, than we actually produce from solar energy. We might dispense with this ridiculous enterprise so that a guy in Bangladesh can have a flush toilet.

Some years back, Swiss thinkers argued for a "2000 Watt" world (1/6 the average power American consumption.) I wrote about that on an anti-nuke website where I sometimes write: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/7/26/211617/753">Real Numbers: The 1998 Swiss Proposal For the 2000 Watt World, and Year 2050 Talk...

Note that I have changed my mind since 2007, when I wrote that piece, and now regard so called "renewable energy" as a waste of money and an incredible collection of garbage.

If we imagine that all human beings are allowed to consume 2000 watts of power on a continuous average - including energy lost to the second law of thermodynamics (and we can improve the utility of this loss and minimize it) we can easily calculate how many reactors would be required to have a clean atmosphere, clean water and reasonable living conditions.

A typical nuclear reactor is rated at 1000 MWe or 3000 MWth.

Assuming that we have 7 billion people on the planet and don't go too far beyond that, we see, by simple division and multiplication, 2000* 7,000,000,000/3,000,000,000 that the required number of reactors would be about 4700.

If on the other hand we think it is important to have lots of dweebs burning energy to do things like, say, run web servers to tell us how great solar energy is, and we go to half the energy that Americans consume, the required number of reactors would be 6000*7,000,000,000/3,000,000,000 = 14,000.

Both of these numbers are acheivable among educated populations with respect for science. They are not achievable by primitive worship of the sun god however.

The World Nuclear Association, working from figures from governments around the world, gives a range of 2000 - 11,000 reactors by the turn of dawn of the 22nd century: http://www.world-nuclear.org/outlook/nuclear_century_outlook.html">Nuclear Century Outlook.

Obviously they don't believe that everyone will live like bourgeois Americans crusing Tesla car websites and moaning "I want one!"

I personally believe that a just and wise world would have between somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 reactors. I also believe in restraints on population growth, and respect for and enforcement of section 1 of the 25th article of the http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml">Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ratified by the United Nations in the 1940's.

It reads:

Article 25.
•(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control

To my mind anyone who calls himself or herself a liberal and doesn't endorse this article is simply drooling all over himself or herself.