Reply #155: Wind, solar and to a lesser extent wave are all intermittent sources.

[TheMadMonk]

This means some form of storage, or a base load generation capacity is necessary.

The simplest and most robust form of tidal power requires the sacrificing of large chunks of coastline.

Anything to do with the sea has to be overengineered to glory to survive the worst nature has to throw at it. So far nature is well ahead on points.

Geothermal that doesn't take advantage of the Earth's natural hot spots (of which there are damned few, and even fewer in useful locations) leeches heat from the the rocks faster than the Earth can replace it, which requires constand drilling of new wells along with relocating or rebuilding surface infrastructure.

There's only so many places Hydro power can be installed, and as was discovered 10 or so years ago, a good many installations actually produce more greenhouse gas over their lifetime than an equivalent capacity in coal, as a result of anerobic decay of bottom vegetation.

Coal spits out tons of uranium and thorium per plant per year.

Existing unranium reactors are indeed far less than perfect. But what can you expect from technology that is decades out of date. However, virtually all thinking on the subject of waste handling first presupposes absolutely no future improvemnent in nuclear technology, or in fact the practical application of what is already demonstrable fact. Any radio active atom can be made into a non-radioactive atom by throwing enough neutrons at it (and of course vice versa). Small scale experiments demonstrate that waste neutron flux can be used to treat waste or bomb grade material, making the latter unfit for bomb making while still leaving it usable as reactor fuel.

New designs exist that make any form of uncontrolled meltdown absolutely impossible. The simplest use deliberately built in weak points that are designed to fail if a reactor core overheats and can not be brought under control. A solid fuel reactor would cause an overhead plug to melt and dump damping material into and around the core. Liquid fuel reactors are easier/better still. Inherent in the physical construction are features that cause to reaction to slow down without any form of intervention if the fuel becomes excessively hot, and in the event that that somehow fails the arse melts out and dumps the fuel into numerous separate containers so there is insufficient nuclear material in any one place to sustain an ongoing reaction.

I susspect that one of the main objections to prototyping a good many of these designs is that they admit that absolute control is impossible, that catastrophic structural failure of a reactor in normal operation is not 100% preventable. Both the industry and the politians who have to approve construction DO NOT want to ever utter the words "If a reactor melts down" because they are afraid that the public won't listen long enough to be told that the worst possible final outcome is a nasty but fully contained mess. Then of course there is the slight problem of proving the designs, which might involve deliberately crashing a reactor and initiating a meltdown as a final test.

The quite legitmate objections to nuclear power as it exists todate are not insurmountable barriers. The Laws of Nuclear Physics and empyrical testing allow a technological solution to all of those objections.

And we do need something to generate the base load capacity that no renewable source can provide in the quantities we need for existing demand, let alone a future that includes at least another 2 billion people with an appetite for 21st Century living.

The odds are excellent that some some designs will prove unworkable, and that others will reveal flaws when scaled up to commercial sizes. But that is what prototyping is all about, plugging the holes that theory alone can not fill. If the pro argument is we get a solution to our existing nuclear problems and massive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Not to mention all the things that can be done when you have enough energy available that the only practical limit is the uses to which it can be put. Worst case we're very little worse off than we are right now.

Demands for zero impact before moving forward are just as disingenous and harmful whether they come from the corporates which refuses to abandon the status quo without an aboslute guarantee of profit from day one, or the greens who refuse to move forward with anything less than a 100% "natural" solution utilising only "natural" energy sources.