Ahoy mateys - I recently took a road-trip across country and used the opportunity to educate myself by listening to a 24 lecture course on the specifics of energy sources, socioeconomical and economical factors behind energy as we know it, and on sustainable energy. The course is here
http://goo.gl/1FGK6Z; I recommend it if one has never taken a course on the topic before.
Since we are on the topic of nuclear power and renewable energy, I'd like to share some thoughts on the topic.
1) Nuclear power is very efficient (in terms of conversion of the raw material into energy), and the amount of raw material available for use in electricity is quite abundant with our current projected stores that can be refined from rocks/dirt, and additional from our sea water lasting 1000 or more years, calculated on current world total energy use/year. There is no air pollution (hence the earlier poster's comment about it being a clean resource), but there is still radioactive waste that is associated with nuclear power. Spent fuel rods and coolant must be recycled (according to worldnuclear.org, it's prudent to wait 50 years until the heat expelled from spent fuel reaches 0.01% the level at removal from the plant before recycling) or disposed of (most often buried) yet our global system does not have a very responsible way of doing this yet which leads to environmental impact or contaminated water, land, ect. The whole process must be carefully managed.
2) Directly related to the topic of this conversation was a discourse on the Fukushima incident. The Japanese plant had a number of fail-safes in place.
A) It was built to withstand the impact of a 6.0 earthquake directly (and could probably withstand higher); when any such disaster occurred, the fuel rods would be lowered into a cooling tank and emergency pumps would keep them cool until teams could enter the plant and get things back up and running.
B) The plant was surrounded by a 19 foot seawall to prevent Tsunami impact, but the tsunami that hit the area was over 50 feet tall.
C) Even though the fail-safes and emergency systems ran perfectly at the time of the tsunami hit, the water entered the pumping area of the plant and short-circuited the pumps that were cooling the quarantined rods. They heated up, and that was that.
Before the Fukushima incident, nuclear power was on the rise and many plants were in process of being licensed. Much of that licensing stopped due to the fear of nuclear power that is currently ebbing in our social atmosphere. It is much more difficult to license a nuclear power plant now, and I think this is a good thing. Having fail-safes is not enough; nuclear power plants need to be built in such a way to withstand and maintain integrity when faced with even the greatest of natural or man-made crises.
When it comes to nuclear power, why does one have to accept the unacceptable adage that it's impossible to predict/protect against everything? We are advanced enough to be able to at least approach doing this (or limit nuclear use until we can).
Barring mass manufacture of solar panels and the deployment of solar power plants spanning the equator, the integration of responsible nuclear powers built to withstand much harsher conditions than those seen at Fukushima when the tsunami hit seems to be the contemplated solution to our aging energy architecture at the moment, with the added benefit of a heavy reduction in CO2 output.
Or, you know, people like me could stop driving cross country while listening to audiobooks.
