Reply #185: Yes, they're all intermittant sources, that's why you have a smart grid

[MadHound]

So that you can move electricity around from the points where it is being produced to where it is needed.

As far as nuclear goes, there is no way that you can fully guarantee that there won't be a catastrophic failure. You can cut that probability down dramatically, but you can never make it 100 percent. Now a catastrophic failure in gas or coal winds up with a few dozen dead at most. A catastrophic failure with nukes means thousands dead and a stretch of land that is barren and uninhabitable. Even at odds of 1000:1, we should not be making those kind of wagers. The more reactors we build, the longer we run them, well then the law of large numbers starts coming into play and we wind up screwed at some point. Do you really want that to happen?

The issue of waste is, right now and for the foreseeable future, an insurmountable one. We have no place to store it safely, we can't simply dump it somewhere, we can't shoot it into space (remember Challenger and Columbia? an atmospheric burst would be a huge disaster). So until we figure out some way of dealing with it, we shouldn't be making it, much less increasing the rate that we're making it.

Then it comes down to simple economics. Solar and wind are cheaper now than nuclear, and they'll soon be cheaper than coal and gas. Why should we continue laying out billions of taxpayer dollar for the most expensive electricity going?